Paperweight, an April Fool's Prank from 40 years ago (goto10retro.com)

by rbanffy 4 comments 6 points
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4 comments

[−] egypturnash 42d ago
"Back in April 1986, ANALOG Computing ran an article on page 113 called Paperweight by Curt Cox."

If you don't want to subscribe to this newsletter to read about this program, https://archive.org/details/analog-computing-magazine-41/pag... is a link to the original article. And here's a video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glIV5yulw8

Finding letters regarding it in subsequent issues, is left as an exercise for someone else. :)

This article has now made me intensely envious of the Atari users who got actual assembly code source along with their long strings of hexadecimal type-ins, us c64 kids just got pages and pages of incomprehensible hex in everything except for Transactor.

[−] captn3m0 42d ago
I loved the author’s bio:

> Curt Cox is a 26-year-old, die-hard Dr. Who fan and Atari fanatic. His family bought an Atari 800 cassette system in 1982. He reads Adams, Asimov and ANALOG Computing. His extensive journalistic and programming talents are often overlooked because of his unnaturally good looks.

[−] egypturnash 38d ago
I'm trying to decide if I think it's more likely he wrote this bio or his mom did.
[−] spwa4 41d ago
Really reminds me of ... Anyone remember one of the first apps google banned from the App store?

It was titled "Send me to heaven"

It challenged you to throw your phone into the air, and used the accelerometer to measure how long and how high you threw it, and created a worldwide leaderboard ... and a great many crashed phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_Me_to_Heaven