Items: Geeky anniversaries

2 Comments

Last Thursday was the tenth anniversary of the announcement of "Netscape network navigator" from "Mosaic Communications Corporation." It was a public beta version of the software that would later come to be called Netscape Navigator. You could download it for free (via ftp) for personal use; commercial users had to pay $99 per user. In fact, you can still download old versions of Navigator if you're so inclined.

When I heard that Jim Clark had left SGI (where I was then working) to go found a company making web browsers, I briefly thought it would be cool to work there; I'd been documenting SGI's "Web authoring and serving solution," called WebFORCE, and I already thought the Web was pretty darn nifty. But I think it never really occurred to me to go apply there, though I'm not sure why not.

(Which reminds me, obliquely, that a few months from now will be the tenth anniversary of my putting up my first web page; SGI set aside server space for employees to put up their own pages.)

The other recent geeky anniversary came yesterday, the 30th anniversary of the first release of Dungeons & Dragons. Apparently someone or other designated the day as Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons day. I may have a copy of the original-edition "World of Greyhawk" supplement somewhere around, but I think I gave it away last year, along with the "blue book" boxed set from about 1979. I was tempted to put together an impromptu game yesterday for old times' sake, but ended up spending the evening discussing ballot measures instead. Ah, the life of a grownup.

This one's not so much an anniversary as a milestone: iTunes Music Store sales reached 150 million songs recently. In a thread at MacRumors, someone posted a graph of the known data points since the store's launch a year and a half ago. It shows what initially looks like exponential growth, falling off in recent months to something more like linear growth; still, the current rate is about 4 million songs a week. There's also a graph of the daily download rate over time.

Finally, not an anniversary at all, but it sort of fits the old and modern tech and games aspect of this entry's theme: you can download the classic Mac puzzle game The Fool's Errand for Mac, Windows, and Amiga for free. Likewise for the same author's game 3 in Three, in which you play the part of a number 3 wandering through a computer's memory. And in just over three weeks, you'll be able to obtain (for about $40 US plus S&H) the new sequel The Fool and His Money. (Thanks, j7y!)

2 Responses to “Items: Geeky anniversaries”

  1. Susan

    Neat info on iTunes… it’s the damndest thing, but since I started using iTunes (in July) I’ve bought three albums (all three of which are from bands that I found through listening to college radio out of Amarillo, which I can do now on the internets), which is three more albums than I’ve bought in the last four years combined. I feel like a statistic or something.

    reply

  2. Colin

    I can’t comment on other “events,” but the 30th anniversery D&D event in Fremont at Scenario Games was sparsely attended at best.

    One of the organizers of KublaCon was running the event which consisted of a choice of 2 pre-made dungeons which could either be run by an attendee or the event coordinator.

    We took my kids and two of their friends and the coordinator ran the game for them (I was less than 72 hours out of abdominal surgery so was not up to GMing for them.)

    During the 3 + hours they were there two other people showed up, waited for an hour for someone else to game with then departed in a hail of swag including the adventures, miniatures for the adventures plus a “limited edition” miniature for the event, a special D20 and a mechnical pencil.

    I’ve been playing D&D since 1978 and can remember the good and bad times with it.

    While I understand that pen and paper gaming may be past it’s heyday, it was still comforting to me to see that there were still “gamers” who weren’t tied to playing out someone’s electronically generated fantasy (somewhat ironic coming from me since I work on an MMORPG.)

    Yes, I have friends and family who still game and I’m raising my two kids on gaming, and I’ve even been to a convntion within the past few years, but, while there were only 6 people who showed to play D&D, at the same time, there were no less than 15 other people playing various other games in the hobby store’s gaming area.

    So, while I gaze at my White Box set and supplements and compare the fact that all 7 of these “rule books” maybe equal a third of the contents of any of the 3 major books for the game in its current incarnation, I’m comforted to see it’s still evolving and hasn’t stagnated.

    reply

Join the Conversation