[ttgurney]

Fun historical article.

I found this especially amusing:

> By March 22, 1880, the New York Times reported, “No pestilence has ever visited this or any other country which has spread with the awful celerity of what is popularly called the ‘Fifteen Puzzle.’ It is only a few months ago that it made its appearance in Boston, and it has now spread over the entire country. Nothing arrests it. Neither age nor sex is spared by it, and it now threatens our free institutions, inasmuch as from every town and hamlet there is coming up a cry for a ‘strong man’ who will stamp out this terrible puzzle at any cost of Constitution or freedom.”

Aside, as an enthusiast of tiny software, the first thing that came to my mind was the implementation of this puzzle on the original Macintosh, which fit into 600 bytes:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Puzzle.txt

There's also a more modern implementation out there in the same spirit, for Xorg on x86 Linux. Supposedly it compiles down to a 1700-byte executable:

http://muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/puzzle.asm.txt