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All the apologies in the world for today’s Beat outage. I finally figured out how to get it back online. Our Elite Tech Team is working on a more secure and long-lasting solution but in the meantime, Python, Apache and MySQL are refusing to play nice. Man, I missed the Beat. It was scary not having it around.

Anyway…

In case you’re wondering, the above image is from a blog post reprinting the Marvel-themed computer book, which seems too bizarre to be an actual licensed Marvel product, but in 1984 I guess it made a lot of sense.

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Python, Apache, and MySQL didn’t even exist in 1984.

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Luckily, Valkyrie did.
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1 COMMENT

  1. Pictures didn’t exist on the Internet back then either. If you wanted pictures, you either zipped the file and FTPed via Archie or Gopher, or you used ASCII characters, like this:
    **************************
    .*##*:*####***:::**###*:######*.
    *##: .###* *######:,##*
    *##: :####: *####*. :##:
    *##,:########**********:, :##:
    .#########################*, *#*
    *#########################*##:
    *##, ..,,::**#####:
    ,##*,*****, *##*
    *#########*########:
    *##*:*******###*
    .##*. ,##*
    :##* *##,
    *####:
    :,

    If my college memory hasn’t been blotto’d, I believe Cerebus the Aardvark was animated using ASCII characters, circa 1992…

    And if you printed anything, it was most likely on a dot matrix printer. With a ribbon.

    Ah, BASIC… do they still teach that?

    I remember programming BASIC on a black (Bell&Howell) Apple ][+ (64K!) in the Sixth Grade.

    (In high school, as a science aide, I programmed an Apple ][c to draw polar graphs in BASIC. Which meant first converting to Cartesian coordinates, then shifting the plots to the center of the screen, then graphing. Yeah, I was a nerd. I could have been chatting up the other aide, who was a curvy blonde cheerleader. Instead, I was interested in a different set of curves.)

    Of course, if you really want to geek out on Marvel computer programs, you can’t beat Questprobe! (Maybe Marvel will relaunch it, and finish the series!)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questprobe