I never really played HHGG as a kid but started it up on my Apple //e using this wonderful disk image, which has a great front end for Infocom games, in case anyone hasn't seen it:
Exact thing happened to me when I first started collecting arcade games. I was ready to sell a Xenophobe cabinet, which is a massive, awkward monstrosity. Took a huge "loss" on it but at the time needed it out of my house and only cared that a potential seller could help get it up the stairs. :)
Ha, I knew someone who formerly worked for IGT. Said when he relocated he had a complete gambling machine (massively obsolete) in his living room. Including the 300 lbs something steel plate that is used to weigh it down. Put it on craigslist for free and said it was gone that evening, scrappers showed up and moved it out for him.
I make text adventure games in a language called Hugo. It was released in the late 90s and has not changed much. I have enjoyed being able to code with some stability for fun as I've learned other languages for work. Hugo feels like home, and it's comforting to know a language really well.
The fact that "Click to expand" / auto-collapse is the default for almost all conversations and there is no way to toggle it off is inexplicable to me.
Yeah! And Warlords for the Atari 800 (or "Castle Crisis," which is a homebrew / arcade-perfect port of the arcade version of Warlords) with some friends and real paddle controllers is a lot of fun.
If you know something about wiring you can get photocells and wire them to the paddle ports (pin 9 and 5) then move by how much light gets to the photocell. I put two in a piece of wood so I could use my hand to allow or restrict light reaching the photocell. Also fun to write a basic program to take the value and use it for the sound command. Makes some weird noise.
That seems fun. I have a kid who might love to play with one or two hooked up to the sound registers.
Edit: I know what I am going to do. My granddaughter is 5.
I am going to write a little basic program that reads these cells wired to a couple paddle ports. I have one set I can take apart for this bit of fun. We have two hands, which makes for a perfect pairing.
Press a key, and something happens on screen. Maybe the color changes with the sound, or it says, "Hello Kiddo", whatever.
And the registers, math, change.
A couple hours on this should lead to interesting time watching her interact with it all.
Thanks for the inspiration. Should be fun. Now all I have to do is get a program into that Atari. Might finally be time to get one of those SD card devices for my Atari, or a FujiNet. Something.
If you're used to exclusively programming with line numbers and you're a kid, sure, it might take a little bit of time and instruction to comprehend that line numbers aren't necessary. But from what he wrote it just sounds like this guy is whining about (when faced with students like this) having to actually do his job.
Fortran and BASIC at the time were, in many ways, the antithesis to his ideas of what a programming language should be.
They did not permit recursion (direct or indirect). Almost by design they encouraged spaghetti code (the thing Structured Programming was meant to work against). They encouraged (or required) global state. They discouraged modularity. They were effective languages (in the sense that people got stuff done in them), but they were poor languages when compared to the capabilities of their contemporaries.
I didn't have an impression that line numbers were important. Most of the time they did nothing and were unwieldy to maintain, they were more nuisance than anything else.
https://archive.org/details/PitchDark