4 replies to this topic

[pscEx]

Here is one of the first computers I've been working with
'He' is a WANG 2200 PCS from about 1975 which is still working.
('P' means portable > around 20 kg)
He is programmed in Basic and has powerful 4 k (kiloByte) of memory.
He has two floppy drives of around 100 k (kiloByte) capacity each.
He has an 8 '' B/W (Better said: green on black) Monitor.
The time he needs to count from 1 to 100 is comparable whith the time my PC counts from 1 to overflow.

Peter

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[Moon Goon]

Gosh, I remember playing "Adventure" on a Wang. I've always kept a rusty knife close by since then

[Chief Aramaki]

This is a reeeaaaly big screen. Ahhm..could you explain that with the rusty knife??

[Moon Goon]

This is a reeeaaaly big screen. Ahhm..could you explain that with the rusty knife??

Really late reply, sorry!

The reference comes from Adventure - an early text "RPG" of sorts. From the Wikipedia:

Colossal Cave Adventure

Main article: Colossal Cave Adventure

In the mid 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. An employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BB&N), a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers, Crowther used BBN's PDP-10 to create the game. The game used a text interface to create an interactive adventure through a spectacular underground cave system. Crowther's work was later modified and expanded by programmer Don Woods, and Colossal Cave Adventure became wildly popular among early computer enthusiasts, spreading across the nascent ARPANET throughout the 1970s.

The combination of realistic cave descriptions and fantastical elements proved immensely appealing, and defined the adventure game genre for decades to come. Swords, magic words, puzzles involving objects, and vast underground realms would all become staples of the text adventure genre.

The "Armchair adventure" soon spread beyond college campuses as the microcomputing movement gained steam. Numerous home-brew knockoffs and variations on Colossal Cave Adventure (which eventually came to be known as simply Adventure) appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.

One of the early items you can pick up is a rusty knife. Me and my Mother played alot of Adventure after work hours. Good times.

[TheHive]

That must have been the portable laptop back then. lol!