Doom on the oldest digital computer in America

10 points by bwbuhse

lproven

Could anyone give a tweet-length summary for those of us who detest watching videos?

E.g. What computer?

johnklos

If you’re not familiar with his work, you really should look around. His restorations and literal building of a tube computer from scratch are fascinating and educational.
- lproven
  
  I’m sure you’re right. It’s just that it’s a form of medium I generally find a complete pain to absorb… so I don’t.
  
  I’ve watched a handful. CuriousMarc’s series on the Apollo Guidance Computer was amazing, for instance. Video just isn’t my favourite format. I watch maybe an hour or two of TV a month, if that, and that’s substantially increased from a few years ago, before I became a parent.
ahelwer

Very first second of video: “this is the Bendix G-15” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendix_G-15
- lproven
  
  Fair enough. It’s just that it’s a format I really hate. Far far too often you have to sit through 3 min of “title sequence” and then some breathlessly excited dude – usually a dude – telling you about this GREAT thing about something that is AWESOME before 15min later you’ve extracted the net information content of a single tweet.
  
  If the answer is right up front, that’s really unusual.
  
  I can read at 1000wpm comfortably. I can push to 2-3x that fast if it’s not very deep. A typical 1h Youtube video takes me well under 10 minutes to read, if they bother to produce a transcript. I can get a lot more interesting stuff in an hour of reading than an hour of video.
  - ahelwer
    
    For old electromechanical computers like this there is a very strong visual component to any technical presentation.
- bwbuhse
  
  A Bendix G-15. I guess he’s got a whole bunch of videos on getting the hardware up and running but this is just the software.
  
  First he explains how the G-15 can play music with a mod. After that, he says how it’s just too old to actually play Doom but it can play At Doom’s Gate (if you program the song).
  
  Then they go after the weird instruction syntax the G-15 uses and finally talk about programming on it and then show At Doom’s Gate of string from the G-15.
  - lproven
    
    Great – thanks! Definitely a bit of a cheat, but an interesting one.
    
    bwbuhse
    
    Yeah, he included the Futurama “technically correct, the best kind of correct” meme in there saying that people in the comments never specified that you had to be able to play the game just “play DOOM” :P
    
    lproven
    
    :-)
    
    winny
    
    I’m in the same boat. I don’t watch many videos shared with me. Instead, I will review the description, transcripts when available, and closed captions.
    
    From the web page, no watching required.
    
    The Bendix G-15 is currently the oldest running digital computer in America, which begs the most important questions ever? Will it play Doom?
    
    Reading the rest of the description, I see links to do it yourself and learn about the software choices that they made.