I'm actually doing this for fun right now - intending to have a stripped-down linux install with Sinclair BASIC as the front-end. Naturally, the system specs are higher (higher res, more colours, a hell of a lot faster) but the BASIC interpreter is almost identical, including the look and feel. I do have a public version of the BASIC interpreter available, but I'll refrain from posting a URL here :) D.

I dunno, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that for me and my social circle at least, the video gaming industry was thriving during those years with the only problem being how a teenager with limited income could actually find the cash to spring for the many fantastic games produced during the "crash" for the C64 and Sinclair machines that we owned. It's well worth taking a wander through the magazine archives at www.worldofspectrum.org for that period to see just how many games were produced which were worth playing for the spectrum alone (I assume that the C64 had similar publications). Each month there were more and more, sometimes more than thirty new games with reviews over 75%. That doesn't seem to represent a video-game crash to me, unless we're only talking about consoles and the companies that solely supported them - home computing (as opposed to video games) was taking off in a very big way and had a very healthy market here in the UK.

I'm confused by the phrase "near-dead". I distinctly remember back in 1985 seeing masses of new game releases from some of the real great publishers of the day, released in stores up and down the country. Nothing was "near-dead" at all - the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum were really going well, and looked unstoppable. Was this "near-dead" thing a US problem, or worldwide? I have some of my fondest gaming memories from 1982 to 1989. I'm talking about the UK of course.

Since the local Tesco started selling DVDs for less than a tenner, I've bought well over a hundred. I never bought them before that - anything more than a tenner and I went without. Very occasionally I'd get a dodgy VHS from a mate which, if I'd enjoyed it, I'd go it hunt down (The Matrix was the last of those, and the last one I watched illegally) and pay full price (£17+). There have been no films since then that I've felt were worth it, and prefer to wait until they're in the bargain bucket. Note that by "going without" I mean I did exactly that, and didn't download them. My 20KB/Sec connection makes downloading pretty much anything a PITA. So for me, the film industry is failing because the vast majority of cinema these days is crap, and what is watchable is way too expensive for me.

Unfortunately, my geographical location means that I'm limited to a download speed of about 20-30KB/Sec, which most of the time clocks in at about 10KB/Sec. This means that I can walk into the neighbouring town (12 miles away), buy a game, walk back and still have acquired the data quicker than if I had downloaded it. Physical media every time for me.

During the development process, many people felt disillusioned by this and cancelled their orders. People take their place, but if you head over to GBAX.com, you might be able to get one of the first batch (which are being built right now) if they have any left.

To be fair, the buy who got his Pandora isn't a developer. He trotted along to the assembly line, offered to help out building these and walked away with his Pandora early as payment. He's paid his preorder money the same as the rest of us. Everyone else will have to wait - these are being built in a Village Hall in the north of England which has been appropriated for the duration (I believe the guy who first proposed this device may well own the hall). There's not many folks building them, and they hope to be able to assemble about 100 a day at first, getting faster as they gain experience.

My kingdom for mod points right about now. I'm a registered nurse in the UK NHS, and your post is a shining example of the way that things are done in that organisation. I'm not a doctor, unlike your wife, but I work very closely with a team of doctors who actually haven't finished their medical training yet, but work up to 36 hours in one stretch (but get a small compensation each month in their pay for giving up their Working Time Directive rights) and often work alone when on-call. It's unsafe, and they're all constantly exhausted (as are we all, under current budget cuts).

Actually, I do it every day (as do my work colleagues). As I'm a nurse, we often get to hear about past patients this way. Sometimes they even say nice things about us... I'm sure that's some sort of conditioning, so we're maybe reinforcing our own behaviour there :)

Of course, the downside is that they usually lie on the obits - "Mary, aged 86, passed away peacefully in her sleep at Ward , General Hospital..." and we're all thinking "bollocks, that was /not/ a good death actually..."

But then, they're hardly likely to write "passed away shortly after vomiting black liquid and howling in pain" which is how it usually goes :(

A little googling turned up Google books' own scans of the original book (from 1884, no less!) and I'd recommend it wholeheartedly:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R6E0AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=flatland&source=bl&ots=B9O1Bn_kho&sig=iEnx2rKJ_0-bBrAKXWLDP_Jfle4&hl=en&ei=iWuzS-buHcKA4QbrvO3LAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false

And I think I'll go brush up on it myself :-) Thanks for the replies, my day gets better and better!

That's... absolutely no problem at all! Your reply just brightened up my day, so many thanks in return!

The XKCD alt-text contains a nice in-joke about flatland (IIRC) - all women are straight lines, and the more important a member of society, the more sides he has - a priest would be almost a circle, as he has so many sides he looks circular. The alt-text goes: "Also, I apologize for the time I climbed down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest." Which is what the flatlanders would see when a stick-man enters their world :)

A 700MB file would take me about ... just over a day, if I wasn't doing anything else on the web. I live out in the back of beyond where the best I can get is 20-30k/sec via ADSL on a copper wire exchange. It sucks, but I can enjoy the scenery around me while I wait for my downloads :)

Now I have no idea if I am talking about the same movie, but when I was very small, my dad took me to see ESB (I was a SW nut at that point, being about 6 years old). The theatre that showed it was running two films one after another - and I remember being quite disappointed when we walked in - I briefly saw the end of the previous film (ESB, the starscape after Luke gets his hand repaired, Han buggers off in t'Falcon), then a pause and then... This incomprehensible short film about a knight in some dark woods - followed by the main event. I have no idea what that film was, but this sounds eerily like it. Possible?

My god yes, I'd forgotten about that. Lobbing devices into the magnetic ramscoop field's pinch-point to frazzle the pilot... dropping an antimatter bullet onto a neutron star, just as the enemy comes around in an orbital manoeuvre.. And I particularly recall that the whole battle between Brennan and the pursuing Pak protector fleet took many years. It was exciting as all hell, though!