this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Sweet summer child. We learned FORTRAN on punch cards that we would send off to the regional office for them to run. Our punch cards would get returned to us with a fanfold printout of errors/output. I'm not sure I ever saw a program work correctly. Mostly because the bad kids would slip fucked up cards into other people's programs, and comment cards remarking on the teacher and her physical unattractiveness. It was a major relief when they put in a micro-lab stocked with these.
Hah, I must have just caught the tail end of that course in HS. Except, maybe midway through the term, they installed a modem that a telephone handset could be placed in to, such that we could run programs remotely on a mainframe.
@anonymous_leaker@lemmy.world,
Actually I remember earlier screensavers those were based on; I believe add-ons like "Flying Toasters" for Mac & PC. Trust Bill Gates' ripoff crew to make a less-robust version, as always.
Oh yeah.. After Dark..
I still have the CD for the Deluxe 4.0 version and managed over the years to grab all the Star Trek and the Simpsons screensavers as well. I will occasionally boot up MacOS 8.6 and faff around with them.
Rock, Paper, Scissors was one I always thought would be great to put on a TV in a bar, and let it run and let people make bets on it.
My friends and I get drunk and do this with SaltyBet. It’s based on the freeware Mugen game engine, and uses community-made characters and levels. So you can be hanging out with friends, and suddenly Shaggy is fighting Optimus Prime. If I’m at a friend’s house and nobody else is using the TV for anything (usually sports), I’ll sometimes log into my Plex burner account, and load up MXC (the English dub of Takeshi’s Castle) for people to zone out with. It has absolutely zero plot, so people can tune in and out of it without missing anything.
Hah! Watching a vid now, that's pretty funny. Guess I missed that one...