Introduction
My name is Jerry Fritschle, and I live in St. Louis, Missouri. By trade I have been for many years a seller of photographic, video and electronic-imaging gear (and occasionally a "real" photographer). Over the last three years, since acquiring my first Mac, I have developed increasing interest in computing. In a way, this is appropriate, since my business is gravitating increasingly toward digital technology. Keep up or die!
Now, at the tender age of 40, I am learning how to program for the Mac. For the sake of continuity (and, at present, a lack of any other compelling ideas), I have been using ASHCAN as my continuing subject.
I wrote the original ASHCAN, as a high-school sophomore, in 1974. This was nothing more than a guess-the-number game, and, while the similarities to "Battleship" were obvious, my memory holds that, if anything, I was inspired more by "MasterMind."
Now, you younger folks wouldn't recognize those computers (an HP5000, I think, with which we communicated via modem). First, I wrote the BASIC code , then transcribed it to cards which were fed into the terminal. The game, as I said, was simple; the computer picked a random depth within the prescribed bounds, and the player had ten guesses. "Gee-you-eye" wasn't even a phrase then. On a printer, the computer unceremoniously typed out whether the user's guess was too shallow or too deep. Not much, but at that time we thought it was neat (and I got an ‘A' in the class).
About ten years later, I dabbled in this some more. I was playing with BASIC programming with a friend's Timex Sinclair computer, with all of 16K of RAM. Considering that this machine cost $39.95, it was tremendous. While doing this, I resurrected ASHCAN. While the game had not changed, I now was able to incorporate some simple graphics, and also implemented a score keeping system.
In the spring of 1998, the Timex-Sinclair version was reborn as ASHCAN 1.0, my first Mac program. The game was still the basic, dressed up "guess the number," and the graphics gave no hint of the extent of your miss (you were either too shallow or too deep--PERIOD), but the game was certainly prettier, because it had better animation, menu commands, and, best of all, it was running in color on a Macintosh. Shortly thereafter, ASHCAN 1.5 added a little more flair to the animation, and introduced a two-player mode.
At this point, I was ready to add some sophistication to the concept of the game itself. With the help of some constructive feedback from my users, here is Version 1.7x. While past users will recognize it, this is nonetheless a most different ASHCAN. Hope you like it.