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by FatActor 1244 days ago
That's an interesting historical perspective of a code review from 50 years ago. Especially where you state that the Q&A team would review the code and decide to patch it or not. Did I used the wrong term from the 21st century? Clearly I was hypothesizing. I'm disappointed you couldn't just inform us without being so snarky.
1 comments
justinlloyd 1244 days ago
One man's snark is another man's war story. There was no code review because video game development, and arcade video game development was the epitome of the Wild West and the lone cowboys who had late night coding sessions trying to figuring out how to shave 173 bytes from the build by changing JMP absolute (three bytes) to BEQ/BNE relative (two bytes) without suffering a page boundary cycle penalty so they could squeeze the game into two 8K PROMs instead of two 16KB PROMs. The primary concern in arcade game development was "does this bug make the game crash or visually glitch?" and "will the player get free time?" and if the answer was "no" to both of those, the bug was relegated to WNF (will not fix). QA in most companies really was Bob on the assembly line who put little dayglo stickers on the inside and wrote his initials under below the line that read "Q.C."
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FatActor 1244 days ago
> One man's snark is another man's war story.

This is why I'm glad to see the old guard boy's club fading into a memory, despite the loss of skills that we may never see again as a culture. It's a mixed blessing.

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justinlloyd 1244 days ago
The "old guard boy's club" has been around a long time, and is still around. The gatekeeping/exclusionary mindset cannot die off fast enough as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately, it won't. Where ever nerds of a culture gather, there you will find them. The old guard. Arms crossed. Legs akimbo. Judging you not worthy. Thinking they are cleverer than you because they read some obscure fact on a usenet group.
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