It was always a myth, anyway. There were always girls who played arcade games, as well as boys who thought they were stupid. But, girls would often simply just let their crushes/boyfriends play so that we could pretend to be impressed.
I ruled the 7-11 Galaga machine across from my high school. :P
Oh, programming? A lot of girls just don't like math, and you used to have to have a really good math average to get into the computer science class in the 80s.
When I was in high school in the late 2000s, one of our math teachers (a woman, by the way) taught the class. She was probably the only teacher to ever teach the class - when she started, they didn't actually have a single computer in the school. Instead, they had time on a mainframe and they somehow entered programs over the phone.
I find it cute how you phrase it like it was magic. They probably had a terminal, smart or dumb, with a modem. (As in an actual make-screechy-noises-into-a-phone-line modem, not a cable modem.) If you recall what a DOS prompt is, imagine one of those except the commands are being run on another machine instead of yours because your machine isn't a computer, it's just a screen, keyboard, and a connection to the phone network. In modern parlance, the thinnest possible thin client.
If it was really vintage the terminal had no screen, just an electromechanical teletype. Instead of printing to a traditional printer on the other end, the TTY would print to a punched-card printer, then some person on the other end set up and fed the punched cards into the mainframe, taking the output cards and feeding them back into a device that read the cards and sent the output back to the teletype in the school. From the students' point of view it'd be like typing a program on a typewriter and then an hour or day later the typewriter prints the result of the program by itself.
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Oh god, at what point do we reach 40k levels of "were not quite sure how it works anymore, only that it does and that we need to appease its machine spirit with burning incense and mono-script chanting?"
In government? I suppose someone on Heron Road still knows what they're doing but that just means they'll be the Adeptus Mechanicus.
(Me, I was just there to nanny one of their offices through the trauma of moving a few boxes. Man, if you ever thought working for the tax man was an option, talk to a lifer.)
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time). I had no idea about the teletype.
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time).
Well, think about the old external modems, not the ones that were on a card plugged into the mobo. They were self-contained boxes that plugged into a serial line from the computer on one end and the phone network on the other end. (Or, for real vintage back in the Ma Bell days, an acoustic coupler that plugged into the serial line of a PC on one end and had a spot for your phone handset to sit!) But if you could rig up another device to output the same kind of serial output, it would plug in just fine. And you can get a lot done without a computer - remember that the early arcade games like Pong weren't running on computers, they were dedicated single-purpose electronics. No CPU capable of reading instructions, just logic chips.
I had no idea about the teletype.
Oh, that's a neat corner of history. Not my field of expertise certainly but one of those odd things I'd come across. While Telex didn't use phone lines - at least not at first - it had much of the same basic idea hardware-wise: Dial a number, type, your "typewriter" converts it into something analog that gets sent across the wire, and someone somewhere else sees the output in addition to you. Here's one in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qv5xw4fsh8&feature=youtu.be&t=97
Or, if you take the modem out, here's a teletype hooked straight to a Mark-8, one of the earliest do-it-yourself minicomputers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPHdoOU8DQ Add in two modems and a phone network (well, a phone network capable of handling fax/modem data connections - becoming less common these days) and you could have those two parts in different countries.
Gaming has never been 'a space for the boys'. And people were never weird about women in games until recently when lefties started crying about it.
Girls were never into games in the mainstream because streaming hadn't been invented. It was a nerd hobby for nerds, until whores learned that sweaty socially inept nerds would worship them for playing games. Then suddenly girls playing games became mainstream. What a coincidence.
Meanwhile the nerd girls that have always played games started getting called whores. It's only been since the left infiltrated it that the whole 'scene' went downhill.
Gamers have never been weird about women characters... Samus is almost as old as Mario and everyone thinks she kicks ass, Lara Croft became a household name and Bayonetta is arguably the most liberated female character ever created not just in games but in all of visual media...
I've been playing a lot of old games during this pandemic -- digging into my libraries of PS2, GameCube, and Dreamcast games that I just can't seem to make myself get rid of.
oh wow... a child... you havent even been around long enough to remember SNES or the Megadrive... much less the old 386 games I grew up with, your opinion is disregarded.
It's funny how they get mad about this, but any man getting involved in things dominated by women is the enemy.
Fuck off back to your shitty little cult hobbies.
The only fix is to be unapologetic about throwing women out of our hobbies and clubhouses.
Gatekeeping and swift exclusion for those who try to change the way things work.
It's almost as if maintaining traditions is important or something.
Not all traditions.
It was always a myth, anyway. There were always girls who played arcade games, as well as boys who thought they were stupid. But, girls would often simply just let their crushes/boyfriends play so that we could pretend to be impressed.
I ruled the 7-11 Galaga machine across from my high school. :P
Oh, programming? A lot of girls just don't like math, and you used to have to have a really good math average to get into the computer science class in the 80s.
When I was in high school in the late 2000s, one of our math teachers (a woman, by the way) taught the class. She was probably the only teacher to ever teach the class - when she started, they didn't actually have a single computer in the school. Instead, they had time on a mainframe and they somehow entered programs over the phone.
I find it cute how you phrase it like it was magic. They probably had a terminal, smart or dumb, with a modem. (As in an actual make-screechy-noises-into-a-phone-line modem, not a cable modem.) If you recall what a DOS prompt is, imagine one of those except the commands are being run on another machine instead of yours because your machine isn't a computer, it's just a screen, keyboard, and a connection to the phone network. In modern parlance, the thinnest possible thin client.
If it was really vintage the terminal had no screen, just an electromechanical teletype. Instead of printing to a traditional printer on the other end, the TTY would print to a punched-card printer, then some person on the other end set up and fed the punched cards into the mainframe, taking the output cards and feeding them back into a device that read the cards and sent the output back to the teletype in the school. From the students' point of view it'd be like typing a program on a typewriter and then an hour or day later the typewriter prints the result of the program by itself.
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Oh god, at what point do we reach 40k levels of "were not quite sure how it works anymore, only that it does and that we need to appease its machine spirit with burning incense and mono-script chanting?"
In government? I suppose someone on Heron Road still knows what they're doing but that just means they'll be the Adeptus Mechanicus.
(Me, I was just there to nanny one of their offices through the trauma of moving a few boxes. Man, if you ever thought working for the tax man was an option, talk to a lifer.)
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time). I had no idea about the teletype.
Well, think about the old external modems, not the ones that were on a card plugged into the mobo. They were self-contained boxes that plugged into a serial line from the computer on one end and the phone network on the other end. (Or, for real vintage back in the Ma Bell days, an acoustic coupler that plugged into the serial line of a PC on one end and had a spot for your phone handset to sit!) But if you could rig up another device to output the same kind of serial output, it would plug in just fine. And you can get a lot done without a computer - remember that the early arcade games like Pong weren't running on computers, they were dedicated single-purpose electronics. No CPU capable of reading instructions, just logic chips.
Oh, that's a neat corner of history. Not my field of expertise certainly but one of those odd things I'd come across. While Telex didn't use phone lines - at least not at first - it had much of the same basic idea hardware-wise: Dial a number, type, your "typewriter" converts it into something analog that gets sent across the wire, and someone somewhere else sees the output in addition to you. Here's one in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qv5xw4fsh8&feature=youtu.be&t=97
Or, if you take the modem out, here's a teletype hooked straight to a Mark-8, one of the earliest do-it-yourself minicomputers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPHdoOU8DQ Add in two modems and a phone network (well, a phone network capable of handling fax/modem data connections - becoming less common these days) and you could have those two parts in different countries.
You could also whistle into the phone with a whistle you found in a Captain Crunch box. No seriously, that happened. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle
And while looking for an article on that, I found Draper got metoo'd in 2017, because of fucking course. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3237591/captain-crunch-aka-john-draper-banned-from-defcon-for-sexual-misconduct.html
They don't need to be playing them to ruin them. That's the problem.
Gaming has never been 'a space for the boys'. And people were never weird about women in games until recently when lefties started crying about it.
Girls were never into games in the mainstream because streaming hadn't been invented. It was a nerd hobby for nerds, until whores learned that sweaty socially inept nerds would worship them for playing games. Then suddenly girls playing games became mainstream. What a coincidence.
Meanwhile the nerd girls that have always played games started getting called whores. It's only been since the left infiltrated it that the whole 'scene' went downhill.
how about we be extra weird about it so you fuck off out of our hobby forever?
Gamers have never been weird about women characters... Samus is almost as old as Mario and everyone thinks she kicks ass, Lara Croft became a household name and Bayonetta is arguably the most liberated female character ever created not just in games but in all of visual media...
oh wow... a child... you havent even been around long enough to remember SNES or the Megadrive... much less the old 386 games I grew up with, your opinion is disregarded.