Legacy News #1207

Where does the time go? Today we have one new site, The Commodore Zone. And plenty of updates that have been stacking up over the last few days as you can see above.

I hope you all had a good fourth of July if that is a holiday you celebrate. I was/am stuck at work on twelve hour shifts so I really don't have time for anything else. I heard that World of Warcraft had a fireworks show at 10 PM central last night which I missed as I was on-duty. It's really interesting to me to see how game programmers add little details like that to a game.

Lately I've also been thinking about the computer I first used. It was a Packard Bell with a 486 processor. When I first started using it I could only navigate in the Packard Bell application which was a "frontend" I guess you would call it - where you don't interact directly with Windows or DOS, but use a graphical menu to find programs. It took a long time to get into working directly in Windows, and even longer to get into DOS. I always had problems getting Wolfenstein 3D or any other game to run for that matter in Windows 3.11, and didn't know enough about DOS to do much of anything.

It was many years until I was lucky enough to get *some* internet access on a 14.4 modem. I filled up a box of disks over a year with games and part of my huge 200 mb hard drive. As I grew into a bigger computer nerd and upgraded the computer to something more powefull I dreamed about being able to archive files on CD-ROM's, but did the only thing I could afford by backing up files on tapes. The tapes generally corrupted the files as they were written, and it took about an hour to write a small game on the media.

Those were the good ol'days of computing. I think I valued my bandwidth, and the games much more. Today I can easily load up NewsBin and grab 40 gigabyets of files. Quickly sort through them and move them over to DVD-R's. I've got stacks of discs which I don't even know whats written on them. I never had a 3.5 inch disk which had files I didn't know about. This could be the start of a really good forum topic - but it will have to wait as we don't have an open forum yet.

I was hoping to get Demu up today, however, the programming is not completed. From what I'm told a large update to the code should occur tonight which will allow me to put the finishing touches on the content. Then all that should be left is some display coding for the company pages, contribution archive page, etc. I'm going to keep on the programmer and hopefully we can see a launch by the end of next weekend.