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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

> The group wrote games at work because "when you're a programmer, especially back then, you have a lot of free time, because you make changes and you compile. And for a big project, a compile would take about 10 minutes."

Well, I have CI builds or deploys that take 10m, but I don't see how that would give me time to write games in such small increments.

2-10m is actually my "dreaded" time for feedback loops. Much less than that, and you just wait. Much more than that, and you schedule something else to do, with a reminder.

But in that frame, you can't really wait, you can't context switch productively..

... which ends you on HN, commenting on articles about people who wrote the most used software in the world (solitaire & tetris) _while compiling the second most used software in the world (a popular OS)_...

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In 1995 when I started at Apple, I was on the "GX team" (1). MPW was the environment. I remember a clean recompile of QuickdrawGX could take hours (maybe as much as 6 hours?). So you lived on incremental builds all day, kicked off a clean build before heading out at the end of the day.

1) Quickdraw GX was to be the next-generation graphics architecture for Mac OS — as an optional Extension though, it never caught on.

Incremental Nokia Series 40 phone image took 4 hours to compile and flash in early 00s. Slow debug.

If I recall correctly clean build would have taken days. There was a server farm that used distcc to split this to 60 or so machines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distcc

Internet definitely impacts my productivity :) just imagine all the time saved by not doom scrolling HN, Reddit and X.

But I agree it's difficult to context switch UNLESS I'm already deep in a side project. In that case it's a lot easier to switch because I'm on fire. The only issue is that nowadays my employer won't be happy about me using the company laptop to write a game, or a dynarec, so I have to work remote for that.

The problem also is, how to stop working on the side project after 10 minutes.

Yeah I found it very hard to stop working on a side project especially if it's difficult. I'd literally bite my fingers and burn candles until I figured it out or gave up for the day, usually well into early morning.

Ah, I wish I don't have to work.

I have the shortcut to timers on my smart watch with two-button presses (one to open timers, and one to start a timer) to start a timer for certain intervals. It's great for that type of thing. A desk one might be good too if there aren't people around that would bothered. The watch is good because it only vibrates.

Compiling Clipper those days took around 45 minutes.

Wow, did you work on it? I used to read about it on magazines and wanted to be a clipper developer. You know, the 90s computer ads were full of wonders. I wish we had those nowadays but even zines are dying.

From distant 2007: https://xkcd.com/303/ ("Compiling")

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