Archive for June 1st, 2003

Game Over. Start Again? – Part 1

Posted June 1, 2003 By Earl Green

It began with two squares and one straight line. An entire industry grew from those inauspicious beginnings which would eclipse the music and movie industries in revenue and define whole generations. Video games are nothing new – in fact, they’re probably older than you think. And most of the controversy surrounding marketing the games is also older than you think – almost as old as the industry itself.

The story begins in the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the need for a user-friendly public demonstration of a massive new room-filling computer system led programmer Willy Higginbotham to create a simple video ping pong game called Tennis For Two. Played not on a television monitor but an oscilloscope, this early precursor to Pong was created in 1958 – truly the first video game, even though it was part of a free public display and not for sale. In 1961, several budding hackers at MIT, led by Steve Russell, created a game called Spacewar on the somewhat less massive PDP-1 minicomputer. Still a hulking mainframe of a computer, the PDP-1 was manufactured and sold to many colleges, and Spacewar became a kind of killer-app demonstration of the machine’s abilities, distributed free of charge. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media

Contents: One House – Some Assembly Required

Posted June 1, 2003 By Pattie Gillett

Many of my single friends complain about the constant nagging they get from their friends and family to “find someone” and “settle down”. While I don’t doubt that that such nagging can get rather irksome after a while, I challenge any of these bachelors and bachelorettes to put up with the constant pressure Dave and I endured about our choice of dwelling unit.

“Why are you still renting?”

“You’re throwing money away!”

“When are you going to look for a house?”

“You need to start building some equity!”

“You guys are still in that apartment? How many years is that now?”

This pressure only intensified after Alexandra was born and people began to imply that it was nothing short of child abuse to live in a two-bedroom apartment with an infant.

While I will admit that towards the end, the apartment did get a bit cramped, Dave and I have several good reasons for waiting to buy a house. (Well, we think they’re good and since we’re the ones who are in the hole for thirty years to the mortgage company, we’re going stick with our opinion for now.) Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Virtual Estate? Not Quite Yet

Posted June 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

When we first learned that we were going to have a baby, we thought about renting a house. Eventually we came to our senses and realized that moving plus becoming parents was one more life-altering even than we were equipped to handle and decided to stick out the apartment one more year. This had another benefit, because when the next year rolled around, we were in a position to eschew renting and purchase a home of our own.

Now, let me make something clear from the start. I’m not one of those people who think that renting is ‘throwing away money.’ I can see a lot of circumstances where renting just makes more sense – you don’t need a lot of space, you don’t want to be tied to an area, you don’t want to worry about the maintenance, you’d like to take the money you save on a mortgage, property taxes and so on and invest in some other fashion, whatever. But we had reached a point where we wanted to have a little more sense of permanence and stability along with additional space, so for us, buying seemed the way to go. And being the 21st-century couple that we are, we wanted to use the Net and modern technology as much as possible. A pity it didn’t quite work out that way. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Life in Practice