The longest card game in the world: Microsoft Solitaire is 30
- Reference: 1590149407
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/22/windows_30_and_solitaire/
- Source link:
This correspondant was working in a computing store when Windows 3.0 landed, having been announced on 22 May 1990. The Amstrad PC1640 was still doing tolerable business, with MS-DOS 3.2 and Digital's GEM desktop for GUI aficionados, while its replacement, the 2000 series, shipped with an odd thing called Windows 2.1.
The PC2386 had an impossibly glamorous Intel 80386DX (and a decidedly iffy hard disk setup) which, as it turned out, would be just the ticket for Microsoft's next crack at a GUI.
After the curiosity that was Windows 2.1, Windows 3.0 featured a significantly improved user interface with a slick 3D-like appearance (certainly when compared to the flatness of previous versions and, er, more recent incarnations).
Perched atop MS-DOS, Windows 3.0 could also take advantage of the improvements in memory management afforded by Intel's new chippery. Additionally, it introduced the Program Manager (beloved by those that most likely today complain about the loss of the Start Menu they whinged about in Windows 95).
Also in the Windows 3.0 box were executables including improved Paintbrush and Calculator apps, [1]File Manager , a Recorder to create macros, and, of course, Solitaire.
After a glitzy launch (for Microsoft at the time), Windows 3.0 shifted a million copies worldwide in the first three months alone. In a harbinger of things to come, it also turned up pre-installed on many machines, including those from Zenith.
Naturally, Apple (already setting the legal dogs on Microsoft after Bill's gang added features like overlapping windows in Windows 2.0) was unhappy with the development, but the wannabe OS also damaged Microsoft's relationship with IBM, with whom the soon-to-be Windows giant was developing OS/2.
While Microsoft has long since dropped support for Windows 3.0, the experience can be relived via virtualization or thanks to the various [2]emulation sites out there. Compared to what it would become, version 3.0 seems remarkably clean, crisp and simple to use. Even if it is a little prone to falling over.
Happy 30th, Microsoft Solitaire
Ranking as one of the most played video games of all time, Solitaire started life in 1989 as a project for intern Wes Cherry. Initially planned to familiarise users with how a mouse worked and introduce concepts such as drag and drop, the simple card game also ranks as one of the greatest productivity sponges of all time.
It is deviously easy to get into. The back of decks can be selected from a predefined range, with one or three cards being drawn from the deck at a time. Winning the game resulted in a delightfully rewarding cascade of cards.
Despite its immense popularity (and inclusion in subsequent versions of Windows) Cherry did not net the big bucks for his efforts. In [3]an interview with British web site b3ta.com , he was asked if he was a little bitter about this. He responded: "Yeah, especially since you are all probably paid to play it!"
Cherry also went on to reveal a feature that could have saved many an employee's career, but was stripped from the app: "There was a 'boss-key' which when pressed would display some random C code," he said. "Microsoft made me remove that."
The game suffered minor tweaks for Windows XP, and was tinkered with during the dark days of Vista and the brighter horizons of Windows 7, before an ill-advised redesign was inflicted from Windows 8, sullying the purity of the original incarnation.
We understand that Cherry has since left the world of computing behind in favour of the [4]crisp delights of cider making .
The Register plans an experiment to compare the productivity impairment arising from cider consumption versus a tantalising Solitaire window. We think the card game might have it in the bag.
In the meantime, please join us in a Friday toast to Solitaire and whatever floats your boat with regard to that first "proper" version of Windows. ®
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/09/windows_file_manager_back_from_the_dead/
[2] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/3.00/
[3] https://b3ta.com/interview/solitaire/
[4] https://www.dragonsheadcider.com/
30 years later and I am still looking for drivers to run it at my monitors native resolution.
Granted my resolution is now a slightly more awkward 1366x768 rather than 800x600 haha.
Shame that things like VirtualBox or Qemu don't care about digital preservation and are more focused on running Cloud gimmicks as fast as possible.
Perhaps...?
You really should think about investing in a new monitor. 1366x768 is so.... so 2010 ish. 1080p monitors can be picked up for under a £100.00 these days. Using one might even improve your productivity.
I'll also be willing to bet that your smartphone has higher resolution than your monitor.
Unless you are talking a load of Porkies?
Microsoft Solitaire has done more to reduce worker productivity than any virus or hack.
"an ill-advised redesign"
It's a nice afternoon for a rant, so I'll take the opportunity to sound off about the abomination that Micros~1 have made of the solitaire patience games in Windows 10.
Today it starts with a hideous banner announcing "National Solitaire Day" and encouraging me to play as many games as I can. "Get Double XP EVERYWHERE!", it screams (capitalization sic). I thought Windows XP was obsolete. And why would I want it doubled? "Visit Facebook to see how close we are to beating the record!!" - an invitation I find easy to resist.
I always elect for random deals, because that's how card games are supposed to work, Micros~1. But it insists on progressing me through "levels". So the random deals at Level 31 are harder than those at Level 1, are they? How do you know, if they're random?
Worst of all, of course, are the ads. Micros~1 seem to have worked out my age by spying on me, or maybe they just conclude that a taste for solitaire patience is a symptom of senility. So I'm sent ads for funeral services and teasers about things for "seniors". They think I'm susceptible to local enthusiasms: "People in St Ives are going mad for this smartwatch | funeral service | life insurance". I assume this is a lie. And there's a bizarre category that shows a picture of some long-forgotten celebrity with a link that says "You'll never guess what X looks like now!". True enough, but why should I care?
It would be bad enough if they just showed the kind of ads you see on TV or in print, but the solitaire patience ads have a distinctive intimate wheedling tone that I find especially obnoxious. I'll certainly never buy any of the stuff they're promoting, and as for the funeral services, I'd sooner be dead.
Re: "an ill-advised redesign"
That's "windows as a service" for you... An ad delivering service and it will only get worse.
To all Advertisers -> see icon.
Re: "an ill-advised redesign"
Aisleriot - you know it makes sense.
Re: "an ill-advised redesign"
I'm so thankful that the people behind WinAeroTweaker also created a bundle of all the Windows 7 games that will install correctly on Windows 10. Hence no crappy Store versions, you get the cleaner and far more pretty Win7/Aero versions of Solitaire, as well as Minesweeper, Mahjongg etc.
Re: "an ill-advised redesign"
Worst of all, of course, are the ads. Micros~1 seem to have worked out my age by spying on me,
Probably
They think I'm susceptible to local enthusiasms: "People in St Ives are going mad for this smartwatch | funeral service | life insurance". I assume this is a lie. And there's a bizarre category that shows a picture of some long-forgotten celebrity with a link that says "You'll never guess what X looks like now!". True enough, but why should I care?
Not sure that is Microfoot, per se. Unless they these are popping up in the start menu or status.
I get those sorts of ads occasionally, and I'm running Archlinux and Firefox.
Re: "an ill-advised redesign"
"local enthusiasms"
I love those "local" ads. My employer is big enough that I get an IP address from their original class A block. As a result, I get "local" ads for all over the US.
"and as for the funeral services, I'd sooner be dead"
That's... typically how they work.
The interface formerly known as....
"certainly when compared to the flatness of previous versions and, er, more recent incarnations"
That was my first thought when I saw the new 'flat' Windows look: "Which fuckwit thought that making it look more like Windows 2 was a good idea?"
Progress, we've heard of it...
Re: The interface formerly known as....
Someone with much more self control than me despaired: "Which fuckwit thought that making it look more like Windows 2 was a good idea?"
I /think/ it's got something to do with more easily providing a common look between interface elements at widely differing scales or making your phone look like your desktop (or your 4K 32" monitor like you 23" 1080p).
It's so awful it's got to have been done for a better reason than just some generic modern look.
Re: The interface formerly known as....
You're correct. It's to allow the interface to be rendered at a variety of different viewing distances and pixel densities. There aren't any bitmap "icons" anymore in Windows 10 for button functions: all graphical symbols are stored in fonts and rendered through the text engine. (the font is called "Segoe MDL2 Assets", and you'll find the icons encoded as characters within the Unicode Private Use pages).
Windows 10 also does the same thing for its emoji support, by using a colour-font feature (COLR and CPAL tables in OpenType) that allows coloured symbols to be built up like silkscreen prints, with one "character" for each colour layer. This is how Microsoft was able to implement every possible skin-tone variation in the "family" and "activity" emojis, and also provide non-coloured emojis without needing a new font (something I wish other vendors would offer). It's a clever approach that reduces the amount of memory and CPU effort needed to display the symbols, can be scaled to any size, and by limiting the number of colours per emoji, you end up with icons that visually blend with text much better than bitmap-based solutions.
(App icons remain as bitmaps)
I know this is not a popular opinion here, but I really the Windows 8 and 10 UI. It's clean and clutter-free, looks really sharp on a high-DPI display, and it's consistent as far as it's applied - the main thing I don't like about Windows 10's UI is how often you're dumped back into the Windows95 look and feel: surely it'd be worth putting a few interns on a task to turn those horrible tab-dialogs into something from this century (... and don't start me on the multi-row tab-bars where the tabs dance around after you click them, in some kind of twisted, user-interface whack-a-mole game)
Another unknown feature...
was the magic key-combo which allowed drawing a single card when in 3 cards at a time mode
I tested it, to confirm what I was told, but I soon forget it, because I much preferred free cell as a time sucking click machine
Re: Another unknown feature...
"...a time sucking click machine"
My eyes first thought the "cl" was a "d" and also swapped that world with the previous one.
If such a machine exists, it better NOT have any Micros~1 software, hardware, or meatware in it!
But still...
I have never been a MICROS~1 fan, and to say something positive about them here is like blaspheming in church, but in the interest of balance I'm going to have to: including Solitaire in Windows was a good move. It was intended as a tool to introduce technophobic noobs to working with a computer with a GUI and a mouse, and I have used it successfully for that purpose many times during my dark days of staff training and support. It did what it was designed to do and performed a useful function, which is more than can be said for many other Windows features.
And as MS apps go, Solitaire has always been reasonably well behaved. I know it has the reputation of being to productivity what a black hole is to light, but the various problems associated with any other MICROS~1 products over the years amount to a far greater productivity loss than poor Solitaire ever could hope to achieve; not in the last place because those who play it during working hours would otherwise be prone to other forms of wasting time anyway. It's the worker's attitude, not the handy temptation of an on-screen card game, that is the leading cause of non-productivity.
In short, Solitaire has helped more noobs overcome their techo/computer/Windows phobia than it has turned good office workers into bad time wasters.
"The longest card game in the world"
Is it as long as a piece of string?
Anyway, I'm sure several, including various versions of Poker, has been around a lot longer than MS Solitaire.
Card Games
Years before the IBM PC, Hewlett-Packard provided a Poker card game, on the HP217 and similar possibly even the HP85 (HP87??) So long ago. Not the first, I'm sure but certainly prior art...
Re: Card Games
Yeah, and I played strip poker with my C64 before Windows 1.0 was released but it certainly didn't teach me how to use mouse (nor much about the female anatomy either)
Other things "stolen" from Apple...
The cards in Solitaire, as well as the standard icon-set for Windows 3.0 were designed by Susan Kare, graphic artist whose other famous contributions to computing included the icon set for the Apple Macintosh, as well as its default bitmap fonts (and a hidden 32x32 portrait of Steve Jobs). To add to the set, as an independent design consultant in the 1990s, Kare also provided the standard icon suite for OS/2 Warp at the same time as doing the Windows 3.0 images... and later the Linux-based Nautilus desktop.
Re: Other things "stolen" from Apple...
I'm at an absolute loss at why you have a down vote :)) have an up and a beer.
Speaking of OS/2...
The IBM provided version of Solitaire for OS/2 included the extremely helpful menu option "Cheat" - which, as you may have guessed, let you put any card anywhere.
Re: Speaking of OS/2...
And if you cheated repeatedly it would pop up a dialog asking if this was really necessary.
The cards were designed by [1]Susan Kare , who is also responsible for the, umm, [2]iconic Mac icon set. A quick search will locate an outfit who will sell you a physical set.
[1] https://www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/susan-kare
[2] https://twitter.com/daniel_m_lavery/status/952796525041664000
... because someone had to...
LOOK at that FLATTY MCFLATSO INTERFACE! We should ALL go BACK to using ASCII CHARACTERS!!! Moving AWAY from the CLI is the *WORST* *THING* *EVAAAARRRRRR*!!!! I blame the COMMIES for the GUI!!! ANYONE who DISAGREES is a HOWLER MONKEY!!!!!!!!!!
... eveyone's thinking it. I'm just saying it...
I'm glad to say...
...that the best version, the one that came with XP, can still be run on Windows 10. I was horrified at what they did for the Vista/7 version, along with the equally crappy version of Spider. When upgrading to a later OS/PC, I always popped the XP versions on.
A quick search will show (possibly*) suitable download locations for the XP versions of both Solitaire and Spider.
* Don't blame me if the version you download comes with "unwanted extras"!
PCs helped develop my strong right hand*
I remember being at a conference where the presenter had a PowerPoint up, one of the slides having a graph that showed a steep drop in user productivity once the PCs had been upgraded from DOS to Windows.
The drop was a mystery they couldn't explain.
He then closed PowerPoint, revealing the open Solitaire game.
*By constant mouse use
Legacy
Before the easy availibity of benchmarking software we used to test a system's performace by playing solitaire on it. This was both for the general feel of drag and drop but the key test was the animation upon completion (which on particularly crappy systems would jerk very badly and glitch).
I don't know how original this completion animation was at the time (probably reasonably so) but it's interesting to see the same animation being played out in many modern versions of solitaire both on PCs and on mobile devices.