Compressed talent: 8-bit games and from video games to combat software

On the first day of the conferences, 3 more talks also took place apart from “The History of Video Games”, although they made a kind of fusion and “Compressed Talent: 8-bit Games” and “From the video game to combat software” became a single talk, since the speakers: José Antonio Morales, from TELSON Servicios Audiovisuales and Pedro Luis Ruiz López of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company had worked together in the 80s in Opera Soft.

What seemed most striking to me about this “fusion” talk was that in the days of Commodore64, these men programmed their games in assembler, something that today seems silly, but at that time it was their daily bread. To tell the truth, the talk basically consisted of telling anecdotes one after another, such as how the Opera Soft programmers lived in a chalet with a cook, or how they tricked a psychologist into believing that a computer had artificial intelligence when in reality she was conversing with another person.

Regarding “From the video game to combat software”, there was only a very brief explanation about how the software is programmed for war activities, telling a quite interesting anecdote that once an American fleet of planes (Or ships, I don’t remember well) had to turn around in the middle of the ocean and return to the base since all their computers had crashed. Furthermore, a curious fact is that for the software of a combat aircraft to begin to be considered stable, it must remain without crashing for at least two hours.

Photo courtesy of Miguel Herrero, a person who by the way I met personally in the summer course.