Computer games in the early 1980s depended more on imagination than graphics cards. In the early days of computer gaming, PC’s offered text based adventures, the most famous of which were the Infocom adventures of ZORK. Text-based adventures started in the late 1970s and were popular well into the 90s. They were a great blend of story and interactive RPG and I remember spending hours going n, n, s, se, sw, look at mailbox, open mailbox, take leaflet, read leaflet, n, open door, etc.

Well, my favorite computer documentarian, Jason Scott (who directed and produced the awesome documentary BBS, which every geek/nerd should purchase) is starting a documentary on the history of the Text-based Adventures. I was fortunate enough to meet Jason Scott at an IT convention in NY City. He’s a very approachable, intelligent fellow and I’m really happy to see him working on another documentary. By the way, if you’re old enough to remember local-dialup BBS’ing, the BBS Documentary will be a trip down memory lane and is very much worth buying.

But for this new documentary, he’s calling it Get Lamp, which brings back memories if you’ve ever played these classic text-based adventures. Filming continued into December, 2007. I expect he’ll be posting new info to the site soon, meanwhile, click on the thumbnails of the interviews, some of the pictures offer short biographies of those interviewed.

Click here for the trailers.

The wikipedia link for ZORK has many links at the bottom, where many of the original games have been ported to web-based versions, for all to enjoy.

Also, I’ve had in my 8-bit nostalgia section a link to the original Zork, web-based:

Also, The laptop that never was: The Commodore Laptop with an LCD screen.

This fascinating series continues from Ars Technica, and soon part 5 will be released continuing this amazing saga.

History of the Amiga: Part IV

The Lorraine Prototype (Later to become the Amiga 1000).

This is part 3 in the Ars Technica series on the origins of the Amiga, it’s quite an amazing tale of 90+ hour workweeks with the challenge of creating an operating system from scratch after the developers realzied that, “. . . CPM and MSDOS [were] poor designs. So, [they] started creating [their] own OS design, even before the Amiga came along.”

What I’m happy to learn at the end of this article is that Ars Technica plans to continue this series covering Amiga’s official launch and its early years with an established product.

From Wikipedia: In 1996 PC World rated the Amiga 1000 as the 7th greatest PC of all time [1]. In 2007 it was rated by the same magazine as the 37th best tech product of all time [2].

Linkbacks to Parts I and II of the Ars Technica articles:
• Part 1: Genesis
• Part 2: The birth of Amiga

Part II of the short history of the Amiga has been published at Ars Technica, worth reading.

I talked about Part I in an earlier post

Part III will be coming out next week: The first prototype.

Years ago, in a galaxy far far away … as an 11 year old, I had an Amiga. It was an amazing computer for it’s time and it captured my imagination. It had a mac’ish feel to it, but it was unique. It was the Workbench! The Amiga brings back a time to me when using a computer was new and exciting and above all, fun. Hours would pass in my world while I’d enjoy using it (as well as other computers such as the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A as well as the Atari 800XL). Of course later the 286′s and 486′s came into being, but that’s another story.

Ars Technica has recently published an article (part 2 coming next week) about the origins of the Amiga (originally named Hi-Toro) and how the dream of Jay Miner evolved from his involvement with Atari.

Another interesting site is the Amiga Forever Homepage which houses the award-winning Amiga preservation, emulation and support package which runs on current operating systems.

They also have a premium package for sale which offers more than 5 hours of video on DVD showing archival footage and interviews with the creators of the Amiga.

There’s just something about these old computers that invigorates and brings me back to the days when, at least to me, using a computer was a very special experience. Of course the nostalgia of childhood probably has something to do with it, but it was during these early years that I established my understanding and firm interest in these subjects. I’m sure I’ll be postinig more about these topics in the future.

Optional: Another well-written history of the Amiga.