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The latest issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal arrived today, and contained an interview by Michael Swaine with game design legend Chris Crawford on the subject of his new venture. You can find the piece online at DDJ.com. If games and game design interest you, I advise reading the interview before continuing. I have admired Mr. Crawford since the mid-1980s, around the time of Balance of Power. This is a guy who wrote his first commercial computer game for Atari in 1979. Balance of Power was a certified 250k copy smash when it was released in 1984. Somewhere along the way he veered off from the game business and went in a different direction. His new gig is a company he cofounded called StoryTron. After reading the interview I went to the site and read everything there, including some of the message board content. I think I now better understand where and why he parted ways with the industry he helped to create. I’m not sure that, in the end, it will be a journey with a successful ending, or at least it might not be the kind of success he envisions. But I understand the attraction of what he is trying to do. Continue Reading »

David Brin makes an interesting point in a recent article on Salon.com (apologies for the ‘click the banner’ hoop you have to jump through to get to the story). The author of such popular SF works as Startide Rising and The Postman is also a programmer, and he has a son who shows signs of being a programmer as well. Now various people can argue that we don’t have enough programmers, or that we do, or that the ones we have are too expensive. But I don’t think anyone will consider it a bad thing if a young person who is inclined toward the art finds the right tools to assist in the learning curve. The point Mr. Brin makes that somewhat surprised me is that we used to have the perfect tool, and now largely have it no more. That tool was BASIC.

The word ‘BASIC’ is an acronym that stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was designed all the way back in 1963 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, both of Dartmouth. The point of it then was to provide a fast way for students new to programming to get up to speed on the fundamental concepts: stepwise execution; flow of control; instructions; operators; operands; variables; input/output; etc. It used to be that every IBM-compatible PC had BASIC burned into a ROM on the motherboard, and there were any number of more capable versions of it available on tape or 5.25″ diskette once those became common. Incidentally, two guys by the name of Gates and Allen got their start implementing BASIC for the Altair. Continue Reading »