I wrote the following in late 2000 (Dec.) for a now defunct website that was commercial. Every word is true and it is (I think) rather funny. Thought some of you might enjoy it, so here it is. My initial foray into the computing universe.
(From December, 2000)
Don Ecker
I started angling my wife for a new laptop computer about two months before Christmas. My wife and I are both writers and we have a home office, but I do most of my writing on the dining room table. My old laptop is pretty pathetic, a 486 100 Mhz. box with a 435 megabyte hard drive. No sound card, no CD Rom, and the screen is starting to hic-cup. I had just sold a story to a British magazine and managed to convince my wife this was the perfect time to go out and buy a new laptop. I checked the prices all over LA and found what I thought would be the perfect unit in a local computer franchise. They built it to order and I ordered a one gigahertz Celeron CPU, 128 megs of RAM, a ten Gig hard drive and a 24X CD Rom ....... and a ethernet card. ( I put together a home network to take advantage of my cable modem.) The whole thing came to $1006. plus tax. The day I brought it home I was so happy I was skying! I sat down and started to set it up and as I was working on it I started to think about when I personally discovered the computer. Talk about time travel to the past, I have had an interesting journey with these damn things and my life took a total U turn when I had my first encounter. Let me tell you about it.
The truth is, I am a total sucker for anything electronic. I have bought stuff, spending thousands of dollars and I truly didn’t have much of a clue as to what it was or what I could do with it! That is the God’s truth. However, there is just something about electronic stuff that winds up my motor. Even as a small kid I wanted the electronic stuff way over other stuff like baseball gloves, footballs or basketballs. Oh, don[FONT="]=[/FONT]t mistake me...I played all those sports, even played college ball, but I loved the electronic stuff. I kind of dug it when in the Army in Viet Nam, I was called upon to lug around the PRC -10 radios. I got to play with all the neat stuff and attachments that went with them. Of course, I have to admit that sometimes in 95- degree heat with 375 percent humidity it did get a little old. BUT..... had personal computers been around in the 60’s my life would have been Oh-SO- Different!
[FONT="]
[/FONT] With PCs, it has been my experience that you either LOVE THEM or you DAMN THEM TO HELL! I have yet to meet anyone who is ambivalent about them. And like I said - I Love Them. And have loved them since I bought my very first one back in late, late 1986. True to form, when I bought my first one I didn’t have an inkling what it could do or more to the point, what I could do with it.
Back in 1986, I was being medically retired. I had been injured on the job, spent several months in the hospital, had just gone through a divorce and ended up with more dollars (at that time) than was good for me. I was going through physical rehab and needed something to keep me occupied. Like I said, not being married anymore I had this . . . money. All the expenses I had were just my townhouse mortgage and my car payments.
Somewhere along the line I got this mail order catalog. On page one was this personal computer. I started to pay attention. I checked out the pictures, and it all looked pretty neat. Naturally those catalogs really work to encourage that “buyer’s fever” and I caught some. Now, about 10 blocks or so from my townhouse was a Radio Shack. I decided one afternoon to wander in and see what they said about all this. I shoved the catalog in my back pocket and took off.
Wouldn’t you just know it, but when I got inside, low and behold, Radio Shack was having a computer sale! Whoopee! I gotta tell you, I started to salivate. The manager of this Radio Shack was a pretty young guy and very sharp. Did I mention that he was also a sweet talker? I think he had his eye on the CEO position at Tandy Corp. somewhere down the road. We started to ..... communicate ....... “Hey,” I began (kind of breathless), “I been thinking about, oh you know, maybe looking into eh, you know, buying a computer.” I whipped out my by now pretty crumpled- up mail order catalog. Then, shoving it under his nose, I pointed to the computer they had on page one. (I think it was a FRANKLIN. Worked off the Apple OS or some such.) Anyway, he looked at it and kind of wrinkled his nose. “Nah, you really don’t want that,” he said, “you will have a tough time finding software for it.” Now he had said a magic word, software. “Ah, software?” I asked. Thinking hard, I tried to imagine what he was talking about although I think I had heard the term. “Yeah, software,” he began confidently. He now had the fish on the hook and he began to reel me in carefully. “The programs that you can run with the computer.” Oh yes, I thought. Of course, yeah the magic stuff that made the computer do its thing!
[FONT="][/FONT] “What you really want is the computer to handle the IBM programs,” he continued, speaking in a measured tone. “You want to work off of DOS!” Now he did it again. What in hell was DOS? So I asked him. “DOS,” he answered. “It means the Disk Operating System!” Now he sounded so sure, I was convinced that DOS it must be! “OKAY!” I told him. “So, lets see what you got!” Man, I was jazzed. I hadn[FONT="]’[/FONT]t heard this much electronic talk since my days with the PRC-10!
He led me over to his display, and I must have let him see the sparkle in my eyes. “Now, we have got a great special on this one! Let me show you my personal favorite . . The Tandy 1000 EX! It comes with a CGA Monitor and 256-K of memory! Plus, it is fired up with DOS 2 point 1!” (I gotta tell you up front, I didn’t have a damned clue what he just said. But oh brother, did I love it! What was staring back at me was a keyboard, one a lot bigger than the keyboards of today. This “keyboard” WAS the computer. It had an internal 5-1/4 inch 360-K floppy drive in it. Period. The CGA monitor was a 13-inch screen, and later after the whole thing was hooked up and running I could actually count the pixels on it. But I get ahead of myself.
Hmm. I began to think about what he had just told me. “This memory you mentioned. Is that all there is, or can you put more in it?” I asked, sharing just a glimmer of thinking ahead. “Oh, sure” he said. Later I was to realize he was mentally adding up all the extras he could probably sell me. “You can put in enough memory to run it all the way up to 640-K.” And then he smiled. (And do you remember what Bill Gates had said? Nobody will ever need more than 640 K of memory!) He knew how to hook me. “You see, the more memory you have, the faster your computer works. When you load a program in the computer via the disk drive, it puts it right into memory. The more memory you have, the more of the program you can have read. So what that means is this: If you only have 256-K it will only load so much then it has to go to the disk and read it, slowing you down.[FONT="]”[/FONT] Now that kind of made sense to me. Oh yeah, we definitely have got to have more memory. “Tell me, how much is 256-K? What does that mean in the `real world?” Now I beginning to catch on, I thought. Hey, I didn’t want this guy to think I was a total putz.
He gave me a blank stare. “256 K means two hundred and fifty-six thousand bytes of memory. That is a quarter of a megabyte!”
Now I was lost again. “A quarter of a what?” I asked him.
[FONT="][/FONT] “A megabyte. In other words, a quarter of a MILLION Bytes!” Whoa … I understood a million. A million of anything was impressive enough for me. So, if I bought more memory . . . . my head now really started to swim. So I okayed him upping the memory to 384-K. Seems like at that point I needed something else in the computer to go all the way to 640 K and he didn’t have one. (However I did get it about a week later.) Oh yes, I also bought an external disk drive that was a 3 1/[FONT="]2[/FONT] inch disk that handled 740-K. (Wow. Now we were talking cause that meant “in the real world” 3/4 quarters of a million bytes, whatever in hell they were.) I also got talked into a printer, another Tandy Special. After all, once you had something in the computer you’ve got to have a way to get it out. Remember that this was 1986, virtually eons ago, computer-wise. The Internet was not yet around for all us home users, and I had not yet discovered BBS’s. If you don’t know what they are, plug it into a search engine. Do a little research. It is hard to believe how ancient those days are.
Oh, yes … one other item that I bought that day. And when I tell you that it changed my life, I do not exaggerate. In passing this guy mentioned a “modem.”
“A what?” I asked. Now I could start to feel the pinch of my wallet.
“A modem,” he stated emphatically.
“Okay, what is a modem?” Now I was starting to feel just the tiniest bit taken advantage of.
“Well if you have a modem you can communicate with other computers around the world.” Then he smirked. Now, with that bit of information rattling around in my head I began to hyperventilate just a little.
Well I bought one. And today with 56-K baud modems for under $30 you will roll off your chair when I tell you how much that cost. Did I mention it was a 300 baud unit? Oh yes, a 300-baud modem for a mere $100.
I walked out of there after laying down about $1,200. Today, of course, if I had all that stuff in pristine condition I couldn’t give it away. But in the end I had a Tandy 1000 EX computer with 384-K of memory, an internal 5-1/4 inch 360 K floppy drive, an external 3-[FONT="]2[/FONT] inch 740-K drive, a CGA Monitor, a 300-baud modem, a box of 10 floppy 5-1/4 inch 360 K disks, DOS 2.1 and a stand to put the monitor on, a dot matrix printer and assorted cables.
[FONT="]
[/FONT] Now I will say this: After the Radio Shack closed he came over to my townhouse and helped me set the whole damned thing up. He also showed me how to use it to format a disk to make a copy of the DOS disk. This was WAY before Windows was on the scene; everything worked from DOS. (And even though I am embarrassed to admit it now, the only thing I could do with that computer was to format the DOS disks. I used up the whole box making DOS floppies. I just spent $1,200 on it, I had to do something with it!)
I do not want to sound sour grapes, because I really grew to love that little 1000 EX computer, but had I known what I was doing I could have done SO MUCH better with the money I spent. I learned a lesson after buying it. The reason Radio Shack had a sale (and I really didn’t save much money at all) was because they had phased out the 1000 EX. (It, by the way, sported an 8088 CPU. Totally anemic). They were going to a new 286 series and wanted to unload their stock. They burned me one more time on the next computer I bought there, but I will save that for another day.
The 300-baud modem is a story in itself. I discovered Compuserve, or as it became known, CI$. At $6 hour if you used a 300 baud modem. It you were fancy and had a 1,200 baud modem, that bounced you up to about $12 AN HOUR! 2,400 baud modems were (in those days) the stuff dreams were made of. Actually as time went on and I started to learn computers I began to write and modems became invaluable. However that lay in the future. So, what did I do with my thousand- plus dollar investment? Well one of the very first programs I bought was STARFLIGHT, a game.
I was a rookie. In Army speak I was a FNG, a cherry and this damn game almost took me over. For just a while it grabbed me worse than crack gets an addict and I didn’t know any better.
Over the years I have bought a number of different computer games. Actually I am not a “big” gamer, and the game has to grab me in order to keep my attention. Most of my computer time is involved with my writing, my research and surfing the web. My point is that today I don’t game a lot, but that might change if I were to ever find another game that grabbed me the way StarFlight did back in 1987. Ever hear of it? No? Well okay then, here is the deal .....
Back in early “87" there wasn’t a lot to keep us science fiction fans happy. I like to explore the concepts that good science fiction presents. But in “87" the only thing Sci Fi happening was the occasional Star Trek flick coming out. Even the next Star Trek series, The Next Generation, had not debuted yet.
[FONT="]
[/FONT] I had gone over to the Radio Shack Computer Center and was wandering around their software section. I had become “good buddies” with the staff, and when I wandered into the store they usually cleared a path for me. They knew they had a sale. I was still learning “computer-ese” and carefully scanned the software on display. I was in the game section and noticed a pretty cool looking package. It said [FONT="]“[/FONT]STARFLIGHT” and it had an awesome looking ship on the cover. The package was dark, and behind the ship was a starfield and several planets lurking in the background. One of the salesmen, a younger guy drifted over. “Hey, this looks kind of cool” I began. “Oh definitely” he said. [FONT="]“[/FONT]I have it at home and it’s a keeper.[FONT="]”[/FONT] “Alright, so what is the deal?” I was thinking of Kirk and Spock.
“Well, this is a mystery” he began. “It starts out at a Starport where you are assigned your ship.” Oh this was almost too much! My very own Enterprise with phasers, photon torpedoes and other goodies! Well not quite... Whoever designed this game had studied (very carefully) all the important tenets of capitalism and entrepreneurship and wanted to make sure that only with hard work AND a level of failure built in, would one finally get that bad ass starship. You start with a ship that barely gets out of space dock, and had they had a kid with a slingshot, he could have knocked you out of the sky.
The idea is to [FONT="]A[/FONT]go boldly where only a few (that each paid their $50) have gone before and earn lots of MU’s (that’s STARFLIGHT lingo for bucks or the long green stuff .... Monetary Units) and then you can outfit your ship with all the neat stuff. Stuff like armor for the ship, lasers NOT phasers, screens (if this were Trek that would be shields) and engines that didn’t come out of a “64 Corvair.” Unfortunately the first one in my ship probably did. You see, everything came in classes, class 1 engine up to a class 5. Same with the ships screens, lasers, etc. Oh yes, one more thing. The crew (which you can pick from the recruitment center, and they are not necessarily all human) have to be trained. All this of course takes money and they don’t give you much. I guess they wanted to see just what we starship captains were really made of.
I plopped down my $50 and took it home.
The game came on two 360 K disks. They squeezed a lot on a 360 K disk back then. First order of business, make two working copies of the disks, which I did. I knew this would work on my system, it said right on the cover. I had no hard drive, so during game play you are called upon to swap disks at times. Luckily it never happened when something really good was going on.
[FONT="]
[/FONT] I called my best buddy Chuck to inform him of this new development. He promised to come over.
So, here I am up to my ears in the instructions. I want to make sure I experience every second of what this thing has to offer. And there was a lot of stuff in there. A star chart, a security access code wheel (now this was interesting, what in hell do you need something like that for?) the manual, and a “quick start” sheet plus the two disks. First order of business is make the working copies. For you more recent computer users, there was a time when one had to do all this prior to using a program. You had the master disks then the worker disks. Sounds kind of like a commercial for communism doesn’t it?
Anyway I got that done. I secured my master disks in a safe place just like the manual said. Now I am ready to explore the universe. Well almost ... I fired the game up and first had to tell it all about my computer. Yes I have a CGA monitor, yes I will be switching floppies, yes it is a Tandy 1000 computer. Okay, I think it is ready.
Bingo, I am on a space platform that vaguely resembled something I remembered being on my school lunch box when I was a kid. Suddenly my character “beamed in!” on the platform. With a kind of buzzing noise. From the computer’s very anemic sound thingy. This is well before sound cards were available. Okay, NOW I was hooked. I looked around at the platform and there were a number of different modules to go to conduct my business. Operations, personnel, crew assignments, a trade depot, ships configuration, and the ALL Important Bank. Now in this universe things were run by an outfit called “Interstel.” Kind of a cross between the Rockefeller’s with a touch of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure, and oh say, Blackbeard the Pirate. It seemed like Capitalism that has run amok with more than a hint of piracy. Ok, I can live with this.
Continued next message
(From December, 2000)
Don Ecker
I started angling my wife for a new laptop computer about two months before Christmas. My wife and I are both writers and we have a home office, but I do most of my writing on the dining room table. My old laptop is pretty pathetic, a 486 100 Mhz. box with a 435 megabyte hard drive. No sound card, no CD Rom, and the screen is starting to hic-cup. I had just sold a story to a British magazine and managed to convince my wife this was the perfect time to go out and buy a new laptop. I checked the prices all over LA and found what I thought would be the perfect unit in a local computer franchise. They built it to order and I ordered a one gigahertz Celeron CPU, 128 megs of RAM, a ten Gig hard drive and a 24X CD Rom ....... and a ethernet card. ( I put together a home network to take advantage of my cable modem.) The whole thing came to $1006. plus tax. The day I brought it home I was so happy I was skying! I sat down and started to set it up and as I was working on it I started to think about when I personally discovered the computer. Talk about time travel to the past, I have had an interesting journey with these damn things and my life took a total U turn when I had my first encounter. Let me tell you about it.
The truth is, I am a total sucker for anything electronic. I have bought stuff, spending thousands of dollars and I truly didn’t have much of a clue as to what it was or what I could do with it! That is the God’s truth. However, there is just something about electronic stuff that winds up my motor. Even as a small kid I wanted the electronic stuff way over other stuff like baseball gloves, footballs or basketballs. Oh, don[FONT="]=[/FONT]t mistake me...I played all those sports, even played college ball, but I loved the electronic stuff. I kind of dug it when in the Army in Viet Nam, I was called upon to lug around the PRC -10 radios. I got to play with all the neat stuff and attachments that went with them. Of course, I have to admit that sometimes in 95- degree heat with 375 percent humidity it did get a little old. BUT..... had personal computers been around in the 60’s my life would have been Oh-SO- Different!
[FONT="]
[/FONT] With PCs, it has been my experience that you either LOVE THEM or you DAMN THEM TO HELL! I have yet to meet anyone who is ambivalent about them. And like I said - I Love Them. And have loved them since I bought my very first one back in late, late 1986. True to form, when I bought my first one I didn’t have an inkling what it could do or more to the point, what I could do with it.
Back in 1986, I was being medically retired. I had been injured on the job, spent several months in the hospital, had just gone through a divorce and ended up with more dollars (at that time) than was good for me. I was going through physical rehab and needed something to keep me occupied. Like I said, not being married anymore I had this . . . money. All the expenses I had were just my townhouse mortgage and my car payments.
Somewhere along the line I got this mail order catalog. On page one was this personal computer. I started to pay attention. I checked out the pictures, and it all looked pretty neat. Naturally those catalogs really work to encourage that “buyer’s fever” and I caught some. Now, about 10 blocks or so from my townhouse was a Radio Shack. I decided one afternoon to wander in and see what they said about all this. I shoved the catalog in my back pocket and took off.
Wouldn’t you just know it, but when I got inside, low and behold, Radio Shack was having a computer sale! Whoopee! I gotta tell you, I started to salivate. The manager of this Radio Shack was a pretty young guy and very sharp. Did I mention that he was also a sweet talker? I think he had his eye on the CEO position at Tandy Corp. somewhere down the road. We started to ..... communicate ....... “Hey,” I began (kind of breathless), “I been thinking about, oh you know, maybe looking into eh, you know, buying a computer.” I whipped out my by now pretty crumpled- up mail order catalog. Then, shoving it under his nose, I pointed to the computer they had on page one. (I think it was a FRANKLIN. Worked off the Apple OS or some such.) Anyway, he looked at it and kind of wrinkled his nose. “Nah, you really don’t want that,” he said, “you will have a tough time finding software for it.” Now he had said a magic word, software. “Ah, software?” I asked. Thinking hard, I tried to imagine what he was talking about although I think I had heard the term. “Yeah, software,” he began confidently. He now had the fish on the hook and he began to reel me in carefully. “The programs that you can run with the computer.” Oh yes, I thought. Of course, yeah the magic stuff that made the computer do its thing!
[FONT="][/FONT] “What you really want is the computer to handle the IBM programs,” he continued, speaking in a measured tone. “You want to work off of DOS!” Now he did it again. What in hell was DOS? So I asked him. “DOS,” he answered. “It means the Disk Operating System!” Now he sounded so sure, I was convinced that DOS it must be! “OKAY!” I told him. “So, lets see what you got!” Man, I was jazzed. I hadn[FONT="]’[/FONT]t heard this much electronic talk since my days with the PRC-10!
He led me over to his display, and I must have let him see the sparkle in my eyes. “Now, we have got a great special on this one! Let me show you my personal favorite . . The Tandy 1000 EX! It comes with a CGA Monitor and 256-K of memory! Plus, it is fired up with DOS 2 point 1!” (I gotta tell you up front, I didn’t have a damned clue what he just said. But oh brother, did I love it! What was staring back at me was a keyboard, one a lot bigger than the keyboards of today. This “keyboard” WAS the computer. It had an internal 5-1/4 inch 360-K floppy drive in it. Period. The CGA monitor was a 13-inch screen, and later after the whole thing was hooked up and running I could actually count the pixels on it. But I get ahead of myself.
Hmm. I began to think about what he had just told me. “This memory you mentioned. Is that all there is, or can you put more in it?” I asked, sharing just a glimmer of thinking ahead. “Oh, sure” he said. Later I was to realize he was mentally adding up all the extras he could probably sell me. “You can put in enough memory to run it all the way up to 640-K.” And then he smiled. (And do you remember what Bill Gates had said? Nobody will ever need more than 640 K of memory!) He knew how to hook me. “You see, the more memory you have, the faster your computer works. When you load a program in the computer via the disk drive, it puts it right into memory. The more memory you have, the more of the program you can have read. So what that means is this: If you only have 256-K it will only load so much then it has to go to the disk and read it, slowing you down.[FONT="]”[/FONT] Now that kind of made sense to me. Oh yeah, we definitely have got to have more memory. “Tell me, how much is 256-K? What does that mean in the `real world?” Now I beginning to catch on, I thought. Hey, I didn’t want this guy to think I was a total putz.
He gave me a blank stare. “256 K means two hundred and fifty-six thousand bytes of memory. That is a quarter of a megabyte!”
Now I was lost again. “A quarter of a what?” I asked him.
[FONT="][/FONT] “A megabyte. In other words, a quarter of a MILLION Bytes!” Whoa … I understood a million. A million of anything was impressive enough for me. So, if I bought more memory . . . . my head now really started to swim. So I okayed him upping the memory to 384-K. Seems like at that point I needed something else in the computer to go all the way to 640 K and he didn’t have one. (However I did get it about a week later.) Oh yes, I also bought an external disk drive that was a 3 1/[FONT="]2[/FONT] inch disk that handled 740-K. (Wow. Now we were talking cause that meant “in the real world” 3/4 quarters of a million bytes, whatever in hell they were.) I also got talked into a printer, another Tandy Special. After all, once you had something in the computer you’ve got to have a way to get it out. Remember that this was 1986, virtually eons ago, computer-wise. The Internet was not yet around for all us home users, and I had not yet discovered BBS’s. If you don’t know what they are, plug it into a search engine. Do a little research. It is hard to believe how ancient those days are.
Oh, yes … one other item that I bought that day. And when I tell you that it changed my life, I do not exaggerate. In passing this guy mentioned a “modem.”
“A what?” I asked. Now I could start to feel the pinch of my wallet.
“A modem,” he stated emphatically.
“Okay, what is a modem?” Now I was starting to feel just the tiniest bit taken advantage of.
“Well if you have a modem you can communicate with other computers around the world.” Then he smirked. Now, with that bit of information rattling around in my head I began to hyperventilate just a little.
Well I bought one. And today with 56-K baud modems for under $30 you will roll off your chair when I tell you how much that cost. Did I mention it was a 300 baud unit? Oh yes, a 300-baud modem for a mere $100.
I walked out of there after laying down about $1,200. Today, of course, if I had all that stuff in pristine condition I couldn’t give it away. But in the end I had a Tandy 1000 EX computer with 384-K of memory, an internal 5-1/4 inch 360 K floppy drive, an external 3-[FONT="]2[/FONT] inch 740-K drive, a CGA Monitor, a 300-baud modem, a box of 10 floppy 5-1/4 inch 360 K disks, DOS 2.1 and a stand to put the monitor on, a dot matrix printer and assorted cables.
[FONT="]
[/FONT] Now I will say this: After the Radio Shack closed he came over to my townhouse and helped me set the whole damned thing up. He also showed me how to use it to format a disk to make a copy of the DOS disk. This was WAY before Windows was on the scene; everything worked from DOS. (And even though I am embarrassed to admit it now, the only thing I could do with that computer was to format the DOS disks. I used up the whole box making DOS floppies. I just spent $1,200 on it, I had to do something with it!)
I do not want to sound sour grapes, because I really grew to love that little 1000 EX computer, but had I known what I was doing I could have done SO MUCH better with the money I spent. I learned a lesson after buying it. The reason Radio Shack had a sale (and I really didn’t save much money at all) was because they had phased out the 1000 EX. (It, by the way, sported an 8088 CPU. Totally anemic). They were going to a new 286 series and wanted to unload their stock. They burned me one more time on the next computer I bought there, but I will save that for another day.
The 300-baud modem is a story in itself. I discovered Compuserve, or as it became known, CI$. At $6 hour if you used a 300 baud modem. It you were fancy and had a 1,200 baud modem, that bounced you up to about $12 AN HOUR! 2,400 baud modems were (in those days) the stuff dreams were made of. Actually as time went on and I started to learn computers I began to write and modems became invaluable. However that lay in the future. So, what did I do with my thousand- plus dollar investment? Well one of the very first programs I bought was STARFLIGHT, a game.
I was a rookie. In Army speak I was a FNG, a cherry and this damn game almost took me over. For just a while it grabbed me worse than crack gets an addict and I didn’t know any better.
Over the years I have bought a number of different computer games. Actually I am not a “big” gamer, and the game has to grab me in order to keep my attention. Most of my computer time is involved with my writing, my research and surfing the web. My point is that today I don’t game a lot, but that might change if I were to ever find another game that grabbed me the way StarFlight did back in 1987. Ever hear of it? No? Well okay then, here is the deal .....
Back in early “87" there wasn’t a lot to keep us science fiction fans happy. I like to explore the concepts that good science fiction presents. But in “87" the only thing Sci Fi happening was the occasional Star Trek flick coming out. Even the next Star Trek series, The Next Generation, had not debuted yet.
[FONT="]
[/FONT] I had gone over to the Radio Shack Computer Center and was wandering around their software section. I had become “good buddies” with the staff, and when I wandered into the store they usually cleared a path for me. They knew they had a sale. I was still learning “computer-ese” and carefully scanned the software on display. I was in the game section and noticed a pretty cool looking package. It said [FONT="]“[/FONT]STARFLIGHT” and it had an awesome looking ship on the cover. The package was dark, and behind the ship was a starfield and several planets lurking in the background. One of the salesmen, a younger guy drifted over. “Hey, this looks kind of cool” I began. “Oh definitely” he said. [FONT="]“[/FONT]I have it at home and it’s a keeper.[FONT="]”[/FONT] “Alright, so what is the deal?” I was thinking of Kirk and Spock.
“Well, this is a mystery” he began. “It starts out at a Starport where you are assigned your ship.” Oh this was almost too much! My very own Enterprise with phasers, photon torpedoes and other goodies! Well not quite... Whoever designed this game had studied (very carefully) all the important tenets of capitalism and entrepreneurship and wanted to make sure that only with hard work AND a level of failure built in, would one finally get that bad ass starship. You start with a ship that barely gets out of space dock, and had they had a kid with a slingshot, he could have knocked you out of the sky.
The idea is to [FONT="]A[/FONT]go boldly where only a few (that each paid their $50) have gone before and earn lots of MU’s (that’s STARFLIGHT lingo for bucks or the long green stuff .... Monetary Units) and then you can outfit your ship with all the neat stuff. Stuff like armor for the ship, lasers NOT phasers, screens (if this were Trek that would be shields) and engines that didn’t come out of a “64 Corvair.” Unfortunately the first one in my ship probably did. You see, everything came in classes, class 1 engine up to a class 5. Same with the ships screens, lasers, etc. Oh yes, one more thing. The crew (which you can pick from the recruitment center, and they are not necessarily all human) have to be trained. All this of course takes money and they don’t give you much. I guess they wanted to see just what we starship captains were really made of.
I plopped down my $50 and took it home.
The game came on two 360 K disks. They squeezed a lot on a 360 K disk back then. First order of business, make two working copies of the disks, which I did. I knew this would work on my system, it said right on the cover. I had no hard drive, so during game play you are called upon to swap disks at times. Luckily it never happened when something really good was going on.
[FONT="]
[/FONT] I called my best buddy Chuck to inform him of this new development. He promised to come over.
So, here I am up to my ears in the instructions. I want to make sure I experience every second of what this thing has to offer. And there was a lot of stuff in there. A star chart, a security access code wheel (now this was interesting, what in hell do you need something like that for?) the manual, and a “quick start” sheet plus the two disks. First order of business is make the working copies. For you more recent computer users, there was a time when one had to do all this prior to using a program. You had the master disks then the worker disks. Sounds kind of like a commercial for communism doesn’t it?
Anyway I got that done. I secured my master disks in a safe place just like the manual said. Now I am ready to explore the universe. Well almost ... I fired the game up and first had to tell it all about my computer. Yes I have a CGA monitor, yes I will be switching floppies, yes it is a Tandy 1000 computer. Okay, I think it is ready.
Bingo, I am on a space platform that vaguely resembled something I remembered being on my school lunch box when I was a kid. Suddenly my character “beamed in!” on the platform. With a kind of buzzing noise. From the computer’s very anemic sound thingy. This is well before sound cards were available. Okay, NOW I was hooked. I looked around at the platform and there were a number of different modules to go to conduct my business. Operations, personnel, crew assignments, a trade depot, ships configuration, and the ALL Important Bank. Now in this universe things were run by an outfit called “Interstel.” Kind of a cross between the Rockefeller’s with a touch of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure, and oh say, Blackbeard the Pirate. It seemed like Capitalism that has run amok with more than a hint of piracy. Ok, I can live with this.
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