Angry German Kid

[unbibium]

dude, I don't think this is real.

Except maybe the loading part.  I never got screaming mad at long load times, but I do remember sitting at my computer and watching it download a big ol' game at 300 baud, instead of picking up a book or watching TV in the meantime.  Where was this attention span when I was in the classroom?  Around '88, someone wrote a multitasking terminal program that would let you play Breakout while downloading, and my leeching quadrupled.

Comments

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

I've gotten at least a third that mad at computers before, usually for some programming thing, or sometimes for some other inexeplicable behavior.

The C=64 in England had a small genre of mingames to play as they loaded stuff off of tape...

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

They must have relied on tape drives for much longer in England. I remember the C64 had to blank the screen while loading, lest the VIC chip's timing demands screw up the load.

I also remember a few utilities that would allow you to create tapes that loaded nearly as quickly as a stock 1541, including one that came on an Action Replay cartridge. I think I used that to create backups of terminal programs, in case my disk drive should ever fail.

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I forget the exact logic of it all but England primarily seemed to use tape; I think maybe the 1541 was never sold at a reasonable price there. I remember a copy of ZZAP!64 from around '91 or so that had a lot of ad for the fastloaders you talk about.

And of course, there was some port mismanagement that made it so the general throughput of the drive was much lower than the hardware supported (using a parallel port in serial or something?) Combined with wonky copy protection schemes, it's a wonder we got anything loaded at all.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

The sweetest irony was that the cheapest fastload solution out there for a while was an Epyx Fastload cartridge.... which interfered with the modem port. So any Color64 BBS that tried to use it instead of a RAMdisk would have "Program loading... please wait..." followed by inexplicable line noise.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

OH! Wait! Another thing that helps load times is audio feedback.

The Atari computer had its I/O wired through the sound chip, so both cassettes and disks would, by default, give you a beep for each record loaded. The beep for the cassette was actually a kind of grating squeal sound, but at least you could count them. For the disks, it made this happy noise and skipped a beat whenever the disk had to change tracks. You can hear it during the closing credits of one of the episodes of the BBS documentary; it's as if the Atari was really excited to be loading whatever it's loading.

And, yes, Atari cassette drives, as well as Atari modems, allowed you to pipe audio directly to the TV. Data was on one stereo track, so music could be on the other, and so a lot of programs -- but not nearly enough -- had load music. Even a spoken intro sometimes. And there were educational systems that took advantage of this.

[jwgh]

I got mad enough to pound on a keyboard once (breaking it), but that was because I was writing a response to an email that made me very, very angry.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I pounded my keyboard and broke it when i bit my cheek while eating. Nothing makes me HULK SMASH angry like biting my cheek while eating.

I think the kid in that video might be seriously autistic or something, assuming that it's real. But i suspect it isn't, too.

Well, here's something true...

[lautreamontg.livejournal.com]

That computer I had in Phoenix? I destroyed it by hand in 2000. I was writing a paper when it crashed on me. I was having a bad day so I started punching it. I punched it till my knuckle ripped open. Apparently I also caused a head crash and lost everything on the hard drive. Since then I've always kept a dead keyboard on hand for when I lose it. One I bent completely over my knee.
Yeah, I have anger issues. No, I don't think I'm dangerous. I do it to inanimate objects so that I can never hit something that feels pain.