Comments on: FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm's Habitat in Rogue Leaders

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:26:17 +0000

I really enjoyed reading this article. I first found your blog after reading about the worlds.com (I posted a comment on your patent trolls topic).
Its mostly interesting to me because I was a QLink customer and actually was in the Habitat beta test. Tho I mostly remember wandering onto a nude beach and somehow was lost as to how to get my clothes back.
Most of this just takes me back to “the day”. I recently found a picture of the C128D I had with a Ramlink plugged into the back. I really enjoy what I read here.
I remember paying $3.60 an hour for premium services on QLink. I think it was around $9.95 a month to be a member and you got 1 hour of premimum services a month included. Much of the service was non premium then but most of the messenger type services were later moved to being premium. (people would avoid the chat rooms and use something more like a /tell system you would find in todays MMO’s).
Their hours of operation also were in line with the reduced call hours for telephone. Everyone in the US pretty much dialed in through GTE Telenet. You could as an example call a west coast dial in from the east coast and be “online” for 3 more hours after east coast access was closed.
Sorry for the random ramble.

By: F. Randall Farmer

F. Randall Farmer — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:49:35 +0000

John H.,
You’re right, I had the drive at 100k and it was apparently 170k unformatted. Formatted it was closer to 165k, which I’ve revised the post to read.
Corrected. I only wish the book could have been peer fact checked. :-)
Thanks!
Randy

By: John H.

John H. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:45:56 +0000

FackCheck: Commodore 64 disks can hold around 170k of information.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

By: Noah Falstein

Noah Falstein — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:11:31 +0000

Chip is right of course – technically I don’t think I was misquoted, I think the author was working off of that “LucasNet” proposal we submitted together, but I know I made it clear to him that my involvement beyond that first document was minimal. I think the factual errors like Chip being “an engineer” (true, just like Einstein was a patent clerk) came in as the author tried to put it all into a narrative form. Come to think of it, it was a bit like the First Penguin award – I touched it for a moment before handing it to you guys…

By: Johan Strandberg

Johan Strandberg — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:03:24 +0000

Having had a hands on demo of Habitat back in the days, I’m still in deep awe of the paging code. Yes it was slow, but suddenly it transformed this tiny, memory starved, 8-bit processor “personal computer” into a true network node. The world as experienced [slowly] by an Avatar was enormous and unlike anything seen up till then. No wonder the network was the weakest link (sorry for the pun). 30 million Commodore 64’s would have eaten alive any network of the day, even at 300 baud.
–j
PS Randy didn’t mention that the floppy for the C64 was one of the slowest floppy drives ever made. Probably didn’t help.