How you got hooked on computer games

[Simulation01]

When I was a young boy I would wile away my hours sitting in front of the TV watching the History Channel.  In those days the History Channel only showed documentary's of WWII battles.  I remember laying in front of the TV drawing my own maps on paper and creating my own symbols for units...then I would basically live out a story in my head on paper.....

After quickening.... for a while I finally got a computer, a Packard Bell, and a computer game....Steel Panthers ( it was lame but got me started ).  My entry into the dark and mysterious world of PC gaming did not stop there.....I found a game called Star General which was like giving crack to a baby....from there I moved on to Lord's of Magic, Age of Wonders....MOO, MOO2, Red Alert, Age of Empires etc...etc...etc...

I fell so hard and so fast....reality blurred into dreams........the day's passed into months....month's passed into year's, and now year's have passed into decades, yet still I dream and thirst......

[ravincravin]

I still have Star Generals from SSI on my hard drive. It's funny how many of those old games can be stashed on your hard drive and they hardly even make a dent in the space used.

My first computer game was for the Atari 800 by Avalon Hills. (I can't remember the name.) It was actually a hybred board and computer game. It came with a board and counters and the computer was used to solve battle results. From there I mail order "Hellcat Ace" by Sid Meier which was shipped to me in a zip lock baggy.

Wow! that was a long time ago, way before IBM even conceived of the PC.

[Jeeves]

way before IBM even conceived of the PC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... _computers

Big Blue was a latecomer to the market,, which dented its mainframe business. Read a bit of history...

[Aures]

Apparently we had a commodore 64 and I used to play on it but I was too young to remember, I found a cartridge around our house once. The first games I remember playing were on the original NES, Mario Bros and Duck Hunt when I lived in America. I played a fair number of DOS games on early PC's but most of the games I really got into were on the Super NES, including the original Starwing (Star Fox) with the 3d chip in the cartridge. The first PC games that I really loved were the Wing Commander games. The first strategy type game I really got into was probably the original Civilization (technically CivNet), Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire is still one of my all time favorites. There have been too many games (PC and console) to mention since then. Somewhere in there I played a fair number of games at arcades, I think I still have a backpack full of prize tickets somewhere that haven't been worth anything for over a decade.

Both my parents have been in the computer industry since the 60's, my brother and I are now both work with computers professionally. I wasn't born until the mid 80's so I missed out on lots of the stuff discussed in this thread but I got into computer games at an early age. I still remmeber the first computer that my parents bought specifically for me, there was this newfangled thing called a "graphics card" that allowed you to have all kinds of shiny things in games.

BTW Jeeves stopping telomeres form shortening wouldn't make you clinically immortal, it is far more subtle and difficult than that. However your time frame is probably not far off the mark. Even if no one who has responded to this thread lives to be clinically immortal there are probably people alive today who will see the day.

[Jeeves]

BTW Jeeves stopping telomeres form shortening wouldn't make you clinically immortal, it is far more subtle and difficult than that.

Agreed, you could have genetic defects, teratogenic even if not inherited, especially if the parents are substance abusers. You could die by accident. You could simply become tired of life and suicide. You could be killed by a madman, or die in a war. There are various science fiction authors who have explored the topic of life in societies where the grim reaper has taken a vacation, starting with Heinlein's "Methuselah's Children". The future would definitely be a brighter place to live for some versus others, depending upon whether they possessed marketable talents.

However, as I stated, rather than attempting to lengthen a telomere, a virus should be designed to block the mechanism in the DNA molecule which causes the cell's replicated DNA to have a shorter telomere....

[Igard]

Imagine how overcrowded it would become if we all got given the gift of immortality. I wonder just what the requirement would be to be given the treatment. Would it be available to all? Would we only allow our finest minds and greatest leaders the treatment? We could create a whole new super-class of humans with the rest of us nothing more than labourers and servants to these god-like beings. I find it really unsettling to think about TBH.

[Jeeves]

Well, that is the point which I was making by mentioning "Methuselah's Children". Unless everyone gets the benefit, chaos could erupt. So far as overcrowding is concerned, the problem which we suffer from most as a species, is that by the time a complex topic is mastered, the person has only a few productive years left until old age abruptly ends their career. With indefinite lifespans, there would be time for multi-disiplinary careers to blossom, gaining benefits for our species from conquering the rampant problem of overspecialized training. Serendipitous discoveries would occur when talents developed in one field were applied to other areas of study...

We are (by my estimate) less than 50 years away from discoveries which will rewrite the laws of physics - look up "Burkhard Heim"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkhard_Heim

[Igard]

Interesting, thanks Jeeves. I'd heard about Heim theory but never taken the time to read up on it or find out about the man. Alot of this is way over my head, but I like to glean whatever knowledge I can.

[Jeeves]

Alot of this is way over my head,

I thought that I wanted to be a physicist for a while, but was defeated by an inability to conceptualize Quantum Mechanics. So I switched away from that into software engineering, a fortunate decision. The topic interests me enough to check public knowledge from time to time, looking for announcement of a major breakthrough. No soap, so far...

[Wenla]

ORIGINAL: flap

Space Traders

I think that it would be "star traders". There still are some servers working.

You are most propably right, my memory seems to be worse than I tought...

[DracoRedux]

I started playing console games at about age 4 with the Super Nintendo. Yes,I am young, lol. I have never seen many of the game systems you are referring to and some I have never heard mentioned. The first video game I played was Super Mario Bros. and is probably still in my top 5 favorites of all time.

Computer gaming did not start for me until the release of the MMO Star Wars Galaxies in 2002. That is my favorite game of all time. I have probably played a computer game everyday since then with the exception of military training. I am a gamer for life, I suppose.

[Aures]

Quantum mechanics isn't that hard, people to go great lengths to make it seems more mysterious and complicated than it really is. I thought I wanted to be a physicist as well, took me until my honours year to realise I didn't. At least I got a degree out of it and some very good knowledge. I have an advantage over most people in IT because I studied semiconductor physics at a post graduate level and I understand higher level maths. Knowing how computers work from the output on the screen right down to how the actual circuits function (as well as the theoretical frameworks driving the different levels) has been very useful for me.

I wrote the following last night right after Jeeves response to my last post. Unfortunately my new ISP chose the minute I was about to submit to churn us over. Now 14 hours later the new connection is finally up and running:

Huh, apparently the way I use clinical immortality is not that widely spread. I thought there was a common and standard distinction between "immortality" (the total impossibility of death, think of the curse of being immortal and unable to die at all dilemma which is very old. Also used in for spiritual beings for whom the concept of death makes no sense) and "clinical immortality" (the absence of aging, the possibility of living forever baring accident, war, murder, suicide etc). The way I use the term already rules out most of the causes you mention.

We all accumulate genetic errors and are subject to ageing in other ways that have nothing to do with telomeres. Even in a perfectly healthy individual with no genetic "defects" (whatever that means) stopping their telomeres from shortening would not make them clinically immortal. It might increase their life span, but there is a big difference between "90 years give or take a few decades" and "infinity" (or just millions/billions of years). It is highly unlikely they could live for even a single aeon without other alterations. As I said before, stopping telomeres from shortening is not all (or even most) of what is required. You can't live forever if you telomeres are shortening with every cell division, but to turn that around and say that stopping telomeres from shortening allows you to live forever is a logical fallacy. If someone has sold you on the idea that they are the key to immortality then you have been sold bunk, just as if you had bought into the notion that all you need to do to live to 150 is eat lots of anti-oxidants or greatly restrict your calorie intake. However, I think you are well aware of all of this and are just being careless with your words.

There are a large constellation of medical advances that will increase our lifespans dramatically, telomeres are merely a necessary but not sufficient condition for long lifespans (at least if your cells keep functioning more or less like they currently do, telomeres could be inconsequential if your life span was increased by medical nanotech bots for example). Once your lifespan has been increased substantially it is likely you will survive to see more technological advances which will increase life expectancy even further. People who are alive today have the possibility of being clinically immortal because we are on the cusp of bootstrapping ourselves up to life spans that will increase faster than we age. It is not because there is a single defined way to become clinically immortal (such as altering the way telomeres function) and that once we find how to implement it our work will be done and everyone will live until something circumstantial and non-medical (or at least not age related) ends their lives.

Anyway this is all highly off topic. Except maybe for the fact that what really got me hooked on computer games is highly related to my passion for science and science fiction.

[Jeeves]

Anyway this is all highly off topic.

LOL, I started the thread, and promptly wandered off topic, so if you want to discourse on other matters, then feel free to indulge...

Thanks for the insightful observations. I WAS rather careless in my statements.

On the topic of quantum mechanics, I was able to compose the equations, and score satisfactorily on exams. However, I did not have the intuitive grasp of probability wave functions necessary to perform original thought experiments. So there was no prospect of gaining a career in theoretical physics. Once I realized that, I asked myself what I wanted from a career, and received the answer that I wanted sufficient income to live comfortably, perhaps even extravagantly (with a bit of luck). Realizing that, I promptly changed my major to electrical engineering, which offered many courses relevant for software engineering.

As an amusing side-note, the electrical engineering BSEE degree required passing a course in transforms (Laplace, Fourier, Z etc.). All the exams were open book for any notes composed in your own handwriting. I normally carried just one notebook, which had the fundamental forms and most common variations for each of the transformation types. For the final exam however, I toted in three notebooks. The extra two had hypothetical transform and phase space inverse transform problems which I considered possible candidates for a final exam. I pulled solutions for five of the eight final exam questions from my practice problems. When I turned in my exam after only an hour, the professor demanded that I hand over the notebooks, promising to return them later. When I picked up my exam and course grades, the prof returned my notebooks, saying that I had well earned my "A" in the course, but thought that I had prepared "excessively".

[flap]

ORIGINAL: Wenla

ORIGINAL: flap

Space Traders

I think that it would be "star traders". There still are some servers working.

You are most propably right, my memory seems to be worse than I tought...

Quote of quote of quote... I am really getting nasty here ! Sorry for your eyes.
Well, between the words "Star" and "Space" the difference is really not huge ! Especially after 20-15 years... They look quite the same and deal with concepts in the same field.