TWILIGHT OF THE QB SCENE

I was reminiscing with some friends about the days of olde, when we were still young, wildly ambitious, under-educated in the ways of computers, and could still dev in QB without attracting any undue attention. I personally gave up on BASIC, as a language, around 1990 or so when I discovered C. Through the years I've wandered to various flavors of low-level languages, but I always come back to C... but I digress.

There were quite a few of us back then, eventually becoming a collective of familiar names posting walkaround demos and weekend experiments several times a year; people who lived all over the world, but would mostly only be known by others for their handle, their good conduct (or in my case, lack thereof), and their partially-completed creations.

It's good to reminisce, for various reasons; certainly to remind yourself of how far technology has evolved in the last x decades, and how far you're come in your personal tech development, but also to ponder those whom you've lost. People come and go, and there have been seismic events (such as the great WoW purge of 2004, or Discord) that have driven people away from forums and over to alternative venues. I still run GDR in my spare time, and people drop by to say hi, but by and large the discussions themselves are elsewhere. The board mostly serves as an archive for good ideas, cool things, and compo information, and a place where people can drop in and remind the world they are still alive.

Speaking of alive... I find it interesting that Dunric's home page is still up after all this time. He passed on around 2009 or so, and left behind a legacy of half-finished projects, ideas, and ramblings. I've already eulogized elsewhere on the net, so it's not worth revisiting, but I will say that it's refreshing to see something that just won't die, in a network where things fall off as quickly as their hosting expires (remember the great Geocities/Xoom purge of ~2000-something).

Sometimes it's nice to revisit an era when everything was a challenge: memory management, video access, music and sound hardware, peripheral management; palette management, color blending; the lot of it. Modern libraries and GPUs trivialize all of that (and to be fair, I don't miss it, other than dealing with fucking shaders), and somehow the sense of accomplishment goes away, but is replaced by larger ambitions. It's not ambitious to make a walkaround demo, now it's ambitious to roll your own Minecraft clone. So weird.

Anyway, back to the grind. The June 2024 4x  ends tonight, and I have to finish my entry.