I have mentioned this here before, but if you're a Mac user, firstly, congratulations ;^) ...secondly, a great small business in Vermont that caters to Mac users (and has a great web presence) is Small Dog Electronics [Disclaimer: I am not associated with Small Dog in any way, other than a satisfied customer].
One of the niceties they offer is a few tech newsletters, which I subscribe to. The latest edition has two stories I'd like to reproduce here, and this one is about the game of Tetris hidden right within the operating system -- Mac OS X. From the newsletter, Tech Tails #333:
[...]According to Wikipedia, Tetris was invented by Alexey Pazhitnov at the Soviet
Academy of Sciences at their Computer Center in Moscow.
Now, like the political messages possibly hidden in Shostakovich’s
music, Tetris is hidden in OS X’s UNIX subsystem. You can unveil and
play Tetris by browsing Applications Folder > Utilities Folder >
Terminal. Type “emacs” and click enter. Now simultaneously press
the “ESC” and “X” keys. Now type “Tetris” without the
quotations. Use the arrow keys to rotate and move the falling Tetris
blocks. Press the spacebar to make the blocks fall.
A whole bunch of games are hidden in emacs in your Macs terminal. To
see the rest of the games, open the Terminal application, and type:
“ls /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/play” again, without the quotations.
To play these games, repeat the steps above for launching Tetris,
except substitute the other game’s name for Tetris. To quit emacs,
simultaneously hold down the control and X keys, and then
simultaneously hold down the control and C keys.
As always, be careful when you are using the Terminal application!
Thanks,
Small Dog! And now, off to play Tetris!
