Remember when

Where is it????

 

I learned to program on the Apple II series as a kid, went to a summer course on it. ENTER magazine would publish programs for it as well.

 

First computer I got to use was a Commodore PET in grammar school. Jr high had PETs, and when I got to Sr High, the PETs were retired for Commodore 64s, Apple IIs, and access to a BOCES mainframe for PASCAL and other programming.

The PC finally made its appearance in college... Mostly 286s, with a few 386s sprinkled in... The 486 was the standard by the time I graduated.

 

I used some kind of a word processor in high school, not sure what or if it was an actual computer or just a standalone. My friend had a Commodore but I never really used that brand.

 

I remember the standalone "Brother" brand of word processor before home computers...

Brother or Brothers, I don't remember exactly.

 

Great game!

 

Brother it was, you are correct

 

I wore my vintage Duke Nukem 3-D plutonium pack T-shirt, bicycle riding yesterday. I will have to take a picture of it after it comes out of the wash.

The Original Duke came out on floppies, but I down loaded mine off the web. I got the first Duke Nukem 3-D trailer for free as part of a promotional CD. Later I bought the CD and every expansion pack and even created levels for it based on architectural projects that we engineered at work.

I could fight my way from the Saroyan Theatre in Fresno to the Our Lady of the Assumption, in Modesto, blow up the Baptistry, jump into the water, swim underneath, and come up inside the Western Digital (in Anaheim.)
that was a hell of a long swim for the Duke!

On that same promotional CD I got a copy of Descent: destination Saturn!

That led me to buy the game, version two and three, and also create levels for that, which was based on a completely different construction engine.

One ran on Build and the other one ran on Devil.

I’ve probably got the code in the docs for that stuff because I always intended to make more levels for Descent. The engine was cool, and it was done with a three dimensional wire frame construction. You made tunnels and decorated the inside of them.

Levels for Nukem 3-D were done by hollowing out spaces in an undefined mass and then decorating them.

Duke was made to allow wide open spaces, where Descent was geared to flying through tunnels and rooms.

Duke 3D had “transporters”, and if you made the exit geometry of one identical to the entrance geometry of the other one, he could jump in a hole in Bellefontaine, and come out in Albuquerque, just like Bugs Bunny.
I made levels for other games over the years but those were the two that I remember well and enjoyed the most.

I own over 200 boxed games for the IBMPC & compatible series of computers. Some will run on stuff as old as the PS2 model 50, like the text game Zork.

Then I have a voodoo card version of a much later 3D Zork that needed a high spec Pentium.

Because I was an engineer and I built all the computers at work I always made sure I had the highest spec available.

 

Me too, and they didn’t “fix” my eyes until I was a senior citizen. Now I’m almost qualified eyewise. I can fly a Bellanca without my eyeglasses, but I can’t read some of the instruments.

I always wanted to fly the B-52, and I remember when they started bringing them into Ogden.

We used to ride our bicycles and skateboards through the ammunition dumps, out to the Iron Ponies motorcycle course, and around to the officers golf course.

They had a latrine/hospitality shack with a $.25 coke/beer machine.

Then one day the B-52s showed up, and they were moving nuclear weapons around. We saw loaded missile carriers from 20 yards, parked in the gravel.

The gates at both ends of the road through the ammunition dump were guarded thereafter. As kids we went through that road whenever we wanted and so did everyone else on base who wanted the shortcut to the golf course or the flightline from the north gate.

So we hid, lying in the tall grass of the bluff at the end of the runway, and watched B-52‘s take off right over the top of us. They just kept coming and going.

They had like 50,000 hp and they would almost pound you against the ground as they flew over. They were so big when you were looking up at them that it seemed they were just barely clearing the ground.

Then they would instantly gain 100s of feet of altitude because of the cliffs above Riverdale.

 

These were my dads from the 50s the 60s and the 70s.


As the Air Force got more important the patches got larger..

 

My dad had the middle patch from what I can remember

 

This says 1964 on it, when dad went to Vietnam, so he carried this with him there and back.

 

That’s cool!!!

 

Fv(k . . . that was me! After I got done delivering papers.

 

I still have boxed floppies of the original SimCity. It came with both 5-1/4" and 3-1/2" media.
Also have a boxed 8-bit SoundBlaster Card; I believe it requires Dos 2.0 and 256k of RAM...

 

I can still remember dad’s Air Force number because I got his hand me down shirts, and they had a laundry stamp on everyone!

Does anybody remember when the khaki Australian bush jacket became a style thing about 1968? I had my dad’s from the army air corps!

That was right after the Nehru jacket and just before the Apache tie as I recall.

I used to wear stuff like that for school, and often resulted in insults and fist fights.

As an Air Force kid I got a lot of secondhand clothes and discount rack stuff.

But by grade 8, I made a lot of money as a paperboy, and I used to go buy weird clothes at the (brand-new) Target that none of the other kids had.

Flashy sunglasses. Body shirts. Metalflake two-tone patent leather wing tips with box toes and a monk strap.

I was riding around on a chopped out Schwinn bicycle with big forks on a little 20 inch wheel in the front.

I’m not sure how I survived those school years without getting murdered by irate hockey players.

I had heard, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

I chose to do it all as if I was from outer space. It was an interesting experience.

 

The PS two model 50 is the only machine I still have with a 5 1/4 drive. That’s our early 1990’s accounting machine.

I don’t think I ever purchased any games that were on 5 1/4. By the time I had my own computer and the money to buy my own software everybody was using high density 3.5.

I remember buying Darkseed and also The Seventh Guest. Both 3.5s

 

We didn’t even have affordable scientific calculators.

I was using a sliderule and we were keypunching our own IBM cards to run on the Boroughs 6700 main frame hot reader. If you were an engineering student they figured you were smart enough to run your own card decks and get your own printouts, but of course we still threw things into infinite loops.

I remember the sysop canceling my program in the middle of the run when it started to chew up time.

 

A departed friend of mine was like that even back in the 80s, I actually inherited the machine he had last year but it's way more than I'll ever utilize so trying to sell.

Yikes..think I had a couple of 5 1/4s long ago from my Apple computer course.

 

How do I post multiple "likes"?!