From: Bruce Ide Man, I was browsing through your page and ran across something I'd forgotten I'd ever had -- the Microvision. The precursor of the Nintendo game boy. There were a few simple games in blocky graphics and cheesy sound effects but I'd play the thing for hours... It brought back memories. In the late 1970s I saw my first video game, a coin-op space invaders in a local woolworths. Oh the quarters I begged to play that game, 8 or 9 at the time and the family was poor, but I could awyas seem to scrounge a quarter or two for Space Invaders. I wasn't good at it, no... I wasn't ever really good at any of those older games, really, though now I can hold my own in asteroids variants and the MS Arcade version of Tempest (The only reason to install Windows on a machine, if you ask me.) The Space Invaders game was quickly joined by Galaxians and the digital kingdom started to appear before me. A simple sub game the object of which was to drop depth charges on subs at varying depths showed up, and a million variants of Galaxians and Space Invaders. I moved, from Hawaii to Georgia. There I was introduced to another wonder. You could actually RUN THESE GAMES ON YOUR TV! Oh, I begged my parents for an Atari game system incessantly. They'd have none of it, waste of money they said, and senseless -- you'd develop no skills playing those games. I found my first coin-op arcades and blew large sums of my allowances in there. I got good at Galaga and better at Spy Hunter and could play either one pretty much as long as I wanted. My folks finally gave in to me christmas of 1983. They got me a TI 99/4A, a machine that was an orphan as soon as I got it, but I didn't care. I had my own little piece of the digital kingdom now. I played games for about a year and then, almost by accident, fell into programming on the cursed thing. I got my first tastes of assembly and BASIC on that thing. About the same time, I started discovering Other Computers. Better Computers. The Apple //E was one. I was astounded at how fast it was, how much better the graphics were than my system and how much easier to deal with. This, surely, was the epitome of the digital kingdom. I must have one. I plotted for years how to scrape up enough to afford one. I never did though, and was stuck using the ones at School or at a public library near where I lived. I took some college courses while still in high school, learning more about programming. I was introduced to an old PDP (11/03 I think) with an 8 inch floppy drive and an OS you had to type an octal sequence into a debugger to load (Ok, so it was a program loader, so sue me.) I also discovered the joy of IBM Mainframes, line printers and ASCII art, and doing high order fractals on the plotters. When I went back to high school the next winter, I tried to do some of the fractals I'd seen on the mainframe on their Apple //Es in the lab with varying degrees of success. I continued on to college, going to Purdue for a year and majoring in Computer Tech. The computer system I had to work on for the first semster was the last one I feel nostalgia for, an old RSTS-F box made by Dec. The precursor to VMS. And now as I compose this letter on my Pentium 166, I wonder if we're really better off than we were. There was a magical feeling in those days when it was all new that isn't there now. The computer is now just another utensel. You can go out and buy one as easily as you'd go out and buy a new oven or refridgerator. It is no longer a mystic beast that you have to be a initiate to understand and we who can make them do almost anything no longer command the respect and awe we once did. And I still miss the old days from time to time. -- ----------------------------------- Bruce Ide greyfox@vnet.net, or root@greyfox.org http://www.greyfox.org