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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 8/01/2007 Where have all the good games
gone, all to Xbox ... I can
remember playing computer games on pcs over 30 years ago. This was the late 70’s, when
arcade games were coming on, and some of those games were being ported over
to the early pcs. The first
pc games were on the old black or green small monitors, very slow and very
crude, but they were games – to give you break from the difficulty of
using that first generation of computers. Some of
them were logic games, written in basic, like the dragons and dungeons type, where
the game was a series of text questions you were asked, and you typed in your
answers, trying to solve the puzzle. But
others were actual graphics, and I remember playing games like Space invaders
and Pong, and of course Lemon aid Stand, on the first generation of pcs
– like on the Apple2,
and early Ataris and others. The Apple 2 was really a cool computer,
you’d hook it up to your color tv set, and you could buy a game
joystick for it. In terms of games,
except for Atari -Apple was way ahead of its
competitors. Another early pc system you could play some logic games on was
the Radio shack trs-80 – referred to as the Trash 80 – but it
wasn’t as good for games as the Apple and Atari. I mean, with 4
thousands characters of RAM, and everything stored on cassette tapes –
what did you expect? Those were computers that played games, and as an
alternative there were hybrid game boxes that could do some computer things. Probably
one of the classic examples of this was Colecovision, which
was a great game machine, but which was actually a computer, with some fairly
sophisticated design. I had one of those, and in addition to playing early
games, I also ran the early cp/m operating system – loaded of course
off tape – and actually did some programming in Coleco basic. But in
1982 it all changed with IBM’s introduction of it’s own PC
– a mostly business system which took over the world, but it could play
some games, specifically Flight Simulator,
which came to be a benchmark test of whether a computer was truly
pc-compatible. If it couldn’t run Microsoft’s flight simulator,
it wasn’t a true clone. And Flight Simulator has been one of the
classic pc world games, with a slightly darkened history when it was
discovered that the perpetrators of the 9-11 disaster had used flight
simulator to practice
their flying. I still
have a great pc version of Pacman, and some golf games and others I still
play sometime. But recently a friend asked me about computer games for kids.
I went to a near-by computer store, and they didn’t sell computer
games. I went to my local
Hastings store and had a rude awakening.
First I couldn’t find the computer games, and then I was amazed
that they were on a tiny 3 foot wide shelf with only 2 rows of games; a very
limited selection, and not very good quality. But there
were virtually rows and rows of the finest virtuos of games for Xbox and
other game boxes, and all kinds of accessories; even clothing items and
jewelry related to some of these games. So the pc
game world has shifted away from pcs, but I’ll bet you still deserve a
break today and will enjoy a game
of Solitaire or Pinball
built into that fancy Windows XP or Vista system of yours. |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2007 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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