Lmst

Remember the Bricca family murders? 💔 The 1966 crime that changed Cincinnati's Westside forever. No forced entry, silent dogs... was the killer someone they knew? This case is WILD. #BriccaMurders #Cincinnati #TrueCrimeStory #UnsolvedCase #Mystery #OddMysteriesStories https://zurl.co/ThEIe

The first generation of CD-ROM drives were laughably slow. Designed to only deliver 44kHz digital audio they were too slow for video. A 1980s effort to allow video CD was called Digital Video Interactive (DVI). To allow video playback on a DOS pc it required three separate ISA add on cards, a video processor, an audio processor and a dedicated CD-ROM interface. The tech was impressive but not widely used, the IP was later sold to intel who reinvented it as the MMX instruction subset in Pentium processors (which enabled hardware-accelerated data compression/decompression)

Anyway as a freshling CS student in 1990, the computer science department (still closely aligned with the mathematics department in those days) offered only non-networked floppy-drive lab computers. We discovered that the engineering dept had a lab of PCs with Ethernet and network drives. That’s right sports fans, NETWORKED GAMES.

Us CS nerds would sneak into the engineering labs to play ncsnipes¹. Which required an arms race between students hiding games on the network drive and sysadmins eradicating them.

Digging through the network drive one day I found a file called DVIVIEW.EXE. I ran it and i got a white screen in graphics mode. Hey, could this be that video tech i had been reading about? I tried to figure out how it worked. It was in a directory named “emtex” with a bunch of other programs.

Eventually, I worked out that it wasn’t a game or a video player, it was some kind of typesetting system. I found a book in the engineering library called “The 𝚻𝞮𝟀book” which I pirated using the library’s high speed photocopiers. Its chapter pages featured drawings of a cute lion² in classical attire. There was another book with a lioness on the chapter pages. I pirated that one too.

And that’s how i became a La𝚻𝞮𝟀 fetishist. #TrueCrimeStory

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes_(video_game)

² https://ctan.org/lion/