Idle Thumbs 219: Idiots Laughing

[Bjorn]

My freshman year I took a typing / stenography course using typewriters. Sophomore year, we moved up to word processing on a DOS version of word perfect. All of this stuff was long obsolete when I was learning about it in the mid-to-late 90's, but it was good preparation for later having to wrap my head around cold war era hardware in the US military over the last decade.

 

Ah yes, that's incredibly familiar to me.  I also learned typing on typewriters.  Funnily enough, the typing teacher got new computers before the computer teacher did, because she was much better at school politics than the computer teacher was (who was kind of a grouchy old curmudgeon).  I also remember having to learn all the text commands for DOS Word, even though I knew graphic versions of word processors existed because I sometimes used the computer at the vet clinic my dad worked at (which, one of the other vets was a massive computer nerd, so their clinic probably had the most powerful PC in the county in it just because it gave him an excuse to build it).  At home we also had a kind of private Internet for farmers and ranchers called DTN that delivered custom information about weather, markets, etc., over a satellite connection, which was still a more interesting machine than most of what we had at school.  It seems really weird now that it ever existed as all, fitting into this short window of time when technology could support it, but the Internet hadn't reached a point to have destroyed the need for it yet. 

 

Our most advanced typewriters then had little LED screens in them that let you type out ~80 characters before committing them to paper, so you could scan for typos while writing without having to use whiteout.  Fancy tech. 

[jennegatron]

Sometimes I wonder if much of the Apple/Mac love of my generation comes from the affection for Kid Pix on school computers in the US.

(My second grade teacher also had: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosaur ) 

[Chris]

jennegatron: Please write in to [email protected] mentioning Kid Pix! I have a stupid 10-second thing to say about Kid Pix on the podcast and I will forget to say it otherwise. It's not worth bringing up on its own.

[Cleinhun]

My high school programming teacher didn't really have a problem with people playing games as long as they got their work done. What he did have a problem with was games that had any sort of violence. Starcraft? nope. DOOM? no way. The weird part was it didn't seem like this was due to any personal objections to the content so much as him trying to cover his ass in case school administrators found out. It was his first year, and the previous teacher had not been popular with administration, so I can't really blame him for that.

 

Anyway, this, combined with the fact that the school computers were way out of date for 2007, meant the only game anyone ever played was Chex Quest.

 

 

(My second grade teacher also had: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosaur ) 

Oh wow, Nanosaur. I had entirely forgotten that game existed until just now. I remember playing it but I don't think I ever really understood how it worked.

[Vorlonesque]

Kickass story!

 

I used to join in on Quake deathmatches in high school during a computer science class that I wasn't even in. The teacher never seemed too worried about my presence; the thing that eventually gave us away was him seeing the game running in the reflection on a player's glasses. Quake was so goddamn good, even with software rendering and no sound, and a shitty school mouse.

This reminds me of playing Quake 2 on the college network from my Dorm room...my freshman year (1998) I'd occasionally check to see if anyone was playing on the LAN (and if not I'd load up gamespy/quakespy) and one day I saw a game and got really excited and jumped in.  The people playing were apparently in the co-ed dorm a good little walk away (I was in what was the guy's dorm at the time, but eventually they made them all co-ed my last year I think)...and they weren't very good.  They mostly played on maps they made in Qoole (a fairly easy to use Quake/Quake2 map editor).  I slaughtered them and then started chasing them around with the blaster, jumping on their heads (they almost never looked up and tended not to move, so this was amusing), and eventually they all tried to gang up on me.  I later ran into a guy who was in one of those games and he said they were all in two dorm rooms next to each other and they were shouting through the walls trying to coordinate.  I would always claim not to be the same person that logged in last time and would claim to be somewhere else on campus and would always have a bizarre back story.  My favorite story was that I was a 4th grade elementary school student on a class field trip to see a college and that I was playing from the library.  They never believed these stories and I always would make them more absurd as I went along.  I was basically just bored and up to stupid mischief.

 

The next year I discovered that the lab assistants/chem majors would play Q1 and Q2 in the chemistry lab in the math and science building with one of the Chemistry professors and I jumped in and did pretty well against them (they did actually move around and shoot at the same time and managed to look up and down...but I still managed to end up 20 kills ahead or so).  I then walked down to the chemistry lab and watched them playing and asked if they ever had people show up from elsewhere on campus and they related to me that it almost never happened but just did that night.  I then waited until someone finished up on a machine and jumped on and repeated my past performance and then towards the end of the round changed my username to match the one I used previously (probably to Vorlonesque, since that was the username I used online in Quake even way back in those days).

 

Ah yes, that's incredibly familiar to me.  I also learned typing on typewriters.  Funnily enough, the typing teacher got new computers before the computer teacher did, because she was much better at school politics than the computer teacher was (who was kind of a grouchy old curmudgeon).  I also remember having to learn all the text commands for DOS Word, even though I knew graphic versions of word processors existed because I sometimes used the computer at the vet clinic my dad worked at (which, one of the other vets was a massive computer nerd, so their clinic probably had the most powerful PC in the county in it just because it gave him an excuse to build it).  At home we also had a kind of private Internet for farmers and ranchers called DTN that delivered custom information about weather, markets, etc., over a satellite connection, which was still a more interesting machine than most of what we had at school.  It seems really weird now that it ever existed as all, fitting into this short window of time when technology could support it, but the Internet hadn't reached a point to have destroyed the need for it yet. 

 

Our most advanced typewriters then had little LED screens in them that let you type out ~80 characters before committing them to paper, so you could scan for typos while writing without having to use whiteout.  Fancy tech. 

I think I actually learned to type on electric typewriters (before that I used the hunt and peck method on computers...but my first real typing classes I believe were on typewriters).  We had keyboarding classes all through Middle School/Junior High that were on IBM electric typewriters along with some old IBM PS/2 PCs that only had floppy drives I think (although I could be wrong...they might have had HDDs).  We also had computer classes with old mid-80's Packard Bells (I think they were 8086s, though they could have been 8088s) that had dual 5.25" floppies and I initially thought that what people meant by hard drives were 3.5" disks because they were "hard" compared to t he 5.25" disks.  I ended up with a typing class in high school as well (with electric typewriters) my first year...its amazing that I don't type more quickly than I do considering how many typing classes I ended up one way or another.  Our typewriters never had the LED screens I don't think...and they were really really touchy.  It was very easy to hold down a key for a little too long and you'd get double letters...hell the things would repeat letters fast as hell (sounding like a machine gun doing it too)...the key switches were nice as I remember...they basically felt like lighter IBM Model M keys and they had a nice click to them.  The Business Computer Applications class (the one I mentioned in my story before...it was the class we played DOOM in) had us working on IBM PS/2 machines (486s with no hard drives, but with 8 megs of RAM) with either the DOS version of MS Works or Lotus or maybe the Corel equivalent.  I think they had a server that actually hosted the office software we used.  Games were allowed in the class so long as we had our work for the day completed (it tended to work as an incentive for people to get their stuff done) and before I got DOOM running, most people played the shareware version of Commander Keen and Wolf3d (which fit on a floppy I think), scorched earth, various card games, tetris, and some other shareware and freeware stuff I think.  I actually ran into the lady who taught that class a couple years back in the grocery store and was surprised that she remembered me...I seem to remember that she said she retired several years ago.

[Jordan A]

We played a -lot- of Quake at school in 2000 or so, big sprawling games that ran as long as possible. We had people connecting from all over the campus, from the computer labs, the library, computers in classrooms. You'd have people of all year levels jumping in and out of these games.

 

Because everyone was so dispersed across the school physically and also in terms of age there was a big element of "whoa, that person's doing really well, who are they and where are they sitting?" Once that happened and it turned out the person dominating everybody else was the school's psychologist/careers counselor. It turned out that guy also played a lot of Counterstrike in his free time, which was probably the coolest thing you can learn about an adult when you're almost 14. It was revelatory, that this 28 year old man was in there mixing it up with the kids in a Quake deathmatch.

 

Which is weird to me, looking back on it, because I'm 28 now and I work in a school. It's fun to watch a 15 year old's face light up when I tell them yes, I have played World of Warcraft since Molten Core.

[iax]

I remember trying to hide a copy of Age of Empires II by putting it in some other program's read me folder and getting a personal interview with the IT teacher lady.

 

That's what happens when you forget to compress it and rename the archive to system.dll.

[Zeusthecat]

Our computer lab teacher didn't give a fuck about anything and clearly hated his job. There were no restrictions on our computers at all and we naturally took full advantage. The games we installed and played regularly included:

 

Gobman (another Pac Man knockoff that was actually really good)

Worms 2

Diablo

Grand Theft Auto 2

 

I think our "teacher" even played some of these games with us. It was great.

[Salacious Snake]

This reminds me of playing Quake 2 on the college network from my Dorm room... They mostly played on maps they made in Qoole (a fairly easy to use Quake/Quake2 map editor). 

Whoa, this gave me major flashbacks!!! I made Q2 maps in Qoole (which was indeed very intuitive compared to its contemporaries), which were played across the various dorms at WPI. 

 

The biggest difference between our experiences was that there was fierce competition at that school. There were always servers going with Quake and Quake 2, and there were some really good players around.

 

It's kind of a bittersweet memory, since I flunked out, probably because I spent all my time playing games instead of going to class.

[Vorlonesque]

Whoa, this gave me major flashbacks!!! I made Q2 maps in Qoole (which was indeed very intuitive compared to its contemporaries), which were played across the various dorms at WPI. 

 

The biggest difference between our experiences was that there was fierce competition at that school. There were always servers going with Quake and Quake 2, and there were some really good players around.

 

It's kind of a bittersweet memory, since I flunked out, probably because I spent all my time playing games instead of going to class.

I remember attempting to make a map...I was trying to make a DOOM E1M8 inspired map that was themed as a space ship crashed into a mountainside.  It ended up looking like a giant metal penis lodged into a stone wall.

[Salacious Snake]

My most successful map was called "The Poop Chute," and it was a series of platforms floating in the sky (with a death brush underneath, so I guess it was like a precursor to the "space maps" in Q3 or UT). Like most things I made, it was mostly rocket launchers, with no health or armor, and the best powerups were in spots that were very dangerous to reach.

 

The name came from a tube that you could either try to run across the top of to get the invulnerability (leaving you very exposed and likely to fall off), or that you could enter to reach a teleporter which would take you to a platform above the rest of the level with a BFG and probably a quad damage.

 

I was a huge fan of dead-end chokepoints, like in American McGee's DM4 The Bad Place, where there's that lava room with the rocket launcher on your right when you enter, and the 100 health and some rockets on the other end of the bridge (next to a spawn point). It was such a constant meat grinder in there. I miss that kind of level design. 

 

If I had more time for these sorts of things, I'd try to organize a thumbs Quake deathmatch. It's still kind of the best.

[syntheticgerbil]

A friend and I threw a copy of Skifree in the personal folder of the each of the current animation students' shared drive when I was at Art Institute. I don't think whoever set that up knew you could access everyone's files by typing in the folder a certain way in windows explorer, because accessing it by clicking gave a restricted message.

 

I can't think of any time in middle school or high school where we had free access to a computer long enough to play any random games that we would install. In high school my class periods were like 50 minutes or some way too short bullshit and doing anything like that was near impossible.