I am fascinated with old vintage computer systems. Windows and America Online did a lot for the computing industry including taking a lot of 'magic' out of being able to work a computer. Nowadays even a novice can turn a computer on, get on the Internet and send email across the world. At one time this took a little bit of work to do. BBS's (Bulletin Board systems) had started networking just years before people started hearing the word Internet. Online games between BBS's (Mostly local ones to save Sysop's from having to pay toll calls) where popular and people would re-dial there local BBS's sometimes hours to get on at least once a day and play their favorite games like Tradewars and other such games. Most of these started out at 300 baud that is 300 bits per second or 30 characters per second, which isn't all that much faster than a good typist. Downloading programs at this speed for even small files took hours and before Xmodem and other transmission protocols sometimes people had to restart several times because someone else picked up the phone or some line noise had gotten in somehow. These protocols where needed because before 14400 modems came along there was no error checking and modems where fairly unreliable. I got my start with a TRS-80 Model I that my father brought home. It was a simple machine by today's standards. It included the Level II basic and came with 4K of ram. I was so fascinated with it that I 'played sick from school' to stay home and check out this new wonderful machine. I was seven years old at this time. It came with a Blackjack and a Backgammon game on cassette tape. Later on I recall typing in a Star Trek game from an issue of Kilobaud and had to take out a few routines to make it fit (with my fathers help). Playing Star Trek without the subroutines to handle Photon torpedoes provided the incentive to get the 16K upgrade. Once this was installed I felt I had all the room in the world to play in. About the same time I was given a copy of "Basic Computer Games" from Creative Computing. This had a program called "Super Star Trek" which was high tech by the standard of the day. I had typed in this same program about four or five times over the year to replace lost/damaged copies on tape and eventually the cover fell off and the book became quite tattered. Other old timers may recall other games from this and "More Basic Computer Games" like Wumpus, Eliza, Conway's game of Life that are easily considered classics. Super Star Trek especially has been re-written in almost every platform that has existed since its start including mainframe and minisystems like Trek52 for the PDP-11's. If anyone would like to read a book that recaptures a lot of this time period I HIGHLY recommend "Fire in the Valley - The Making of the Personal Computer." This fine book is written by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine and published by McGraw-Hill ISBN # 0-07-135892-7.

Description of the computer used in the classic movie "WarGames"

A quick note to folks who think of "pong" as the first computer video game. Spacewars was the first computer game:

http://www.gamesoffame.com/space/spacewar.html

Listings of Super Star Trek from Creative Computing's old "Basic Computer Games!"

http://www.gamesoffame.com/space/star_trek.html

Where the Russian supercomputers far behind ours if not equal in performance? The BESM-6 may have been 'different' than US supercomputers but definitely not decades behind like most people may think.

I currently have an Apple ][e that I found at a tag-sale with my favorite price tag. (Free for those who don't know me well enough) This machine had everything but the software and manuals. It came with an old Microsoft CPM card (Yes they did make some hardware and in fact hardware was what Bill Gates wanted to get started in (traffic counters to be exact)) an Applied Engineering Ramworks card (with a colorworks RGB daughtercard added on) amongst others. This machine works just fine except for a few sticky keys and lack of documentation.

I also have a few TRS-80's including a Model-III that I loaded up with 48K of ram, two internal floppies and a Tandy High resolution graphics card. This is a fun machine to replay the old Big Five games and the Galactic Trilogy games. Does anyone else out there remember loading "Temple of Apshai" from tape and playing it all weekend? This had to be one of the first if not THE first graphical role playing games on computers. I know Adventure preceded "Temple of Apshai" by several years but was strictly text with verb/noun commands. This fine game was one of many of this Rogue style of games. Scott Adam's and Lance Mikulus are two big software names from the past. Everyone on pretty much every platform of the day had at least heard of Scott Adam's adventures. These where some very fine and thought out text adventure games and belong on anyone's list of classic games. There seem to be very few games that started out on the IBM-PC that I consider to be classic material. Two of these have to be Starflight and Master Of Orion. Both of these games allow you to play almost as long as you would like and grow with you as you play. Two other games I have found myself playing over and over with different challenges each time are the Civilization and Command & Conquer games. Both of these fine games have had sequels and add on packs that expanded greatly on their playability. Command & Conquer is a great game to play against the computer (Can play either missions with clear cut objectives or actual play against a player computer) or against humans on an IPX/SPX network. C&C also allows you to play with several choices of weapons for each side or each player can start with the same weapons as the other player. You can either build up a strong base to produce lots of weapons quickly or go for the "grunt attack and simply build weapons right from the start and attack the other players base before it can be defended.
Well I wasnt too sure where I could put a link to this game I've found. It seems to capture a lot of the original fun that Adventure, Temple of Apshai and the early games had but with multiplayers! At any time there are usually over 300 people playing and there are around 8 million different rooms you can be in. So here it is:

Got comments or a question you need/want answered? Just curious if something can be done? Just want to post your websites address to get more coverage? Well then ask the GURU!


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