Elite was a huge consumer of my time during my teenage years. I'd originally tried it on the 8bit Acorn Electron (the BBC Micro's baby brother), but was a bit too young to really get it and was hopeless at playing the game. But when I got my first PC, I was able to really get into it, spending hours playing when I should have probably been studying for my GCSEs, eventually getting the missions and the coveted Elite status.

All this was done on the CGA version, low resolution in four colours. On loading, a menu would allow me to select wireframe graphics only, or if the PC was really fast (6Mhz 286 or greater I seem to recall...), then you could select solid filled polygons. I had a 20Mhz 286 so could enjoy the enhanced version. Didn't matter though, because the imagination filled in the gaps.

When Frontier:Elite 2 came out, I was amazed at all the things we wanted to do in the original could now be done (landing on planets with a seamless transition between space and atmosphere, different ships that could be bought and equipped, more missions). But the flight model was a bit too complicated and lacked the immediacy of the original. I was never really taken with the "Star Dreamer" time acceleration feature either as it was too easy to skip through things (like docking).

Never played Frontier: First Encounters as I think I had moved onto girls by then, but having read that it was released by the publisher in an unfinished state, it sounds like I've not missed that much.

But Elite:Dangerous sounds like the sort of game I really want to play! A huge universe as a playground? Flying through the clouds of a gas giant? Mining asteroids? Teaming up with friends to complete missions? Yes please!

So far I've pledged a little, with the expectation I'll pledge more before the Kickstarter finishes. As a [very] occasional gamer these days, this is something I want to spend my evenings playing.

I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if the efforts invested in KDE and GNOME had been put into completing GNUstep. I seem to recall many objections back then about Objective-C, but that doesn't appear to be much of an issue for all the current Mac OS X and iOS developers...

The Linux world could have been a *very* different place.

I agree that Elite is a technical tour de force, but perhaps a more impressive game is Exile, also on the BBC computer. It could run in 32K RAM and used a procedurally generated landscape, had a decent physics engine, a "realistic" form of AI for the creatures and was absolutely huge.

The most amazing thing (to me) is that problems in the game were solved not by following some pre-programmed rule (put "key A" into "door C"), but by manipulating the environment. So "key A" did fit "door C", but you could also use a sufficiently powerful weapon to blow the door open, or throw an imp through a hole so it goes down and presses a button to open the door. Totally amazing sense of freedom.

There is a play through on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbLndV_f_vo

And some technical details here: http://exile.acornarcade.com/devel.html

If you've never seen Exile, you owe it to yourself to spend some time just marvelling at what could be achieved in 32K RAM.

If the games industry had managed to put the 16bit and 32bit machines as hard as Elite and Exile pushed the 8bit BBC, games would be far more advanced today.

I'm pretty sure that's not in the New Testament, but would be interested if you find a reference.

"L" was the game that first got me hooked with computers. I played that game through to completion on one of our school's BBC micros, even though it involved doing so during break times, lunch and after school. I was very fortunate to have a maths teacher that was really into the BBC and knew what could be done with computers. We had an Econet network, fileserver and a computer room that we could spend our breaks in.

The OS and built in BASIC in the BBC are extremely elegant: functions, procedures, a VDU driver that treated the screen as 1280x1024 logical units, so graphics plotting worked, regardless of the physical screen resolution, multiple filesystems, support for additional languages, the ability to peek and poke from with BASIC as well as the amazing built-in assembler. The hardware could be upgraded beyond anything the other 8bit micros of the day could due to a huge number of I/O ports. I remember being very confused when I got my first PC and QBASIC was the only bundled language. It all felt so primitive compared with the elegance of Acorn's 8bit range.

I've still got a mint condition BBC Master with an internal second processor (offload the program to the co-pro and use the base machine for I/O duties only). Very tempted to add a Retroclinic Datacentre so I can plug in USB sticks and run software from there.

The BBC micro, in the hands of a good teacher, was a machine that shaped lives. I'm in IT because my maths teacher "got it" and passed on his enthusiasm.

The BBC news report on Dennis Ritchie's death: here.

Would be good to see this hit the Most Read section of the site.

It's no exaggeration that without Dennis Ritchie's contributions, many of us would have very different careers. I've been fortunate to spend the first 12 years of my IT career working on multiple Unix and Linux systems, and although I'm not much of a coder, I've compiled a fair amount of C and recognise that if it hadn't been invented, neither would C++ or C#, which constitutes a lot of the code in use today.

Without Unix, what would the Internet been built on? Perhaps something like VMS? Would tools like Sendmail or BIND been developed in those environments? The influence of Unix can be seen everywhere in IT.

Actually, without Unix, we wouldn't have had NeXTstep, which became MacOS X, which became iOS. We wouldn't have had Minix or Linux, so no Android. So the mobile landscape would have been different as well.

I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that Dennis Ritchie's legacy is the IT industry we have today. Most of us stand on this giant's shoulders.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

I don't know where you're posting from, but in the UK, the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya were/are running as lead items on the main TV news. It's major news and being treated in the same way the Orange and Velvet revolutions were.