Also, I kept trying to come up with some kind of easter egg or hidden joke about the file names. SELDON? MANCY? Some kind of acronym? A private joke us non-MAC users wouldn't get? Or just a pseudo random string of characters?
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some in-joke for SELDON, but if there was I didn't get it. MANCY, I did get. "-mancy" is a suffix used in many words as different ways of foretelling the future. Such as:
necromancy--raising the dead for them to tell you the future (it's grown down different meanings so that it may just mean raising the dead)
geomancy--divining the future by markings on the ground or the pattern of thrown soil
There are a bunch more, pretty much any seemingly random event has been thought to be interpretable as omens of the future, reading tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, wax droplets in water, etc...
Anyway, AWESOME story, one of my favorite Podcastle episodes. I really felt like I knew Andy even though she was never even onscreen, which is a testament to how real David's character felt to me. The idea of a prophetic program running on such an old system is intriguing and a little absurd (in a good way). Awesome Awesome Awesome. And the plot arc mixed well with his emotional arc of grieving, well mixed, well played.
Also I was very glad to hear a programming story from someone who sounds like they know programming (or at least has bothered to talk to someone who knows programming). Too often, computers are used as a "magic" item by writers who don't really understand them. Which seems odd to say, in a story where the computer was doing something generally considered magical, but the authentic details went a long way toward convincing me that this computer and the people around it were really real. There were various details that indicated this, but foremost of those was pointing out that computers can't generate truly random numbers. There are ways to simulate randomness, but it's never truly random.
-A side thought for you: Humans are way worse at randomness. That's why there are Rock Paper Scissors champions--they are the ones who are better at seeing the patterns in others attempts at randomness and exploiting them.
Interstellar Pig I was very excited to hear Interstellar Pig mentioned in the story. Awesome YA Science Fiction book. I had an awesome English teacher who assigned this as reading. Extremely fun, I really got into that when I read it. I haven't read it since, might be fun to read again.
Text adventures I love text adventures and other generally outdated game types. About 15 years ago my aunt and uncle gave me "The Lost Treasures of Infocom" collection, I still don't know where they got it as they are not even computer players, barely able to use the internet. It is awesome, having a couple dozen Infocom text adventures (they were the big developer of text adventures in their heyday). I also like the old graphical adventures like King's Quest and Space Quest. *sigh* They don't make games like they used to.
Abandonware On the topic of retro gaming, if you like old-school computer games, or would like to find out if you like them, you've gotta check out
www.abandonia.com They collect abandonware games and put them up for download. Lots of text adventures, graphical adventures, and many other types.