The Great Operating System Games 145
harrymcc writes "For decades, the simple little games that come with operating systems have been some of the most-used software on the planet. Legendary geeks such as Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Andy Herzfeld have tried their hands at writing them. And yet they get no respect — or, actually, attention of any kind. Technologizer's Benj Edwards aimed to rectify that with a look at forty years' worth of bundled OS games, from 1971 Unix text-based ones to Woz's Little Brick Out to such Windows mainstays as Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Reversi." Article is an annoyingly long slide show (would it kill people to put a reasonable amount of content on pages?) but there's some fun stuff in there.
Re:Heh (Score:4, Informative)
Solitaire (Score:2, Informative)
IIRC solitaire was included with windows to help people who hadnt used a computer before get used to the process of dragging & dropping and using the mouse in general.
Re:Solitaire (Score:4, Informative)
That may or may not have been its original purpose, but that was the way we trained people to use the mouse at a previous job, back when Windows 3.1 was being introduced.
I ran several training sessions, helping people play solitaire on a computer for 2 hours. Seemed really, REALLY silly at the time, but we tried training a couple of people using different methods and paying someone near-minimum-wage to play a game that was included with the OS for two hours turned out to be an exceptionally efficient way to get the concepts of cursor movement, click, double-click, click and drag, menu operations, etc across.
Self-study was not, however, encouraged. We did have one guy try to defend playing with "Vegas rules" enabled as "advanced self-learning" - didn't go terribly well for him. ;)
Re:Ski-Free (Score:5, Informative)
Were you setting someone up for free +5?
Re:What about... (Score:3, Informative)
The article mentioned Hunt the Wumpus. Are you posting just to hear yourself speak? (Or read yourself... comment?)
Windows Disk Defragmenter (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:2, Informative)
Yes! I spent hours playing that. It looks like this is a download of the game: http://www.stanford.edu/~cammat/HOVER/index.html [stanford.edu]
I'd also like to thank the windows 95 disc for introducing me to Weezer.
What about the games inside apps? (Score:3, Informative)
OK, it's not an OS, but Excel had a flight simulator hidden inside it. Getting into it was a pain, but popping it up on someone else's computer was as much fun as the game itself.
Re:What I'd like to see - boot games (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, Namco liked that idea too. Patented it in '95.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5718632.PN.&OS=PN/5718632&RS=PN/5718632 [uspto.gov]
apt-get install bsdgames (Score:3, Informative)
When you're stuck with a console, the bsdgames package helps a lot to pass the time. There's a great version of Tetris, ports of the classic games Hunt the Wumpus, Adventure, and Trek, and some assorted puzzle games. My favorite is Boggle. Great way to spend 3 minutes while something downloads/compiles/whatever.
Re:Solitaire (Score:4, Informative)
Solitaire is still the best method for getting Grandma & Grandpa used to using the mouse. Or minesweeper if they're clever.
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Informative)
My only guess is it mentions Breakout. Breakout was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow at Atari and eventually contracted to HP Engineer Steve Wozniak by Steve Jobs. Those two later worked together to make the Apple and Apple ][ line of computers. One of Woz's driving goals for creating the Apple computer was to make a software only version Breakout, and the version he created was included with the computer, written in Woz's own Integer Basic (the other version of BASIC on the Apple ][ was actually written by Microsoft).
Probably the same info on wikipedia, but I'm a walking wikipedia for this sort of crap ;)
Re:Too busy watching Weezer's "Buddy Holly" video (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone know why exactly "Buddy Holly" was put on the disk? Seems like kind of a random video to toss on there.
One of the Windows 95 buzzwords was "Multi-Media".
Re:GORILLA.BAS (Score:1, Informative)
Evidently you didn't bother reading the article given that two pages of it were devoted to Nibbles and Gorilla.