Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Early Unix Computer Games - Computerphile" video.

  1. That was one game I managed to complete. I drew up a map by hand as I went through it. Figuring out the “twisty little passages, all different” was fun ;). In the end I remember I could complete it in about 40 minutes.
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  2. Coming initially from the DEC minicomputer world, I immediately appreciated the one unique feature of the little PCs, namely that direct memory-addressable frame buffer. Trying to do on-screen drawing by sending data down a serial line simply could not compare for speed and interactivity. But those early PC OSes never implemented a decent abstraction layer to allow apps to have some independence from the underlying video/graphics hardware. Instead, they just tried to be cut-down versions of big-machine OSes. Opportunity lost, I thought.
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  3. Mostly. They did manage to copy some AT&T code, which was only removed after a lawsuit.
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