~ $ cd projects/fibergochi && cat README.md
The Fibergochi
A Tamagotchi, but the pet is a student at the FIB, the computer science faculty in Barcelona. It has to study for exams, find a free terminal for its labs, sleep, and not get bored, until it gets its degree, or it is thrown out. I wrote it in JavaScript in February 1999; the code is signed Night. It was one of the first interactive pages I made.
This is it again, with its own drawings. Its words were in Spanish, and here they are in English.
by Night
- exam
- lab
- terminal
Study/Sleep sends it to study or to bed, and it decides which: it tosses a coin. Find terminal sends it to look for a free terminal, and once it has one, it does its labs there on its own. http sets it browsing, if it holds a terminal. Beg is to beg for better marks, and the answer is always the same. alfa, Bar and Friends were never written. They did nothing in 1999, and they do nothing here.
The three lamps beside the drawing are an exam to study for, a lab to do, and a terminal held. After the last day of class the first two blink.
A day has sixteen hours, and a term has twenty-five days, twenty of them with classes. The marks come out on the twenty-second day. A subject is passed if less than an hour of work is left on it. Here a step comes every tenth of a second, so a term lasts two minutes. Time passes only while the egg is on screen. The Fibergochi is kept in your browser, as a cookie kept it then, and new starts another.
Left alone, it is thrown out for boredom on the sixteenth day of its first term.
The rules of the faculty
It starts in the Fase de Selección, the first phase of the degree: nine credits, and in this game a credit is a subject. Anyone who has passed none after two terms is out, with a single word: BACARRA. After four terms, anyone more than two credits short is out. Anyone one or two short is let through, but only to the Técnica, the shorter degree of fifty credits. Anyone who passes all nine chooses: the Superior, a hundred credits, or the Técnica.
After that come the alfas: for each of the last six terms, the credits passed over the credits taken. Four of them below half, and it is out. And anyone who finishes the degree gets two messages, the second of which is an error in KERNEL386.EXE, because nobody was expected to get that far.
What the code of 1999 says
The notes at the top of the file tell how it was made. I did not know how to use arrays in JavaScript, and I had no internet connection to find out. So the ten subjects are ten variables, credito0 to credito9, and they are reached by building the variable's name and evaluating it:
function LeerArray (nom, index)
{
return eval (nom + index);
}A browser kept only twenty cookies, which was not enough for a cookie per number. So all fifty numbers went into one cookie, four characters each, which is why every number in it had to stay between −999 and 9999. The notes also warn that Netscape did not tell upper case from lower case in names. So anything changed was to be tried in Explorer first.
One line was missing. A student let through to the Técnica after four terms was never taken out of the Fase de Selección, so the next term threw them out after all. That line is added here, and nothing else is changed.
The credits in the code give the original idea to Sardakuar, and the idea of actually making it to Josep Llosa, "who does not know we have mentioned him, or does".