I'm done with this ridiculous time vampire of a game.

[Rising-Sun]

Well I am not sure if too late to post, I remember seeing those big ol' 8" floppy drives along with disks. Thank god we don't use them anymore lol.

[Treetop64]

ORIGINAL: chazz

Just lost a whole carrier group because they'd rather bomb transports than an enemy carrier group. Which they knew was there.

This is retarded.

I'm done.

I think he's on his way to play World of Tanks now. Judging by the character of his posts here, he'll fit in just fine there...

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: RisingSun

Well I am not sure if too late to post, I remember seeing those big ol' 8" floppy drives along with disks. Thank god we don't use them anymore lol.

I'm a bit younger than some of the computer people here. I graduated college in the late 80s. However, my first project out of college was working on a monstrosity originally developed in the late 70s for the 757 and 767 program at Boeing. My boss had designed it before getting promoted.

It was a box that went into a 19 inch rack and had about 20 cards in it that were 20 inches X 20 inches. The older cards were all wire wrapped, though the newer production cards were printed circuit. Each card had a Z-80 processor and 64KB of RAM.

Everything was written in assembly and the 7 or 8 programmers who had worked on it before I did were all EEs, not programmers. They had little concept of modules. The printout of the main module was as thick as a phone book. We had to edit on the mainframe, then download the source to a microcontroller development system with 8 inch floppies, assemble the code, then down load it to a PROM burner and burn a PROM before we could test any changes. I took a book to the lab with me when I was coding. I got a lot of reading done.

That system could handle 16 data buses on the airplane. It was used for simulation testing of the various avionics boxes developed for the planes.

For the 777 I was tasked with writing the code for the replacement. That unit ran on an early 68040 processor before Apple started using them. We had a great hardware debugging guy who found a slew of bugs in the processor and reported them to Motorola. He probably made the Macintosh more reliable. I was able to increase the bus count to 80 running full blast. More than would ever be needed in the real world. That was some of the tightest code I ever wrote.

Bill

[LoBaron]

ORIGINAL: Endy

While I agree that some of the whining comes from lack of knowledge of how the game works or lack of preparation, there are genuine situations, and quite a lot of them, where luck plays a major role. And it can be very easily checked by simply replaying the turn. I did my share of it with my opponent who was also interested in how stuff could play out with a different dice roll and in a few different scenarios - carrier strike, SAG battle etc. - the results varied from catastrophical to really good ones depending on a dice roll.

And I don't agree that you can plan for everything. Despite your best skills there are always factors you have absolutely no control over. Weather is just one example - absolutely no control over it and no way to plan or prepare for it because the forecasts are not a reliable tool to predict it. And just this one factor can lead to a MAJOR difference in results, for example a carrier battle or a surface action depending if you get nice weather or a thunderstorm in the target hex or hexes. And yes, it's just a matter of how lucky you are with the roll despite everything else you did.

I can name a few other factors but I believe you get my point. Yes, this kind of randomness in some factors is pretty realistic and true to life and most of us have learned to accept them. However, some players are used to something very different and to games, even pretty realistic ones, where the battle outcome just can't vary so much depending on just one factor. Many games, even the more complex or realistic ones, let you predict your chances very well, with only slight variation of the final result. Of course, you might argue that this is more similar to chess than real war but some players react very badly when this kind of control is taken away from them.

I'll say again, yes, WITP has got most of these random things right and yes, stuff you can't control like weather could play a major role in a sea battle and shape history and should do the same in game. The problems start when you realize that if you moved that one squadron somewhere on the West coast or in Japan, then that carrier battle could've been just as easily as it has been lost. And like I said, some other wargames have randomness confined to a much bigger degree and you can predict the results of your actions MUCH better without the wild disparity of results based on a random dice roll.

And some players react histerically to that and have a really hard time accepting it in Witp. Then again, this game is just not for everyone and you need to learn to accept it as it is.

ORIGINAL: PaxMondo
Point being, most air combat, and particularly naval air combat, had a lot of variable NOT controlled by the commanders. Weather being first, but FOW being right with it. Intel was far from perfect. Because of these two factors alone, coordination was measured in double digit minutes, not seconds like today. I think that, more than anything, is what many [younger] players struggle with. They have never been in a situation where absolute, total control was not possible. Products of the digital age, the whole concept of analog is just foreign.

Anyway, just thoughts of an analogue Neanderthal.

Reread our discussion and just want to note that in general I agree with you anyway.

PaxMondo actually made the comment that got me thinking.

Most kids nowerdays are used to a world where collecting data and predicting events is simply a matter of using the touchscreen of the nearest available handset. For many it is difficult to imagine a world where the main difficulty was not to pick the correct information out of an abundance of data available, but to be able to access even a fraction of that data in the first place.

The (naval) battles of WWII were shaped by individuals interpreting those - in most cases insufficient - data fragments, in the course of events before a battle, as well as during engagements. Few had the capabilities to account for what important bits of information they could use to their advantage while remaining aware of what might still be hidden behind curtain of FOW, and based on this knowledge making the right decisions. Those were the artists who shaped the course of a battle.

Good discussion gents, also in the parallel thread created by Lecivius.

[Rising-Sun]

A lot of interesting stuffs here, too bad that player couldn't handle this game, may later he will try again harder. All I have to say is read the manual carefully and a lot of tips on this forum.

Maybe some players doesn't have patient to play this game.

[wegman58]

ORIGINAL: crsutton

My first computer. And, a pretty damn good one at that.

I remember in High School in 1975 Brother James (I went to Catholic school) standing in front of the room saying this is the last time I will ever teach this and started with the slide rule lessons.

[PaxMondo]

ORIGINAL: wdolson


I never worked with the 4004, but I know what it is. I have heard it is still used in street light controllers, but I have never verified that.

Bill,

So many legends and myths about the chip ... I did a little googling and came up with a ton of contradictions. [;)]

I wasn't in that industry, I was only a hobbyist, so my knowledge is not complete. My memory though is that while the 4004 did get a number of commercial uses, it was rapidly replaced by the 4040 in 4 bit applications and by the 8008 and 8080 series for 8 bit (and eventually the revolutionary Z80). 4004 family, while a breakthrough, had a number of severe limitations not that least of which was its tiny memory addressing capability. It was something like 512 bits of memory address ... even in its native machine code, that is a very small program. My first breadboard with the 4004 and nixie tube display, I remember it took me all afternoon the first time to load in my first program. toggle switches to do it and I kept having to start over. Messed up one step and all you could do was clear memory and start over. Of course, the program was to calculate pi to max digits .. I think it was 8 digits ... [X(] way cool.

[Banzan]

ORIGINAL: Treetop64

I think he's on his way to play World of Tanks now. Judging by the character of his posts here, he'll fit in just fine there...

Belive me, you need far more calmness to play WoT regulary, then a lost carrier battle in WitPAE needs.

And yes, i know this first hand... [:D]

[geofflambert]

I worked (for just a year) for the North American distributor of Ving locks. They were door locks used in the hospitality industry. There were two types, one most people are familiar with which scan a card the same way you swipe your credit card in a reader. The other was mechanical and involved these plastic punchcards, you pushed the card into the lock and pins would go through the holes punched in the card. This is the same technology that Joseph Marie Jacquard invented in 1801 to program looms with. Here's a pic of the loom, you can see the cards strung above.

[geofflambert]

Here's a close up of the cards.

[geofflambert]

Here's a portrait of Jacquard made with this loom.

[geofflambert]

Amazing. An important precursor to the electronic computer. Today's young people would understand their world better if they took an interest in history.

[Treetop64]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

Amazing. An important precursor to the electronic computer. Today's young people would understand their world better if they took an interest in history.

Pfft. Who the #^@& cares about times without smart phones and internet...

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

I worked (for just a year) for the North American distributor of Ving locks. The were door locks used in the hospitality industry. There were two types, one most people are familiar with which scan a card the same way you swipe your credit card in a reader. The other was mechanical and involved these plastic punchcards, you pushed the card into the lock and pins would go through the holes punched in the card. This is the same technology that Joseph Marie Jacquard invented in 1801 to program looms with. Here's a pic of the loom, you can see the cards strung above.

Interesting. It seems a bit unwieldy having to carry a great big loom to get into your hotel room though.

[geofflambert]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

I worked (for just a year) for the North American distributor of Ving locks. The were door locks used in the hospitality industry. There were two types, one most people are familiar with which scan a card the same way you swipe your credit card in a reader. The other was mechanical and involved these plastic punchcards, you pushed the card into the lock and pins would go through the holes punched in the card. This is the same technology that Joseph Marie Jacquard invented in 1801 to program looms with. Here's a pic of the loom, you can see the cards strung above.

Interesting. It seems a bit unwieldy having to carry a great big loom to get into your hotel room though.

Would you please just go away. [:@][:D]

[geofflambert]

Here's pics of those Ving lock keys

[btd64]

yeah, I remember using them. I think. Old mind with a not so good memory.[:D]....GP

[Ron Saueracker]

geoff...don't forget. we got a match coming.[&o]

[drw61]

Reminded me of one of my favorite shows James Burke's Connections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

Here's a portrait of Jacquard made with this loom.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: drw61

Reminded me of one of my favorite shows James Burke's Connections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI

I was thinking the same thing. James Burke is great. If more history teachers were like him, history would be a popular subject in school.

Bill