The year is 1976, I am a senior in high school and am attending Mr Arnold’s math and physics classes. This is where I was shown my first computer. An Altair 8800. It was decked out with a keyboard and monitor, a tape cassette recorder for storing programs, and a paper tape reader (also for storing programs.) I became infatuated with the BASIC programming language and computer games. This experience is probably why I’m STILL a programmer. Because, when I got to college, we had to program on a mainframe IBM using punch cards and FORTRAN. I knew this was bullshit, since I had already experienced interactive programming (keyboard and monitor) on the Altair. (Note, mice weren’t invented at this point.) Not to mention a much better programming language BASIC (I thought at the time. Actually FORTRAN’s better.) If I had not had the prior experience with a user friendly computer, I may have decided computers were not that much fun.
But back to the point, the game I first played was called Star Trek running on the Altair. We all LOVED that game. The object was to kill Klingons, of course, by firing phasars and photon torpedoes in the right direction. It was a pretty amazing program for it’s time. I just recently found that program on the web (written in C this time), downloaded, compiled and ran it. Talk about a trip!!
After leaving high school, I can’t recall playing any computer games, for 16 years. There may have been a small amount of game play on the VAX at Texas A&M, but I can’t recall it.
Around 1992, I was working at Texas Instruments, and got hooked on a new dogfight game on the Silicon Graphics workstation. What was cool about it was that it was a network game. I was able to dogfight with other people in the building! That experience hooked me on network game play, but I could only get my fix at TI, after hours of course(g).
Around the same time I was on a flight test on TI’s Convair trying desperately to not throw up in the barf bag, testing a new seeker we were working on, when one of the techs showed me a new game called Wolfenstein 3D. I played this game for hours upon hours. I remember my nausea went away instantly as I played (in a bouncing plane!) The 3D graphics put that game WAY ahead of it’s time.
There were many games since Wolfenstein, which I can’t remember and won’t go into here. I will just fast forward to a few weeks ago. Another first for me. I succeeded in getting a network game to run on my local LAN in the house. Quentin and I are now playing Battlefield 1942 and Unreal Tournament 2004. The reason it took me so long to do this was because these games require that you keep the CD in the drive and I was loathe to buy a second copy of the game. Well, TechTV’s The Screensavers showed me the way on this one. A program called Alcohol 120% can make a virtual CD Drive with the contents of the CD stored on the hard drive. Now all my computers in the house have Alcohol 120% running and copies of the CD’s on the hard drives for all my network games.
Quentin JUST asked me to stop writing this post and play BF 1942, so I will end it here. I think it’s cute that he refuses to play against me. He insists we be on the same team. Which is fine by me because he’s better than me(g).
Leave a Reply