As I'm trying to get back into the swing of things, I took a look around Slash Dot for some ideas. One thing I found is this Tetris demo. Click on the link to try it out.
The one thing special about this Tetris is that it is only 140 bytes. That means there's only 140 characters needed to write this game. This code can fit onto a Twitter feed. Though it takes a few more bytes to embed it onto a web page, this is still really cool.
There is actually a whole website dedicated to make JavaScript code that is only 140 bytes or less. The well named 140byt.es is a collection of code that can fit on a Tweet. It has quite a few things already ranging from function calculators, to QR code embeds, to the game of Tetris I opened up with. I think it's pretty cool how much you can do with so little space.
It actually reminds me of the older days of video games. We have CD's and DVD's that can hold anything from 700 Megabytes, 7,000,000 bytes, to a blistering 17 Gigabytes, 17,000,000,000 bytes, if you look hard enough. It was not always like that. If you took into example of the Atari 2600, the system was so limited that the games not only held the information for the game, but the RAM for it as well for some games. Some of the biggest game on the Atari were only 64 Kilobytes, 64,000 bytes, but most games could have fit on 2 Kilobytes, 2,000 bytes. That is actually less than an empty Microsoft Word 2007 document. It was amazing what programmers had to fit games on compared to today.
While we are in an age where more information is fitting on smaller discs, and that ratio increasing every day. I still think it's amazing what you still can do with limited space, and 140byt.es is a good way to show it. Thanks to mikejuk for this Slash Dot post.
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