Myths from my childhood part I - Game programmers from the 80’s
December 29th, 2009
I was drawn to computers in the early 80s, when my father introduced in our household a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. All of my friends had a Commodore 64, and we endlessly debated about which one was better (I can admit it now: it was the C64). Later I moved to the Commodore Amiga. Then like now, most of the attraction was the ability to play videogames.
Unlike today’s overbloated videogames industry, most games at the time were made by single individuals, two at most. Thanks to magazines like Zzap64! (known in Italy as Zzap!) I knew them by name and worshipped them like rockstars.
Alone we are not (lonely, maybe)
December 28th, 2009
I found the image above while going through “The decade in news photographs” photo series on The Big Picture. I quote:
astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. The result is this amazing image, looking back through time at thousands of galaxies that range from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Some 10,000 galaxies were observed in this tiny patch of sky (a tenth the size of the full moon) - each galaxy a home to billions of stars
“Mind-boggling” doesn’t quite begin to describe it. To me it seems obvious that there HAS to be someone in the gazillion planets above. Of course, we may never meet them.
On a different note, I was happy not to see the iPhone pictured as representative of the decade, at least until I saw that Paris Hilton was there.
