Hobbyist developers are still writing games for the Atari 2600.
The sentiments of the developers in that piece chime rather nicely with some of my own thoughts over the last few weeks: they talk about how dealing with the constraints of the system (4Kb program size, 128 bytes of RAM) makes programming it more fun.
Playing with that Acorn Atom emulator the other week reminded me of how much fun I had programming this tiny little computer. It feels like that as computers have become more capable they have become less interesting: they can do more, but it's so much harder to think of things to do.
I wonder if there is an element of incomprehensibility about it, too - it was perfectly reasonable to think that one person could understand a machine like the Atom or the Spectrum and write interesting programmes on their own, but for one person to understand the whole of a Mac or the whole of Java is ludicrous. And it has been demonstrated many times that no one understands Windows.
Do I know where I'm going with this? No... but I can see that one of the reasons I like the idea of writing novels would be that it's an individual art form, whereas software just isn't these days.
Posted by Dunx at May 21, 2004 09:41 AM
There are still some platforms current enough to be commercial and limited enough to be coded solo, though perhaps not for very much longer. Having spent a fair bit of my recent career working on some of them, I have to say this romanticising of deadbeat useless rubbish machines may be misplaced.