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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 3:32 AM

    I had to include "Adventure". It was one of my first experiences with any kind of computer. I actually played it on a teletype, with one of those 300 baud dial-in modems with the cradle for the handset.

    My uncle, who worked as a programmer in the early 1970s brought the teletype to my parents' house, and this was one of the things we did (there was also "Star Trek", which was kind of like Battleship -- you can still find it in Linux distributions to play on the console, and ASCII art).

    This was a time when kids did not normally have childhood experiences interacting with a computer -- which seems hard to imagine today, but it was true.

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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 3:38 AM

    Then four games from the arcade era, which I played in actual game arcades, and then on a friend's Atari 2600 console.

    I played several of the Infocom text adventures, including "Leather Goddesses" and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

    And then I went through a phase with graphic adventure games, especially King's Quest and Gabriel Knight.

    In the 2000s, I had gone over to Linux, and there weren't a lot of games. Our compromise was to have a Nintendo Game Cube. I liked the "Enter the Matrix" tie-in game, and I used to re-play the car chase mini-game a LOT -- at one point, I managed to jump the car through a hole in the game model, and it just free-falled endlessly!

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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 4:04 AM

    What made the Centipede arcade machine so cool was the big trackball interface. It had a lot of inertia, and you could really get that thing spinning!

    But I think I liked "Frogger" the most on the arcade machines. Maybe it was the story aspect -- poor little frog trying to get across the highway!

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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 3:53 AM

    For the young 'uns, this is what a "teletype" looks like of about that era (it's not the right model -- my uncle's was a portable that came in a big suitcase -- I don't remember more than that).

    A "Decwriter" -- a 1970s teletype. Couldn't find a portable model that looked like I remember,. But it was similar to this. There is no screen -- you type in commands and it types out responses from the computer. On paper.
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  • Winchell Chung ⚛🚀nyrath@spacey.space
    Sep 29, 2026, 10:29 AM

    @TerryHancock

    That's the model of DecWriter that I learned how to program on, back in college. The lab had three. Made an annoying rasping buzz when it printed.

    A couple of years later the computer lab got one (1) small CRT with an attached keyboard. There was always a long line of students waiting to use it. If you got tired of waiting you could use a DecWriter, or come back to the lab at midnight.

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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 3:20 PM

    @nyrath

    That's probably the same "Star Trek" game I played on my uncle's teletype.

    By the time I actually got to college, the usual interface was a video terminal. We had mostly VT-220s, a few VT-100s, and some "Adam" dumb terminals, especially at the telescope.

    We also had a few classic Macintoshes in the computer lab at that point.

    The main Astronomy department computers were running BSD Unix or VMS.

    And of course, we had those big 9-track tape reels and readers -- I had one for my senior research data. I probably still have it somewhere. But I haven't seen it in a long time!

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