h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Never heard of it. Listen to this bull... there is no such thing as the Gathering!

My mum said the same about Santa. Tell me it's not true...

http://www.gathering.org/

;^)#

Santa has his own page too

So, isn't virtual reality real enough for you?

;^)#

Oh it is true and it does really exist - currently some where in Vikingskipet, Hamar, Norway some five thousand boys and girls are on holiday with their computer. Sort of like a cross between the decoding station at Bletchley during the war and Glastonbury.

http://www.gathering.org/~perk/gallery/IMG0042B.jpg

Check out this picture, unbelievers. And make sure you scroll from left to right, it's a huge event.

Looks like the Towers are the only ones able to contribute to this one.

Not so much a Tower as a Scribbly Gum here

;^)#

At college I did the demo in Turbo Pascal that sent a picture of a ghost giggling around all the monitors of a particular room on a Novell 3.0 network scared the bejesus out of our caretaker

Why? All the people at the meet can come over and tell us about it. I hope they do, it's been called cyber-graffetti.

LOL!!!

I don't believe in the gathering, I don't!

Okay, okay. I HAVE contributed to this pathetic excuse to pilfer cash out of teenagers... and for what? So I could scribble out some jpgs, gifs, and pdfs and some HTML. I won for one of my non-pixel jifs- big hurrah.

bygones

I was very loosely involved* in the Atari ST demo scene about 10 years ago... It's nice to see that the ethos continues

(* I raytraced a tumbling asteroid which found its way into a demo... Looked good, too - I wish I could remember what the demo was eventually called...)

It sounds absolutely nothing like Bletchley. What utter rubbish. What a ridiculous thing to say.

It's just people fiddling about with computers. That's all. They're not even doing anything *useful*. And what H2G2's doing promoting it is beyond me.

The connection with Bletchley Park is the cameraderie, the problem-solving, the challenge to innovate. You may think that computer games are pointless, but they are a lucrative market, and many of the best techniques used in modern games were pioneered by demo writers such as these.

There is nothing that connects a bunch of sad, spotty games programmers with people who slaved night and day to defend our country from invasion by an evil empire. They can't even program a website properly, let alone save lives. What an utterly ridiculous, pig-ignorant point of view. You should be ashamed of yourself, frankly. Now, go and get an education, grow up a bit, and come back when you can separate real life from computer games.

Aren't you being a bit harsh 007? Everyone is welcome here, and yes that includes spotty computer nerds. We all have our own interests, whether it's coding or crochet or cricket. Everyone is welcome here.

007 I too am very sorry that you took my comments about Bletchley in that way. But as someone who was once and fingers crossed will be again be a military historian I would never ever degrade the sacrifices by any one of any country made in times of war. I can only apologise if it offended you.

But humanity is diverse and as Peta says that surely is what this site is all about.

Much of the software in the Cruise missiles used to defend the USA was adapted from algorithms developed for computer games...

And, as to your perception of my point of view as pig-ignorant, well, everything is relative...