Videogame History 101

Leapfrog writes "I found an interesting and useful site called The Dot Eaters which gives a pretty thorough history of the electronic gaming industry. I found it very informative. " (yes, Hemos and I got to San Jose. Lost baggage. Lost Nate. 6 hours late. But alive)

lost baggage and nate?

[John Kozan]

Did you sneak nate on the plane in a bag? Is that why he is lost too?

A few more Icon details.

[Eric S. Smith]

I've always wondered why there isn't more webbed information about these things. They sucked and were cool at the same time...

• They were originally built by Cemcorp, the Canadian Educational Microprocessor Corporation. Unisys bought either the Icon or the whole company at some later point.
• They were, with few exceptions that I knew of, diskless workstations. They got everything off of a central file-server, called the Lexicon. This was the weak link: turn on 20 of them at once and prepare to wait 15 minutes for them to all get the OS loaded. A small square in the upper right corner of the screen flickered when the machine wasn't just hanging, but was, rather, actually talking to the Lexicon.
• There was an actual danger of files being left open on the Lexicon if you turned off an Icon while it was in the middle of doing something. Pretty bad.
• The original beasts were pretty much all metal construction, except, of course, for the plastic keys on the English/French keyboard, and the rubber bumper on the front.
• They had some kind of primitive sound synthesizer built in. When starting up, they'd say "dhtick," and there were some educational games (Speak Face, anyone?) that would talk. Ours often greeted you when you logged in: "Hah-low!"
• They did indeed run QNX, with optional GUI shells over the command line. The first, called Ambience, was a pointy-clicky menu system. A later creation, which arrived, I think, with the Icon II, was called ICONLook. It tried to look cooler than Ambience (not hard), but was at least three times as slow. There was also a GUI file-manager that you could start up from the command line, called House. The command line was a reasonable place to be. There were various commands with odd names that corresponded to what we'd expect on a Unix system (the best was probably the delete command: "frel," for "file release"). The languages were all Watcom. The OS was buggy.
• There was a text editor, a simple word processor, and then something more complex called WPro that you used if you felt cool. The text editor took good advantage of the trackball, and had a cut-and-paste clipboard system that held more than one thing at a time. There was a flat DBMS called Watfile.
• Some programs took advantage of the networked nature of the machines to let you chat with others or play games against each other. Well, actually, two did, that I know of. We didn't even have e-mail, which is pretty grim. Perhaps it was available and we just didn't have it.
• While watching the machine crash, or waiting 10 minutes for a program to load, you have lots of time to think of abusive names for it. Useless ICAN'T is my favorite. "Oh, no, it's loading ICAN'T-Look!"

Some years after they appeared in my school board, a I saw a What's New item in Popular Science about them. I've never met anyone from outside of Ontario who's ever heard of the things, though.

I wish I had the manuals...or any other information about them.

Microsoft Blunders

[iota]

I noticed this under the Timeline section of DotEaters for 1983-1984...

"Microsoft demonstrates its new product Interface Manager, later to be renamed Windows. It is later revealed that the windows appearing to be running different programs were simply a graphical kludge."

Sound familier? Microsoft's up to the old tricks...


iota

80186

[John Campbell]

I think the HP-48 series of calculators uses the 80186, too.

Icon computer?

[substrate]

OK, its not a video game, but its been annoying me for a few days. In high school in about 1982 I took computer science. The machines we used were Icon's or Ikon's or something. They were a networked system possibly unix based. I _think_ they ran on a 68000 processor. Has anybody heard of them, have any info on them or know of a web page on them?

Computer Space

[kabloie]

I actually got to play that game at the 'Ice Chateau' in Spfld IL. Big blue sparkly molded box with a really crappy game inside! I guess I'd already been playing Space Invaders and Asteroids and was used to a good interface. If I remember, your aim direction constantly spun around your ship, so there was an added timing trick which was really hard to get used to in 1 or 2 games.

That crappy blue box is probably worth more today than ever!

-k

101?

[Jacco de Leeuw]

What is this? Binary code?

dig the

[SuperGeek]

Lost Baggage
Lost Nate
Came Alive
6 Hours Late

well shit, ya're a poet and ya don't even know it

Isn't that a Haiku? Probably not..

=)

Oh gawd, I should get some sleep now

Don't Pee On Anything

[Seumas]

Don't you guys dare pee on anything important down there in San Jose. We don't want to see you get yourself banned for a decade like Ozzy did when he urinated on the Alamo in Texas.

Although it would make one helluva Slashdot article...

TANK!

[wilkinsm]

I loved tank for the 2600. Especially with Invisable Tanks and Bouncing Balls.

The site seems to have miss the TI system - and its tape deck based games (though it does mention the adam...) Is is too new?

Dot Eaters

[ManBeast]

One point about emulation is that for some people it is to help them relive their glory days of gaming. With old arcade classics like Asteroids, Discs of Tron or old systems like ColecoVision and such. With all this UltraHLE/N64 emulation press, it seems emulation has gotten a bad stygma of piracy and such to it which it doesn't deserve.

Ahh Robby how i miss you

[chris_c]

I had a nes with that really cool robot, i think his name was robby, he would help you out in games (though i think only one game was released for him :(), the coolest bit was the fact that he had a pair of sunnies in case your screen was too bright. That was class.