There are some programs which I really like. When I started university, we had on the university mainframe access to something called ArpaNet, some worldwide network between universities, and which would later evolve into the Internet. The university mainframe had an interesting FTP cache of different programs, and one of these was Moria. I just had discovered Tolkien, and quickly I rolled into the world of Dungeons & Dragons, and its kin. Moria was one of the roguelike games, a world where the goal was to plunge into the deep caverns of Khazad-Dhum, and fight the Balrog. Moria had different alternatives, the most common were NetHack, Omega and of course Zangband. I must have wasted thousand hours playing Moria.


Another program was Fractint. In 1988, I received my first computer, an 8 MHz XT machine. It came with a diskette with QW-Basic, and some months later I had written my first fractal generator. It took one minute in high zoom mode to draw a pixel, and delivered head-ache causing green-and-black pictures. Fractint was a freeware program that had the revolutionary idea of using integers to compute the fractals, instead of floating point numbers, which made it blazingly fast. Fractint is called Xaos nowadays.


The program which many people play with first when using a Linux machine, must be XScreenSaver. It has tens of different modes, which are added on a regular base, which produce each a screensaver image with many different tuning parameters, good for hours of fun. Xscreensaver now has 233 modes, and every time an apt-get dist-upgrade brings a new version on my PC, the first thing I do, is check out the new modes. I just discovered Timetunnel, which draws an animation similar to the opening and closing effects on the Dr. Who television show. Very hypnotizing indeed.