Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 14, 2018

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I REMEMBER… ALAN’S MEMORIES OF THE EARLY DAYS OF FED

by Alan

...Lying in the sun on the roof of a narrow boat in the Chester Canal Basin, writing the first draft of the spec for Fed...

...driving in the pouring rain to Slough to pick up an Atari MegaST computer to actually write the code on...

...lugging the Atari ST down to Croydon library so players could try it out...

... persuading the boss to buy a new memory board for the Compunet server so we could run Fed on it...

...hurriedly writing some more code for Fed so the players could get out of the cell on the Earth...

...setting up a server in Liverpool so the games guy on GEnie could try it out...

...finally getting Fed ported to GEnie’s weird 34-bit mainframe...

...all the alarms going off at Dulles Airport, triggered by the metal bar down the middle of my leg (broken after being hit by a car)...

...huge thunderstorm in Charlottesville taking out the computer I was porting Fed to Kesmai on...

...hot summer sun in Tyson’s Corner porting Fed to AOL, zooming around in a little red MR2 sports car...

...American Cafe, Tyson’s Corner, being grilled by two men in sharp suits about the activities of a Fed player. “If we told you who we were, we would have to shoot you”...

...FedCon, New York, rounding all the attendees up to go and eat at the Hard Rock Cafe...

...AOL merges with Time Warner, Fed moves to the Web...

...adding derivatives (futures trading) to Fed – lots of reading up on how it works in real life for that one...

...coming back to New York from Chicago. As we start to land the plane suddenly goes to full power and heads up steeply. Someone left an aircraft parked on our runway...

...Carl and Toby volunteer to be our Sysadmins and help out over the next few years (many thanks, guys – it saved our bacon)...

...moving the server to Manchester England, so I don’t have to fly to the USA if something goes wrong...

...planning and preparing the server code to go Open Source in the next year or two...

...and for the next 30 years...

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