A Geek’s Memories

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dosBy David Ponce

I’m sitting here, and for whatever reason, I’m taking a little walk down memory lane. If you’re not in the mood, please skip ahead.

I’m a child of the 80’s, and first started playing with computers around 1987. And you know something, I remember a bunch of stuff. And it’s crazy, just how much has gone down in the last 20 years. Here’s what’s stayed with me, for whatever reason, and anyone that has anything to add feel free to do it in the comments.

I remember DOS.
I remember 8 character filenames with three character extensions.
I remember my first 286 with 512kB of RAM.
I remember monochrome monitors.
I remember Commodore 64 and Lunar Landers.
I remember when Macs were used in schools.
I remember dot matrix printers.
I remember bauds.
I remember my first 7,200 baud modem.
I remember “Z Protocol”.
I remember BBSes and first hearing about this crazy thing called the Internet.
I remember waiting ten minutes to download a fuzzy picture of Cindy Crawford of a BBS.
And another two to get the system to display it.
I remember being fascinated at the idea of multitasking.
I remember Windows 3.11.
I remember Wolfenstein 3D.
I remember Doom.
I remember Duke Nukem 3D even more.
Anything 3D was cool in those days.
Why?
I remember wearing a heavy VR helmet.
And hating it.
I remember Hotmail before it belonged to Microsoft.
I remember Hotmail when it had 2MB of space.
Hey, that wasn’t even so long ago.
I remember Yahoo! before there were any graphics on it.

Eh, I’m bored with this. Anyone want to keep adding stuff?

65 COMMENTS

  1. I remember spending more time editing config.sys and autoexec.bat to get enough conventional memory than on playing the game.

    I remember Rise of the Triads
    I remember the original Civ
    I remember how awsome Norton Commander was
    I remember http://ftp.cdrom.com

  2. I remember floppy disks
    I remember 30 pin RAM
    I remember large, meaningful boxes with nothing but 2 floppies and a bit of paper
    I remember Compuserve
    I remember Oxyd

  3. I remember mono-laptops with 20mins battery life
    I remember networking with a parallel cable
    I remember my old CompuServe ID
    I remember my second ISP giving ALL USERS the same username and pw
    I remember ‘Homepages’

  4. I remember the first computer I sat down in front of, a Research Machines 380z
    I remember seeing my first video game whilst on holiday in the US – pong !!
    I remember my first 1200/75 baud modem – I remember using an acoustic coupler
    I remember thinking in 68000 machine code
    I remember typing in pages and pages of code printed in magazines such as Byte etc only to find that there was a mistake in the code or they had printed the pages in the wrong order then spending countless hours (days) trying to get the program to run
    I remember coming home from school and starting to load Elite (from tape) and having to sit down for dinner before it had loaded… At least I got to play after dinner.
    I remember being Elite !

    I feel old now…

  5. I remember Xtree Pro
    I hated Parity Errors on my Olivetti (8088 cpu by Siemens)
    Still have those Turbo Pascal 5.5 disks in my shelf
    I remember 5?-inch DS, DD disk (360kb)
    I remember Ms-Dos 3.3 and World Games by Epix (PC Boot-Disk)
    I remember when a VGA-card with 256kb RAM was cool
    I remember buying a 2x CD-Rom drive for ~ 100? (that was cheap)

  6. I remember Renegade and PCBoard to run my BBS
    I remember being a SysOp and CoSysop
    I remember OS/2
    I remember ASCII Codes
    I remember all the talk about having to put out cash for a Math-Co processor (DX Rock!)

  7. I remember my first computer was a Commodore Pet. I remember programming ASCII graphic games with DOS. I remember building an interface so I could save programs on a cassette tape drive. I remember programming Fortran on a teletype terminal and saving programs on punched paper tape.

  8. I remember Oregon Trail on AppleII
    I remember Karatica
    I remember dialing out to “the mainframe”
    I remember when BASIC was just that
    I remember keyboards that made a distinctive KER-Chink sound when typing
    I remember Hayes above-boards
    I remember when Gopher would revolutionize how we got information
    I remember when an Internal 14.4K modem was drool-worth
    I remember saying ‘540Meg, How will I ever fill that hard drive?’

  9. ^^ Oregon Trail!!!

    I remember when ICQ first came out and they assigned numbers… I think. I was 2198434 , I wonder if it still would work. I also remember Prodigy when it was an actual program like AOL. Our email address was a random mix of numbers and letters, with the envelope in the lower right corner to tell if you have mail. Wow it was the most pathetic thing ever. Yeah I’m not that old.

  10. I remember being excited to have a 128kb computer. It was a CoCo3. I also remember plotting pixels to make pictures. One. By. One. Oh , and I remember having an impressive maximum resolution of 640×480, with a whopping 4 colors to choose from…

  11. I remember my Compuserve ID as well
    I remember when certain parts of Compuserve were “walled off” premium content for which my parents would get billed by the hour
    I remember waiting all night for a 100KB download off of a BBS, only to find out it was for something called “Windows” that I didn’t have
    I remember programming in GW-Basic
    I remember when we got our first mouse, for nearly $200, that connected to the serial port, and only worked with one application we had, GeoWorks

  12. I remember when it was difficult to find porn.
    I remember Prodigy.
    I remember when Amazon.com was a book store.
    I remember when Cnet was a TV show.
    I remember when TechTV had interesting programs.
    I remember when it was fun to send & receive ‘joke’ email.
    I remember my first Packard Bell PC (and I’ll never forgive them).

  13. I remember “Fat Fingering”
    I remember paper tape and punch cards.
    I remember when 5 1/4″ floppys meant no more paper tape or punch cards.
    I remember playing Star Trek on a printer, as in on paper. +K+
    I remember programming in Fortran and Cobol.
    I remember when a 300 baud modem was a big thing.
    It’s been so long, I probably don’t remember anymore…………..

  14. I remember a 1x CD-ROM drive.
    I remember Secret Of Monkey Island
    and photocopies of the game solutions.
    I remember Maniac Mansion’s codes table and red acetate sheet.
    I remeber DOS Shell
    I remember WaR3z sites.
    My parents remember phone invoices.
    I remember Mandy B/W porn video on a 3’15 floopy disk.
    I remember wp51.exe

  15. I remember working on a “prototype word processor” that came from a company out of Washingston state (I wonder who that could be…). They donated mainframes to my boss (yes, they were mainframes back then) They came loaded with a word-processing program where the editing window was on top in a window above the text. At the time, we all thought it was quite cool. One feature that it had that is missing from the final version: you could select two letters and reverse them by hitting “control R” for those pesky from/form type mistakes

  16. * I remember POKE 1011,0
    * I remember ultrix, VAX/VMS and DOS 2.20
    * I remember when Ctrl-Alt-Del would reboot
    * I remember AirTrax
    * I remember upgrading from 1200 to 14.4k baud and thinking “…that sounds weird.”
    * I remember when caps lock would click down into place
    * I remember Turtle, and drawing squares, circles and triangles
    * I remember is was spelled Apple][ (you posers)
    * I remember WWII BBS
    * I remember when eBay’s primary server (singular) was Cayman
    * I remember Netscape 1.0, progressive download of graphics, and thinking “WOW!”
    * I remember my first cross over cable
    * I remember token ring…nevevr did get that working
    * I remember typing in PC Computing articles, they were buggy as heck
    * I remember being told to “…write 1000 times I will not…”, and instead writing a FOR loop and printing to LPT1 (that worked exactly once)
    * I remember my fax modem, that was SOOO cool (BGFax 4 ever!)
    * I remember buying hardware from that weird guy in the basement of a strip mall
    * I remember the Compaq “portable” computer (suitcase sized)
    * I remember “defraging” my parents machine, got bored, rebooted…D’OH
    * I remember thinking “What’s GOSUB?”
    * I remember thinking that all of this would be SOOO cool if I could only do it as a job…

  17. * I remember WP51
    * I remember my Lazer computer (IBM compatible)
    * I remember looking at a Mac and thinking “How cute, but useless” (nothing has changed)
    * I remember two phone lines (they became four at one point)
    * I remember replacing the ribbon on my printer
    * I remember when TurboTax would print out a form “Not Approved By The IRS”
    * I remember horsefun.jpg

  18. Oh boy…

    – I remember saving my first program on 2 punch cards.
    – I remember spending hours typing a BASIC program from Creative Computing Magazine into the Commodore PET
    – I remember CLOAD
    – I remember the Trash 80
    – I remember computer terminals with paper output instead of a CRT
    – I remember Choplifer on the Apple II
    – I remember the sound the hard drive would make when my Apple //e would boot up. (chuka-chuka-chuka)
    – I VERY fondly remember Beagle Brothers
    – I remember acoustic coupler modems at 300 baud.
    – I remember how getting 10 5.25 inch blank floppies for $15 was a killer deal
    – and then using a hole punch to make them “double-sided”

    Jeez I’m old…

  19. I remember getting my first computer C64
    I remember Pool of Radiance and having to flip those eight 5.25″ disks
    I remember getting my PS/1 and having the “big” hard drive. 40 MB.
    I remember my 2400 baud modem and my sister picking up the phone during a BBS download.
    I remember playing multiplayer (TWO PEOPLE) Doom using a serial cable and realizing that I suck against a real person.
    I remember emailing my girlfriend in BC when she want to university without sending pictures.
    I remember phone rates of 28 cents a minute, but only after MIDNIGHT.
    I remember that Pentium 233 MHz were fast machines.
    I remember having to zip files across 5+ floppy disks.
    I remember using Autocad with the text based command interpreter.
    I remember playing my first choppy 150×80 video on my computer and being amazed.
    We’ve come a long way…

  20. I remember 8-inch floppies.
    I remember ZORK and Leather Goddesses of Phobos
    I remember my friends mocking me when I bought a 486DX66 PC with an 810MB hard drive, telling me I’ll never use that much drive space…

  21. I remember Gopher.
    I remember Telnet.
    I remember FIDOnet.
    I remember the orgininal THE WELL.
    I remember Boardwatch magazine.
    I remember KERMIT.
    I remember modem strings (AT&F1&D2&S10…)
    I remember video game fanzines.
    I remember long distance bills for “good” BBS.
    I remember my first CD-ROM/soundblaster kit and being wowed by all the free Creative and Kai Power tools included.
    I remember USRobotics before the Palm Pilot.
    I remember Apple Newton.
    I remember writing batch scripts with DOS Editor.
    I remember Commander Keen.
    I remember Shareware of the Month Club.
    I remember Miner 2049er.
    I remember compiling BASIC on my Texas Instruments 99/4A.
    I remember figuring out in Novell how to send a one line “from administrator” text message to every teacher, every student, and every computer in the school district.
    I remember Netwars.
    I remember Dune 2.
    I remember PASCAL.
    I remember WordPerfect for DOS.

  22. I remember having 1k to write programs in.
    I remember R-tape loading errors.
    I remember Hungry Horace.
    I remember rubber keyboards.
    I remember wobbly 16k RAM packs.
    I remember typing pages and pages of code in from a magazine.

  23. I remember Adam Osborne.
    I remember 8 inch floppies.
    I remember my TI 99/4-A with cassette storage (bought for $50 at the going-out-of-business fire sale).
    I remember using DOS “debug”.
    I remember using DOS “edlin”.
    I remember Wordstar dot commands.

  24. I remember My first computer – a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
    I remember loading my games from t: – a tape drive.
    I remember ROMBasic.
    I remember writing music in BASIC using “beep” commands.
    I remember EMS and XMS memory.
    I remember when serial ports, printer ports, and disk controllers all came on a separate ISA expansion card.
    I remember when a multiplayer game meant 2 people and required a null modem cable.
    I remember Microsoft Word – For DOS.
    I remember MUD.
    I remember Commander Keen
    I remember the first Leisure Suit Larry.

  25. I remember when shutting a computer down was ‘park’
    I remember my first Geocities page, and how proud I was that it had page dividers and animated GIFs
    I remember being amazed by a computer demonstrating Descent (the original) at a regional science expo
    I remember buying Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy on 3.5″ floppy for 50 cents, along with a game called Jetpack, when my local department store stopped selling games on floppy
    I remember OS/2
    I remember when keyboards had nothing between CTRL and ALT

  26. I remember my first computer the ZX-81 with 8K of memory…..
    I remember programing it for 2 hours to see a circle crossing the screen (TV)
    I remember not having any magnetic media in it
    I remember my MSX
    I remember saving all the data in cassette tape
    I remember waiting 45 minutes for a game to load in cassette
    I remember plugging my MSX into a 220v outlet
    I remember my 286 with 4mb of RAM
    I remember coding PASCAL
    I remember DOSSHELL.COM
    I remember windows 3.1 (of course)
    I remember a lot…. dont have the time now….. BBL

  27. -oregon trail
    -number munchers
    -gophers on the 486
    -appleII
    -power macs
    -sitting in typing class back in HS on the Apple power macs with a bomber chat program that set off an exploding bomb sound everytime someone got a message and ticking off the teacher who was old.
    -2400 baud modems
    -compuserve, aol, and other ISP’s that required entirely numeric UID’s.
    -getting my first P1 and thinking it was awesome on Win 95 after the upgrade from 3.1….

    much more, but have to go…

  28. – Punch cards, 110 Baud Modems
    – TRS-80, Cassette Tape storage, Assembler
    – Apple II 48K RAM
    – 8086 IBM PC, PC-DOS, Assembler, TSRs, Turbo Pascal
    – Compuserve was a step UP
    – Wordstar, VisiCalc, Zork
    – 640K RAM in a PC was a lot

  29. I remember that damn noise those modems used to make and wondering if they’d ever come up with a way to get rid of it.
    I remember when floppy disks were actually floppy. Imagine that.
    I remember that when it came out, the game boy was the most awesome thing ever, even if it did look like a giant grey brick with a yellowy screen the size of a postage stamp.
    I remember using products by microsoft competitors.

  30. I remember Secret Of Monkey Island (Yes I know that is mentioned already, but I REALLY loved that game… and le chuck’s revenge)
    I remember upgrading my 386 from 4mbs to 8mbs.
    I remember using Hypercard on my schools Macs to write programs.
    I remember overclocking my first processor… a 166 mhz pentium to 180mhz. WOW!
    I remember hacking windows 9x systems at school and thinking I was 31337!

  31. I remember CPM
    I remember putting the cpm interface card from a basis 108 into an apple ][e and blowing it
    I remember 40char screen
    I remember paying $189 dollars one month of calls to call BBS
    I remember walking into a room at Vassar college full of NEXT computer
    I remember our first 3.5 800k external diskette drive for $800
    I remember the Hero 1, when the arm broke off while spinning on itself
    I remember rise of the triad
    I remember blowing the fuse of the external floppy drive when plugging into 220v europe
    I remember the useless IIgs
    I remember playing sounds on the commodore external drive
    I remember visicalc πŸ™
    I remember our noisy daisywheel printer
    I remember when we were considered ‘real’ geeks in school

  32. I remember CPM.
    I remember 5-1/4″ floppies
    I remember 10MB hard drives
    I remember dot matrix printers
    I remember daisy-wheel printers
    I remember printer enclosures
    I remember wanting an Apple Lisa
    I remember “Copy-II-Plus”
    I remember X-Tree
    I remember “Aldus” Pagemaker
    I remember Compuserve and 300 baud modems
    I remember making punch card flyswatters

  33. I remember when a 2 5.25 drives is all you needed.
    I remember when 300 baud was cool.
    I remember creating animated ansi art.
    I remember when Prodigy stole my files.
    I remember when a 1GB HD took up 2 5.25 bays and cost $3k.
    I remember when Max Headroom made fun of reality TV before there was reality TV.

  34. I remember LanTastic and their 2MB/s thinnet cards.
    I remember Donkey (that game that came with MS DOS 1 or 2).
    I remember my friends going out to buy the MS DOS 6.22 upgrade.
    I remember Stacker for DOS and the fun/pain it caused.
    I remember the IBM EGA card with the daughter card.
    I remember when Comdex was cool and innovative.
    I remember Copy II PC and the hardware that went with it.
    I remember solving Kings Quest on a PC Jr, because the graphics and sound were better than the PC-XT.
    I remember Computer Shopper, that four pound magazine full of ads.
    I remember TheDraw, ANSI editor, and posting my work to PCBoard 10.0.
    I remember dialing TheWell, long distance from Georgia, to get “Hearts of Space” playlists.
    I remember using AutoCad 2.6 on a 286 with a 80287 chip installed.

  35. I remember ProCom Plus
    I remember being a Sysop
    I remember Legend of the Red Dragon
    I remember Usurper
    I remember Dos 6.0 on 3 and 1/2 in. disks
    I remember when Juno first came out.
    I remember playing Doom on my old 386 SX and having to get 4 MB of RAM and reduce my screen to practically nothing to play it.
    I remember Packard Bell

  36. i remember:
    “press 1 for CGA
    press 2 for EGA
    press 3 for hercules
    press 4 for tandy”

    ‘QEMM
    ‘WWIV
    ‘Legend of the red dragon
    ‘Barren realms elite
    ‘”elite bbs’es”
    ‘ansi art packs
    ‘.mod files
    ‘scream tracker πŸ™‚
    ‘modem to modem games… pissing my parents off to no end in the middle of the night πŸ™‚
    ‘the original pentium FPU bug and subsequent recall

  37. I remember:
    4 bit CPUs (8008)
    10 blinking lingts and 2 switches (Altair)
    Writing maching code because I couldn’t afford an assembler
    hollerith cards (used in my first college class – fortran)
    CP/M (and the Z/80)
    Booting the apple PC from assembler
    P-code for the Apple 6502
    $7K for the 10M corvis omnidisk
    Backing the Tandy up to a cassette tape
    The 110 baud acousic coupler
    The 300, 600, 1200 4800 and 9600 bps modems8, 5, and 3.5 inch disks
    The 5100 PC with switchable Basic and APL languages
    Upgrading the 4.77Mhs 8080 to a Nec to get a 20% speed boost!
    The terminator resister pack on the 130K floppy drive
    Version 6 Unix and the advent of C
    Logic lines on the PC BUS creating a short condition (bad doc!)
    The hard drive reef off Boca Raton
    When using GOTO was cool
    The overbuilt 45lb compaq portable PC clone
    100K network cards – then arcnet, ethernet, 10-Net, etc
    Novell netware 4.1 – the first time (later it was Advanced netware 4.1)
    Hacking BITNET and manually routing using SPOOL RSCS
    Running FidoNet using Desqview (Spectrum BBS Columbia MO 1981-1992 RIP)

    Most of all I remember programming in zeros because the 1 hadn’t been invented yet.

  38. I remember:
    Veronica
    Gopher
    Archie
    WinCIM and pay-per-minute on CompuServe
    a.b.p.e
    Saving up for 8Mb of memory
    Tweaking XF86Config
    Having only a 170Mb HDD
    My Psion II Organizer
    Getting PKZip to span floppies
    ZX81 and the wobbly 16Kb memory pack
    Longing for an external floppy drive for my VIC20
    Reading news in 1980 that IBM had ‘missed’ the personal computer market
    Osborne 1
    OS/2 Warp
    PEEK and POKE
    CPU speed displays on the front of PCs
    Spiders From Mars
    Acoustic couplers
    Jazz Jack Rabbit
    That little stip of paper to remember WordPerfect function keys
    Mosaic
    Waiting 2.5 hours for a 2Mb file to download
    Deciding whether to choose a DX2 or a Pentium I
    Modem strings (AT&…)
    Programming a pixel to bounce around the screen
    BBC Micro
    MSCDEX.EXE

  39. I remember hacking school PCs too – I found lemmings hidden on a Windows 3.1
    Monkey Island was pretty cool (once I got Windows), but anybody remember those text games in DOS? I had Guild Of Thieves.
    I remember using a little pointy thing they called a ‘Turtle’ on BBC Microcomputer System to draw shapes.
    Pen down, U10, R10, D10, L10, Pen Up and you have a square!
    Atari 800XL was my first personal computer – it had an external tape player that I used to load “Captain Sticky’s Gold” from if I could be bothered to wait.
    I learnt to use BASIC on my Atari and spent hours typing in programs and then looking for the one line I had typed in wrong.
    I remember my brother and sister having an argument over the Atari which caused it to have a “boot error” and I was amazed that it could tell they had stepped on it rather than put their hand on it!!

    We’ve come a long way – and people really have taken a lot of the innocent fun out of it all.

  40. i remember logo
    i remember basic
    i remember pascal
    i remember apple IIe and apple IIc
    i remember the quest series… kings quest, police quest and all the stuff you had to type… get bottle… look in bottle,
    i remember my cga monitor and how amazed i was when i got my ega monitor and saw the cheryl tiegs flashing gif. don’t even get me started when i got my svga monitor.
    i remember stacker
    i remember my handheld scanner, and how i had to make multiple passes to scan a single 8.5×11 page
    i remember paying hourly for internet

  41. I remember when OS/2 ran Windows 3.1 embedded faster than Windows 3.1 ran native
    I remember OS/2 Warp (still have the discs)
    I remember when 3.5″ floppies became popular
    I remember hours playing with FRACTINT
    I remember actually looking forward to checking my email and sending them
    I remember when spam was either a meat product or a Monty Python sketch
    I remember when personal websites were ‘home pages’, not ‘blogs’
    I remember Sabre Wulf
    I remember being blown away that Elite on the BBC Micro split the screen and used two different graphics modes (hires B/W and low res color) at the same time!

  42. I remember:
    ADKFA and ADDQD
    being uber impressed with windows 95
    When computer mice had two wheels instead of a ball underneath (and I know a school that still uses them)

  43. I remember Altavista being the top search engine
    I remember when warez groups would post their own BBS numbers on their releases
    I remember hearing my first .wav (2unlimited song) 20seconds

  44. PEEK and POKE commands
    SET and RESET commends
    Typing programs from magazines
    Hunt the Wumpus and ASCII Star Trek
    Black plastic cassette recorders to save/load data
    The Turbo button
    How cool daisywheel printers were (and the ‘soundproof’ boxes you had to keep them in)
    Really floppy 8″ disks
    the DEC Rainbow
    the TRS/80
    BASIC
    COBOL
    PASCAL
    GANDALF boxes
    Green Bar fanfold paper
    Turning the keyclick sound on/off
    Punch cards
    Open reel tape storage
    Hard wired circuitry in the mainframe

  45. I remember:

    Intellivision
    the FIRST TRS80 Model 1 with keyboard, monochrome screen and cassette deck.
    The TRS80 Model II and III
    Zork and Star Trek
    Writing stupid repeater text in BASIC
    the TRS80 PORTABLE!
    Kings Quest
    D-Base
    EcoNet BBS
    Printers with Daisy Wheels and Ribbons!
    Thermal paper fax machines
    “Heavy Duty” copy machines that took up entire rooms (and all they did was staple and duplex)
    Rotary Dial Phones
    When MTV played music
    When I first got CABLE TV
    The first time I saw “Netscape” when it was brand new!
    Transitioning from DOS to Windows!
    When WordPerfect could do TABLES!!
    When making a word bold in a word processor required a CODE like HTML.
    Using waxing machines, tape lines and an Xacto knife to layout a newspaper
    Using Ventura
    When VOICEMAIL started at work!

    Gee…imagine how many things I’ve forgotten!

  46. I remember going to the school library searching for the meaning of the word “emulator”.
    I remember sys 64738 and LOAD”*”,8,1.
    I remember using a screwdriver to change the position of the tape’s head in a C64 tape player and using 64KLOADER.
    I remember the first time i saw a small Mac icon with “x” at his eye on a Mac Plus.
    I remember trying to make a wheel of fortune game in Excel (maybe in 4.0).
    I remember trying the same in HyperCard, but created only a shooter where my teacher’s face could melt to bits.
    I remember using ducttape to fix my QuickShot 2.
    I remember buying a 20 GB hard drive and everyone was laughing: what will you use that big place for?
    I also remember my first 20 MB external hard drive which was bigger than a scanner, and I tried to fill it up from SyQuest discs.
    I remember watching Operation Wolf, and saying: whoa, this is sooo lifelike.

  47. I remember…

    -Forced to play Carmen Sandiego on the Apple Mac at elementary school. I liked Oregon Trail better.
    -Printer cartridges that used tape and printer paper with those perforated track holes on the margins.
    -Winter Olympics, Spy VS Spy, Mario Bros on the Commodore/IBM
    -386 was the hottest thing
    -Windows 3.1\MS-Dos
    -14.4k and 56k Modems and the sounds they made
    -Prodigy,CompuServe
    -Doom, Duke Nukem, Lemmings, Quake, Jane’s USAF using joystick, ChessMaster 8000 (forgot how high it got)
    -Bringing my desktop over to my cousins to network first generation PC games. Dune, C&C, X-Wing VS Tie Fighter (how so many hours was spent on this), Need for Speed, Warcraft 1, Star Wars Dark Forces.
    -Figuring out what all those networking things IPX, COM Ports, Baud Rates, Not really understanding what we did, but we eventually got it to work.
    -Original gaming companies – Microprose (X-Com is #1 all time), Bull-Frog, Info-games, Sierra, Original EA, Lucas Arts. There are probably older ones, but I don’t recall or not in my generation.
    -Small software shops where u had to go to the store and get software/peripherals – Egghead software, Electronics Boutique (store dedicated to PC games only and shelf real-estate was abundant. Now u go to EB, and u see is 1 rack of PC games all compacted)
    -High end VGA games on 8 floppy disks! Expensive power strips.
    -When pc subwoofers came out.
    -Taking forever to figure out Leisure Larry Lounge Lizards with all those typing commands. Scumm games.
    -CorelDraw
    -10/100 Network Cards, Co-Axial Cables with those metal terminators

  48. I've been playing BRE on an old BBS using a telnet connection. If I accidentally type the wrong thing, I cannot get the backspace, delete, arrow keys or anything to work. I'm stuck timing out or buying 100,000 soldiers or whatever. Anybody know if there is a resolution to this?

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