Links for April 6, 2018

Dungeons & Dragons Wouldn’t Be What It Is Today Without These Women

“At Gen Con Origins, people needed somebody to DM one of the sessions for the AD&D [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons] Open,” she said over the phone earlier this year. “So, I grabbed my stuff and met the team and did that. One of the semi-washed teenaged boys on the squad there looked at me, gaping, and said, ‘It’s a woman!’. I said, ‘10 points for perception.’” Wells was the first woman designer hired by TSR.


PDF Format History: Where Our Future History Lies

The PDF, in a very short amount of time, became one of the most important ways business users shared documents. It simplified the hard work of going to Kinko’s, because the file format was able to easily embed assets like fonts and images, simplifying one of the hardest parts of getting a file printed.... And most importantly, in the case of the IRS, “fillable.”… While none of this was as lightweight as, say, a text file nor as flexible as HTML, it sure beat PostScript for the average person. And the PDF became the long-term solution.


ViperCard

ViperCard is an open source re-creation and re-imagination of 1987’s HyperCard.