Old School Gazette: Your source for the "latest" in technology and entertainment.
Friday, August 27, 1982.
Technology
Microsoft has released a spreadsheet program called "Multiplan" for Apple II, Osborne I, and IBM PC. It was already available for CP/M, but is released on multiple platforms as part of a strategy using a C compiler that compiles to portable-code, or "p-code", allowing it to run on multiple systems. Multiplan also has the distinguishing feature of referencing cells in the "R1C1" format, as opposed to VisiCalc's "A1" format. This format is relativistic, with a location of a cell being dependent on its position relative to another cell rather than its absolute position on the grid.
Video Games
Taito has released an arcade cabinet called "Jungle Hunt". It is a right-to-left scrolling game in which the player swings from vines, swims while avoiding gators, dodges rocks while climbing a mountain, and rescues a lady from cannibals. The game uses an impressive parallax scrolling visual feature.
Film
A week ago today saw the release of "Beastmaster", a fantasy movie about a man who can communicate with animals and must fight an army led by an evil wizard.
On the same day, "Class of 1984" was released, a thriller about a music teacher confronting a violent high school gang.
Television
On Tuesday we saw the last rebroadcast of "McClain's Law", a crime drama about a retired police officer that returns to active duty to avenge the murder of a friend. The series has not been renewed for a second season.
Sources (literally all of these are fun, and they could probably send me a C&D for plagiarism):
http://kpolsson.com/comphist/comp1982jul.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_in_film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_in_American_television
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McClain%27s_Law
This was supposed to be out over a week ago, but things have been nuts for me lately!
This is a not-quite-official announcement of the Discord server I just created. Completely free. Don't need to be a supporter on Locals. Don't even need to be a member.
It's definitely not a secret that this community hasn't been active since Matt Hartley hasn't been involved. I think there are a few reasons why (one being that I had a lot less time to devote to it than I realized), and I think that making a completely free alternative would help, and I unfortunately don't think I can do that on Locals! You have to pay if you want to post. Discord should be free (unless I did it wrong).
Feel free to come join! It's still kind of experimental at this point, and I don't know how well I'll handle content moderation, which will probably be the biggest challenge.
