Technology

pfft— 16-bit @ 3Hz and 128k of ram?

give me Adventure! waiting for each turn to process and refresh would actually give a sense of suspense!

edit: for reference, Pong on an Atari 2600 ran at 8-bit @ 1.19 MHz w/128b of ram. so 3Hz is barely enough power to process rudimentary logic and text display. Adventure was node-based with a simple language-prompt interpreter. it would be slooooow, but it would have a chance of actually working.

edit 2: Adventure, (aka ADVENT) was the original text-adventure game:

This is one that you can really get your teeth into. You travel around an imaginary world, collecting treasure and solving puzzles, all the while making a map on paper so that you have an idea where you are. The control system is fairly simple with just one or two word commands, and once you get the hang of this, it works really well. It is also made easier by certain short-cuts such as just typing, 'building' to enter the building.

The game ADVENT, which adventure is based on, was written on a PDP-10 in FORTRAN by Will Crowther in 1976 and is considered to be the first adventure game. The following year Don Woods expanded the game by adding fantasy elements and making it more puzzle-orientated.

Originally written by James Gillogly in 1977 as a port of the classic FORTRAN game ADVENT written by Will Crowther and Don Woods.

(source)

I actually got to play the original version when I was a student at RIT in the 90s, as the College of Computer Science still had a DEC PDP-10 running a VMS/VAX system that had a copy of Adventure. It was infuriating, and I wasted far too many hours in study hall playing that shit when I should have been learning C++.

Everyone? You sure? Just off the top of my head, I've witnessed:

1. A fellow millennial recently calling his tower "the modem".

2. A user who thinks a computer experiencing a "crash", as in the unexpected termination of a process, means everything on the hard drive was just lost.

3. A teacher who swears their fiber optic internet connection always slows down when it rains.

4. A family member who thinks cell phones are actually miraculous.

5. An IT director who decided to save time while rewiring an entire school district's network by forgoing patch panels completely, terminating hundreds of CAT-6 cables (which he first laid directly on top of the drop ceiling grid) with RJ45 connectors plugged straight into switches, labeling each with masking tape.

6. A police officer who called his chief and supervisor over to his desk in order to explain that he discovered a massive vulnerability on the agency website, demonstrating the risk by showing them how he was able to change some text with the browser's element inspector.

7. A software developer who only used Internet Explorer (years ago when Chrome was still arguably the best option) because "Google tracks you". He was later sentenced to decades in federal prison for organizing the production of CSAM on the surface web, not the darknet, mostly over Craigslist.

I know how to navigate a Windows file system and my 13-year-old daughter doesn't. So I can still feel superior to someone!

Sadly, Portal64 has come to an end after cease & desist letters were issued to James. Still, it was a fantastic series and he is a great presenter, he makes the technical challenges he faces so Interesting to follow.

Why would anyone hate Excel?

Doesn't meet the minimum requirements :P

the article anticipates and responds to that question

But can it run crysis?

What doesn't run Doom? They have probably gotten cashew nuts to run Doom.

If you enjoy watching 1 frame per x time period sequences, and you're okay with x being decades, it might "run" doom.

3hz processing is probably achievable by some humans

They say it can't run DOOM however you can use it to display the video output from DOOM.

Excel would be emulating the silicon here

Excel would be closest to a virtual machine software in this case