Welcome to the Jungle (article about the future of parallel computing)

[Brad Anderson]

On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:

> "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote in message
> news:je9e3t$1g3l$1 at digitalmars.com...
> > Hi,
> >
> > so you are also following Andre's attemps to revive the
> > old homebrew developer feeling. :)
> >
>
> Yea, I grew up on that sort of thing. And I'd been working with Andre'
> (LaMothe, of course) since well before he started doing hardware kits. His
> old DOS-based game dev books are what moved me from various forms of BASIC
> into finally really grokking things like C, pointers and low-level
> programming (which I had only "kind of" understood before). Then I just
> happened to end up in contact with him through a mutual aquaintence (via
> AOL
> 1.x ;) heh, yea, way back then). Andre' was starting up a budget-game
> publishing company and was looking for a breakout clone, which I happened
> to
> already be working on. So there was that, and then he started some gamedev
> forums that I was a regular on for years. Then Hasbro Interactive fucked
> everything up with unsubstantiated litigation and typical corporate "drown
> in legal fees" tactics, and then he got into doing hardware kits like he's
> doing now.
>

I was a regular on there too.  Small world.

>
> IMO, Indie gamedev is really the only way to go if you want to make games.
> All the way until college I was convinced I wanted to work for a major game
> company. Then I started learning more about the nature of the industry at
> the time (around 2000-2001), and that was also the point where the industry
> itself was starting its slow descent into becoming into the
> Hollywood-wannabe cesspool it mostly is today. ("Fuck actual gaming, we're
> gonna be cinematic storytellers!" Too many Pixar rejects in the industry
> now, I guess...Not to mention all the "packaged-goods" managers...)
>
> > I also miss those days. I grew up with the ZX Spectrum,
> > doing some BASIC and Z80 stuff, then most of my friends
> > moved up to the Amiga 500 and I eventually got a PC,
> > since my dad was the opinion the PC would be the future.
> >
>
> For me, it was Apple IIc and ApplesoftBASIC (I'm normally critical of apple
> products, especially after having spent a year or so with OSX, but the
> Apple
> II line is the one major exception for me. I guess you could say Woz was
> the
> *real* Apple for me). Plus a small amount of Logo and machine code on the
> machine. Then I got a [Packard Bell, remember them?] 486DX2 and moved to
> QBASIC, had an enormous amount of fun with that. (IIRC, Amiga was pretty
> much out of the picture by then, and I hadn't even heard of it. Sometimes
> now I feel like I really missed out on it.)
>
> Tinkered a bit with C/C++, but didn't quite "get it". Then did VB 3 (It
> came
> on a bunch of floppies and was for Win3 :) ). Then I found Andre's DOS
> books
> (this was still *just* before DirectX, or at least around the time of what
> was then called the "Game SDK"). Was into that for years, and somehow
> managed to get sucked into web dev, and these days all my free time goes to
> D-related projects (mostly things that will directly or indirectly make my
> webdev work slightly less painful).
>
> > Anyway, I had lots of fun doing x86 assembly programming
> > with some Turbo Pascal and eventually C. Then quite a few
> > languages after that.
> >
> > Nowadays I develop business software mostly in JVM and .NET
> > languages, running in clustered environments. With development
> > teams scattered around the globe.
> >
> > Doing low level programming and graphics related stuff is
> > now only a hobby, when real life permits to do so. Until the
> > day I manage to change area.
> >
> > Wow, now I am a bit nostaligic
> >
>
>
>
Regards,
Brad Anderson
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