I found this gem in the great newsletters that the
Recipe du Jour
Trio put out, written by Simply Tim, and printed by permission. Tim's photo
at right; click to enlarge. I can relate to Tim's story...
Needless to say, the holiday season brings all of
the toy manufacturers out of the woodwork and onto the television screen.
And whenever I see an advertisement for computer games, I can't help but slip back
to the early 1980's when I bought my first computer. It was a Radio Shack
Tandy Model 4. In those days there were no hard drives; a lot of memory was considered
to be 64-K (bytes). [1,000 K = 1-KB (kilobyte); 1,000 KB = 1-MB (megabyte)]
Relax.
To put all of this gobbledygook in perspective - - if my math is correct - - it
would take nearly 16 MILLION Radio Shack Model 4 computers to equal the mnemonic
power of a single modern computer's standard 1-GIGABYTE (one BILLION bytes!) of
memory, and you can bet modern computer games use every bit of it.
But 64-K of memory was enough the night I slipped my first computer-game diskette
into the Model 4's floppy drive. The game was called ZORK. There were
no graphics, no colors, no such thing as a mouse. Not even Windows.
There was only a keyboard and a black and white screen. The game was a TEXT-only
fantasy game, meaning you were presented with a descriptive paragraph to which you
would type in an appropriate response. The response directed you to another
paragraph of text. For instance:
"You are standing in a mountain field. To the East is a stone farmhouse.
To the South is a meandering brook. To the West you can barely make out a
pathway that leads to a dark forest. To the North is a. . ."
You type: "GO EAST" and hit the <Enter> key.
"A rusty gate bars your way to a two-story farmhouse. Just inside the gate
on a cobblestone walkway you notice a paper bag. The walkway disappears on
the West side of the house, where a rope swing is tied to an old and gnarled oak
tree."
You type: "Pick up paper bag."
"You can't do that. A rusty gate bars your way."
You type: "Open gate."
"The gate is now open."
You type: "Enter."
"A nasty Troll leaps from behind an unnoticed bush and cuts off your head with a
very dull sword. You are dead. Would you like to restart?" ...More
>>> Copyright Tim Lee 2003
I found this gem in the great newsletters that the
Recipe du Jour
Trio put out, written by Simply Tim, and printed by permission. Tim's photo
at right; click to enlarge. I can relate to Tim's story...
