266 pages of well-written, edited, fact-checked electronics and computer programming. Monthly. Let that sink in.
There is so much good info packed into this one issue, it is worth terabytes of crap on stack overflow. Clearly there was less information back then, but it was far higher quality.
I'd like to understand how C came to dominate the world when LISP could replace all of the scripting languages we used today. Was it tooling on cheaper machines that made C so popular? Or that it was closer to ASM than LISP? I never really formed a good opinion on this, I'm missing lots of history.
I'm pleased with how many replies here acknowledge that business and marketing is a legitimate domain of expertise. I was expecting HN, which skews "young programmer" demographic, to just call it all BS. It's not, it is just another area of important expertise.
Same thing here. I think tooling (packers included) aren't really designed for this, as demonstrated by the hacks you need to apply to aliases and directories. I hope this is fixed over the next few years, because like you, I got it to work but it is fugly.
Try limiting players to 60 minutes per day. In the BBS days this worked because you got two TURNS per day. 24/7 access is what kills this sort of thing, IMHO.
I enjoyed space-trading games back in the BBS days, but somehow MMORPG blew those out of the water because people will play 20+ hrs per day and skew the economies into country-sized alliances (`Eve` I'm looking at you). No Man's Sky sort of picked up on that, but it had too much going on. Maybe both of those games were the pinnacle of the genre and I just didn't have the patience, but it seems to me there could be something large-scale that appeals to casual gamers as much as die-hard farmers.