Computer and Video Game Nostalgia
I've been feeling very sentimental about computers this week. Its largely due, I'm sure, to the fact that I set up a IBM-XT clone (circa 1986) in my office.
This machine has dual 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, which means it was one killer machine back in its day. I use the first drive to boot up into DOS whenever I start the machine (old computers, you understand, did not have hard drives-- you need to load the operating system from disk or cassette each time you turn them on). The other drive has an old floppy with a bunch of games. Among my friends, Asteroids is the most popular.
Its fun watching peoples faces light up when they see it running on the black and orange monitor. Even non-geeks seem to take delight in remembering what computers used to look like. I love comparing that old gem to my current main desktop. Its hard to believe the difference 15 years can make in this industry!
Check out this fun recreation (above) of the very first video game, entitled Pong, created by inventor Ralph H. Baer. If that gets your juices going, you should download this clone of Space Invaders for the PC. Written in DOS, it will run on any Windows computer. It will open a full-screen DOS Window and take you on a nostalgic trip!
F1 - start game
Esc - end game
Ctrl - move left
Alt - move right
Shift - fire
I used to play Space Invaders endlessly on my Commodore PET computer. The computer had a built-in 9" black and green display, a 4 MHz processor and 6K of RAM. I seem to recall it took about 15 minutes to load Space Invaders from the cassette drive. Playing Space Invaders was about all that that computer was good for. I read recently that the PET was named after the pet rock fad of the mid-seventies. Appropriate!
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