Re: The map that will never be
 

Piqued by Ich's post I looked around my file system and according to filestamps the best I could come up with is that I first used asshat "definitely before 2006. probably around 2002.", so that doesn't tell me much :S

And in a more topicy note - give us that map http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: The map that will never be
 

..lol. What monster have I created?

Re: The map that will never be
 

Thanks for the definition and the very interesting discussion of "asshat".

DigitalSin, you did not make a mistake, but this forum has a more diverse membership than usual on the gaming circut. A substantial percentage of us are 40 or older.

And I, for one, toyed with IM for a while, but decided to opt out of the text message world for many reasons. I also know that many of my temporal peers also eschew the communications mode in its various forms.

Re: The map that will never be
 

Ah yes. Me being a youngun, I have no grasp of how varied the interweb is, I just assume almost all 40+ers are like my parents.. technologically incompetent.

Re: The map that will never be
 

Your interest made me look a little further and it seems that asshats are popular since the 60s to 70s at least.

Ah, so I am not alone. Phew.

Re: The map that will never be
 

But if you give it one moment of thought you will come to the realization that we (the 40+ers) invented the technology, the web and PC gaming. So not only are some of us technically capable, but also living proof that "once a true gamer, always a true gamer".

There are a couple of us on this forum who have been gaming since the first week, if not the first day, of the home computer. The first PC game I played came on a cassette, identical to the cassettes used for stereos. I will always remember the thrill I got when something I did triggered the cassette drive, because it always meant that I did something right. It was another year or two before the 5" floppy came out. And I was in my early 30's at this time. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: The map that will never be
 

I feel like I should kneel down after that last post.

Re: The map that will never be
 

*Kneels*

Back in my day, we had to google uphill, both ways
 

"Why you young whippersnappers! I remember the days of my 300 baud modem the size of a los angeles phone book, wired to a dial phone. And those damn tiny switches, trying to get them right. And the contest to imitate the sound of making the connection.

You had 300 baud? We would have killed for 300 baud! We had 110 baud, half-duplex, and WE LIKED IT! Yellow-paper chattering teletypes and all!

Bah. We had to use punched cards and paper tape. I can remember how amazed and awed I was by my first teletype machine, chunking along at something like 4 or 5 characters per second. Then, one day, someone invented one that saved time by typing while the head was moving from both left to right AND right to left.

Luxury! We used to use semaphore flags to move data from one server to another in the same office.

Flags! We would have given our right arms for flags! It was so smoky in our offices (back in the day, of course) that you could not see flags from across the room. We had to relay data in envelopes hand- carried by midgets. I believe these were the first "packets". Occasionally the midgets fell over (hard to see in the smoke) and produced what we called "compressed headers". I think there's an RFC on that.

Midgets! We DREAMED of having midgets! We had to get up at 5 in the morning, go out to the woods, cut some sticks, sharpen the sticks, and punch the cards by hand!

Cards?! We had to chip flint into pieces with sharp edges, then use the edges to peel the bark off the trees and then use the sticks to punch pieces of bark.

Bark... ah, how we dreamed of bark! We had to chew wood fibers with our own teeth, spit them out and roll them flat with stones and leave them to dry in the sun!

You had stones? We had to mix water and dirt and let it dry in the sun for centuries!

How we used to dream of the sun! We had to wait for eons in the formless void, waiting for The Word to separate the light from the darkness!

Word? HA! All we had was an amino acid soup!

Amino acid soup! How we dreamed of amino acids! We had big piles of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen and had to assemble our own organic molecules. FROM SCRATCH!

You had elements?! All we had were protons and electrons. We had to mine our own subatomic particles to make neutrons and then in a single precarious step, combine the neutrons with protons and send electrons into precise orbits. And you think your system crashes were hard to deal with? Imagine the fallout *we* handled every day...And we didn't have any of that wussy lead shielding, either, back in the good old days, and we *liked* it that way.

Electrons?!?!? God, how we DREAMED of electrons, sitting there, all alone in our probability fields.

Matter? They had MATTER? Man, you guys are lucky! Back in my day we had to create the molecules out of quantum vibrations. BY HAND. And you had to be lucky enough to find someone to do it for you--it's not like we could go to www.outoftheformlessvoid.com and read the FAQ, you know?

Quantum vibrations!? A formless void!? We could only dream of a formless void... we were all packed into a singularity of spacetime having no dimension, and we liked it!"

See also: http://mirrorshades.org/wc/2007/07/back_in_my_day.shtml

Re: Back in my day, we had to google uphill, both
 

Ahaha, truly words of wisdom! Hands up all who think this thread went off on a bit of a tangent?