Update: A brief obituary was posted today. You can read it here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...
So far, there is no confirmation other than this Hacker News post. A Wikipedia editor is reverting additions of the news to his biography page until this confirmation arrives.
"his 21 year old son Cole did die unexpectedly in his sleep in April" I never said that I thought otherwise, nor did I reference Cole in my linked article, and the comment you replied to didn't mention Cole either.
These could each be an article in themselves. :)
Nice.
I did mention AOL, as part of the "Eternal September" of Usenet (so tangentially, but still acknowledging it was there) but yeah, I did skip over some of the others. CompuSERVE was something I thought was really cool at…
I self-publish my novels, and I've had steady if very low sales year after year (certainly not enough to live on) and I have friends who have chosen the small independent publisher route and have not been happy with the…
I think it would be very unlikely for the web and html to arise in the current political climate, yes. It only came to be in the first place because of a massive amount of government investment that was an artifact of…
I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist. But the real weakness, at the…
The Amiga was (and still is!) an amazing machine. If you liked this article and would like to read more, I'll take this opportunity to plug my History of the Amiga series on Ars Technica:…
You've got it right. I was going to label the inputs in the transistors in the second animation, but it made the diagram rather crowded, so I left it out. The diagrams are simplified because they leave out things like…
EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though. I…
I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking…
I can honestly say that I love all the writing work I do. Every article I wrote for Ars Technica was a labor of love, even though I got paid. My novels are as well. I still have a day job (although I did write full-time…
Quote: "self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily)" This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a…
If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, NCommander did a thirteen-hour stream where he successfully (!!) installed OS/2 1.0 in a virtual machine (using PCem) and then upgraded, in-place, every single version…
I don't think so. OpenDoc was a document sharing service in classic Mac OS, similar in some ways to Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) but somewhat more advanced. Back then, some folks thought that…
I don't think there's a good explanation out there. From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of…
phpBB added a mobile theme that works pretty well, but many sites didn't bother to upgrade. Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then…
Thanks! I think it's just a combination of the limited graphics character set on the Heathkit, plus eight years of practice (at the time) making games using it. The stuffed animals are from my childhood, so I kept them…
I'm really enjoying it so far. It seems to fit with my mental model of making video games, which basically ended when I was 15 and writing games in MBASIC on my Heathkit (and later QuickBasic on MS-DOS, but I sort of…
Congrats on releasing the game! Great work! I'm 49 and I have basically the same story you did... and also share the same secret dream to write games "one day", so I'm starting really small with a simple little 2D game…
Kind of like this: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/07/the-fullness-o...
I had a similar experience with a BASIC game I wrote in 1987, which I revived recently in an emulator - the code itself was copied directly from ancient hard-sectored 5.25" floppy disks into a virtual disk image. The…
The distinctions between volatile and non-volatile memory weren't always so distinct! "Another interesting property of core was that it is a non-volatile system, unlike most of its predecessors. The magnetic field in…
Update: A brief obituary was posted today. You can read it here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...
So far, there is no confirmation other than this Hacker News post. A Wikipedia editor is reverting additions of the news to his biography page until this confirmation arrives.
"his 21 year old son Cole did die unexpectedly in his sleep in April" I never said that I thought otherwise, nor did I reference Cole in my linked article, and the comment you replied to didn't mention Cole either.
These could each be an article in themselves. :)
Nice.
I did mention AOL, as part of the "Eternal September" of Usenet (so tangentially, but still acknowledging it was there) but yeah, I did skip over some of the others. CompuSERVE was something I thought was really cool at…
I self-publish my novels, and I've had steady if very low sales year after year (certainly not enough to live on) and I have friends who have chosen the small independent publisher route and have not been happy with the…
I think it would be very unlikely for the web and html to arise in the current political climate, yes. It only came to be in the first place because of a massive amount of government investment that was an artifact of…
I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist. But the real weakness, at the…
The Amiga was (and still is!) an amazing machine. If you liked this article and would like to read more, I'll take this opportunity to plug my History of the Amiga series on Ars Technica:…
You've got it right. I was going to label the inputs in the transistors in the second animation, but it made the diagram rather crowded, so I left it out. The diagrams are simplified because they leave out things like…
EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though. I…
I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking…
I can honestly say that I love all the writing work I do. Every article I wrote for Ars Technica was a labor of love, even though I got paid. My novels are as well. I still have a day job (although I did write full-time…
Quote: "self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily)" This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a…
If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, NCommander did a thirteen-hour stream where he successfully (!!) installed OS/2 1.0 in a virtual machine (using PCem) and then upgraded, in-place, every single version…
I don't think so. OpenDoc was a document sharing service in classic Mac OS, similar in some ways to Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) but somewhat more advanced. Back then, some folks thought that…
I don't think there's a good explanation out there. From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of…
phpBB added a mobile theme that works pretty well, but many sites didn't bother to upgrade. Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then…
Thanks! I think it's just a combination of the limited graphics character set on the Heathkit, plus eight years of practice (at the time) making games using it. The stuffed animals are from my childhood, so I kept them…
I'm really enjoying it so far. It seems to fit with my mental model of making video games, which basically ended when I was 15 and writing games in MBASIC on my Heathkit (and later QuickBasic on MS-DOS, but I sort of…
Congrats on releasing the game! Great work! I'm 49 and I have basically the same story you did... and also share the same secret dream to write games "one day", so I'm starting really small with a simple little 2D game…
Kind of like this: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/07/the-fullness-o...
I had a similar experience with a BASIC game I wrote in 1987, which I revived recently in an emulator - the code itself was copied directly from ancient hard-sectored 5.25" floppy disks into a virtual disk image. The…
The distinctions between volatile and non-volatile memory weren't always so distinct! "Another interesting property of core was that it is a non-volatile system, unlike most of its predecessors. The magnetic field in…