What a time to be alive as a coder...
Now there's a glut of content. Will another opportunity ever appear again? In both cases, the opportunity didn't look good at first.
With AI we might go through an era of sameness and/or slop leaving the door open for something more genuine. Everything is cyclical.
Edit: Wikipedia tells me that at launch the Apple II cost the equivalent of $6700 for the 4k model or $13,700 for the 48k model.
Ya, I was a teenager at the time wanting to buy a computer but apple was about $1200. The color computer was only $399, so I saved for a long time then bought one and learned programming and how to make video games.
As gamer in the 1980's, I only cares about what could actually get on a few shops around my hometown, and they were mostly games coming out from UK, and Iberian Penisula.
With the Amiga, German and French studios also became relevant.
Everything else was almost inexistent.
Also arcades had what they had, owners weren't changing games all the time.
I certainly did not felt that great manually translating Z80 opcodes into DATA entries, to be loaded via RANDOMISE USR instructions.
Got a bit better with hexdump editors, but good luck tracking down checksum errors.
Finally, debugging meant manually simulating the execution on paper, with arrows and boxes, to try to get a feeling of what could be root cause for the error.
Yeah, what a time.
Steve wrote a lot of software for the first computer I had access to which was my father's Tandy Color Computer. We didn't have much money so we couldn't afford luxuries like a disk drive and commercial software on a ROM pack was a rare gift.
One of the handful of ROM paks we had was a game called "Popcorn". It's opening screen proudly displays "By Steve Bjork" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSL4dGhJhHo ). As an 8 year old kid, I thought it was a funny name. I'd often call my little sister a "bjork" and she would predictably yell back "no, you're the bjork!". It was a bit of a family joke for some years.
Fast forward 25ish years and I started participating in "retro computing", reliving some childhood memories and had fun writing some new software for my first love. I participated on the community forums, helped with some open source projects and eventually found that Mr. Bjork was still active and creating projects for this old computer. I traveled to the annual "last" cocofest where Tandy nerds still gather and got to meet him. He was extremely kind and we had interesting discussions. We even collaborated on some projects. It was surreal to be working with this "legend" from my early childhood.
Sadly, Steve passed away in 2023. He was truly a sweet and capable man who gave a lot to the community for years after any commercial opportunity had passed.
There was a lot of graphics and movement in that game for the power of that cpu, more than the games I was writing.
afavour•6mo ago
ldargin•6mo ago