Hello, I’m mike. 38 year old graphic designer from California.
Used to make simple crappy text adventures as a kid on my TRS-80 coco, and thanks to watching Get Lamp, checking out ADRIFT (and other great programs) I’m taking up the hobby again!
Aside from all that I watch a lot of old movies-mostly horror and noir, like to surf, sail, drink, play music and watch the giants.
Hi, Pelle, Sweden, 30-something, program computers.
Played Zork and a few other games in the 80’s. Tried to write some text adventures in BASIC. Got on the Internet a few years later in 1995 and soon found out about inform and the ifcomp, ifarchive and all that. Last game I wrote was in Lisp for a university course 1996. Remember the engine was heavily inspired by what I knew about Inform, but the parser was probably not very good. Got the Masterpieces collection when it was still in available, kept lurking, maybe posted once or twice on the newsgroups over the years. I think I have checked back to see how the things are going about every other year or so, playing some games from the latest ifcomp and reading the latest news threads and blog posts. I play if games slightly more often than that. Still always make sure I have frotz and inform6 installed as soon as I get a new computer. Sometimes I even compile something.
This week I watched Get Lamp (and ordered the dvd), read raif for the first time in maybe two years today, saw a link here, registered. Now that I have introduced myself maybe I even dare join in on some thread some day.
Other than this I play board wargames, sometimes design my own. Got a small game published by a small dtp publisher two years ago. Must have this thing for obscure hobbies that used to be mainstream a few decades ago, now that I think about it.
1 Like
Welcome, pelle! I am the resident lurking guy with a bad elbow who registered at the start of last summer. 
Not many people probably remember me. (My elbow wasn’t bad back then. 
) Just being goofy. Seriously, it’s good to have you here.
I’ve made a few posts on the Inform 6&7 authoring board over the past few days, and I realized that it would be polite to introduce myself.
I was first introduced to Adventure while a student at Cornell University in the mid-1970s. I spent many nights in a computer terminal room, typing commands and reading the responses that were printed out on a long roll of paper (CRT monitors were pretty rare in those days). To this day I take pride in having slain the dragon with the very first command I tried.
Fast forward a few years . . . during the 1980s, I played most, if not all, of the Infocom games on a friend’s Apple IIE. For the next twenty or so years after Infocom bit the dust, I lamented the fact that there were no more text adventures being written (or so I thought).
About a year ago, a friend (the same one with whom I played most of the Infocom games) discovered Inform and brought it to my attention. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store. I managed to finish one fairly sizeable game. Unfortunately, I can’t make it public because, while the plot is wholly original, it is based on characters to which certain notoriously litigious people claim the rights; in order to avoid aggravation and expense, I’m using it only for my own amusement and that of a very few close friends.
I’m now working on a second game which does not have the same constraints. Unlike the first one, where interaction with NPCs was extremely limited, this one will have a good deal of interaction, including conversation. Learning the techniques to make this work is not easy, but I’m having a ball.
Robert Rothman
1 Like
Wow! That must have been a magical experience indeed. I can only imagine. 
Oh man, an age when monitors were rare…
Young’uns like me just can’t comprehend. I love hearing and reading about the old days of computers, though. Must have been a magical time, so to say.
I basically started using Inform 7 yesterday. Bursting with story idea’s, and it’s a blast looking up ways of which I can implement them. Never been much good with text adventures, but I’ve always enjoyed them highly. Hopefully this will help me out!
Bainespal and Argus:
One of the other things about playing Adventure on the University mainframe in those days was that there was no way to save a game. If you got killed or just did things in the wrong order and wound up in an unwinnable position, you had to start all over.
Of course, at least with Adventure you could type a command and get an immediate response (even if was in the form of a line printed on a roll of paper). For a lot of the stuff we did, we had to type our code and data on punchcards (we generally called them “IBM cards” or just “computer cards”) using a keypunch machine. Then we took our deck of cards to a card-reader machine which zipped through the deck (I believe using a compressed-air mechanism) and read each card (I think it read them by determining where light passed through a card, indicated that a hole had been punched in that spot). Then we would wait, anywhere from perhaps an hour to 24 hours depending on the priority of our job (lowly undergraduates like me always had the lowest prority) and at the end of that time we would come back to pick up our output, printed on wide tractor-fed sheets of green-and-white “computer paper.” If you made even a single typo in preparing the cards, it was not unusual to come back after waiting a day only to find that your “output” was no more than an error message. 
It made debugging even a simple program a time-consuming job!
On the other hand, in a lot of ways life was easier–or at least simpler–in those days . . . .
Robert Rothman
While I can wrap my head around the days of keyboard computers, punch-card computers are a completely different world to me. It’s hard for me to fathom… Did you have another machine to make the punch cards for you? Was printing onto paper the only means of visual output? Was data storage limited only to punch cards? What sort of data did punch card computers process anyways?
Being in my early 20’s and the oldest computer I’ve worked with is a Commodore 64 (I grew up on DOS computers, though), it fascinates me to think of how old punch card computers may have worked.
Argus:
To prepare the cards, we used a keypunch machine. It looked like a big typewriter. (That may not be too helpful–typewriters may be as foreign to you as keypunch machines.) There was a keyboard, and a device that held a stack of cards. When you pressed a key, the machine would punch a hole in the card at the appropriate location to represent the character. There were probably hundreds of these machines at various locations throughout the campus.
As far as output was concerned, there were some CRT monitors, but generally only people with some pull or who had a good reason got to use them. For most of us, the only means of output was on paper.
With respect to your other questions, I’m afraid they’re a little beyond my ken. I took an introductory computer course (Bits for NitWits?) and, of course, played Adventure, but I never was (and still am not) really into the technical aspects. I’m sure there there was some means of storage (maybe magnetic tape or punched paper tape?) but it was not available to the great unwashed (and I was pretty dirty). Perhaps some other, more technically-savvy, old-timer can chime in and correct me.
Robert Rothman
I’m quite familiar with typewriters. For some reason, my grandfather collected them. I used them quite a lot as a kid, until we got a DOS computer for me to type into. So I can easily picture the same mechanical hands swinging and imprinting the letters on the paper doing the same to a thicker piece of plastic.
Some of those old ones had CRT monitors for output? Hm… It’s hard for me to picture an Altair 8800 or Imsai 8080 (something of that caliber, at least) putting output into a monitor. I barely know anything about CP\M, though I think that came some time later…
checks Wikipedia
Well! To my surprise, it was used in the 70’s and 80’s, in particular on the aforementioned Altair 8800!
I love learning about this kind of stuff.
One of my uncles said that old computers he used as a kid, you had to put the code into it manually in binary for it to do anything. Was this done pre or post punch cards, do you know of?
(sorry if I seem to be sending a battery of questions at you. My curiosity is rather boundless, and I always always always prefer to learn from someone who experienced things directly than from an encyclopedia. =D)
Argus:
Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear on one point. There was one mainframe computer, which lived in its own building a few miles away. The various means of communicating with it – punchcards or keyboards for input and CRT monitors or line printers for output – all were connected to the same machine over telephone wires. So if you were one of the lucky ones who got to sit at a monitor, it was not connected to its own computer, it was just that you would communicate with the “big” computer through a monitor-equipped terminal.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound patronizing about typewriters; it simply occurred to me that a lot of people who grew up in the digital age may have never seen one except maybe in the movies. I read recently that the last manufacturer of typewriters just went out of business.
Robert Rothman
It’s all good, Mr. Rothman. =D I seem like a young, energetic whippersnapper, but I’m fascinated by technology both old and new, in equal measure. I’ve surprised many people simply by knowing that old phones work in power outages. (my Grandma had a phone like that. Was very handy!) My Grandpa liked old old old technology, my Dad likes 60’s-70’s age technology, my older brother loves his 90’s tech, and I love it all.
Ahhh, so it was one of those building-sized computers. Amazing! And all the inputs outputs were simply routed to it via phone cables. Interesting… And it was situated a few miles away? Hm… I’m guessing ethernet cables weren’t invented/perfected/in widespread use yet, hence the phone line connection. [i](then again, since it’s a few miles away, I’d imagine phone lines were all there were for connecting it all… This must have been an early version of ARPANET. I wonder what year it was…
scrolls down
Mid-70’s! At Cornell University, which is at New York State. (I’m Canadian, so my knowledge of US geography is… Well, better than most Americans that I’ve met. >_>)
Argus, it sounds like you’re actually more familiar with a lot of the technical aspects than I am. I remember what we had to do, and what things looked like “from the outside,” but I never did understand a lot of what made it tick. (Actually, I still don’t–to this day I’m amazed when the little men who live inside my computer do what I tell them to do and then reply to my questions by mirror-writing on the inside of my monitor screen. ) I do recall that “the computer” was an IBM mainframe. At the time, at least in the public mind IBM was practically synonymous with the word “computer.”
Robert RothmanI can read all I want about old technology, but it will never compare to having actually been there. I can plug away on a Commodore 64 all I want, but it can’t ever come close to having had one back when it was top of the line.
A friend of mine reminds me of you a little. She said she paid attention to computers a lot ‘back in the day’. When I asked her about different models of old computers, he knowledge tends to stop around 1987, when the Amiga line started coming out. She says she doesn’t have a clue about computers these days; Facebook almost baffles her still.
Hm, so IBM was almost synonymous with computer back then… Were they the only company that you know of that made them? Was the computer ever referred to as “the IBM”? (similar to how Nintendo used to be synonymous with home consoles)
IBM was not the only computer manufacturer, but it was the biggest, particularly for mainframes used by universities and major corporations.
I remember one summer around that time (it might have been a little bit later) I had a summer job in a small office which was pretty advanced technologically (one of the principals was a former IBM employee). They had a Wang computer, and some of my tasks required working on that. The one thing I remember about it was the disk drive, which sat on the floor and was about the height and overall size of an end table. Each disk (actually, I think it contained several physical disks, but we called it a disk) was about 14 inches in diameter and 2 inches thick. You would place the disk on top of the drive, where there was a mechanism which engaged the disk with the inner workings of the drive. Then you turned on the power, and had to wait about ten minutes for it to come up to speed. I’m not sure what the capacity of the disk was, but my guess is that it was far less than you could fit today on a 3.5 inch floppy.
Robert Rothman
I’m afraid 3.5 inch floppies are gone too. I had an iMac in the late '90s that had no floppy drive built in – I think you were supposed to transfer your data using a CD drive or the internet. Apparently it was the first so-called legacy-free PC without floppy drives; I bought a floppy drive that hooked into the USB port. Now physical data transfer is all on USB drives, I think, or probably on some more advanced things that I haven’t heard about, like kids with bar-code tattoos that get scanned by their iPads or whatever. I probably have my old floppy drives around somewhere, with invaluable things from the history of me like my undergrad college papers. I was going to say that I hope someone is preparing to archive the data from old floppies, but having just typed the previous sentence I don’t want to.
(I’m 40 and not quite as much of an old fogey as I sound, though I wonder if anyone actually is getting a tattoo in the form of those square scan codes you see on flyers and the like. They’re going to replace plastic with flesh! Fact! BTW, happy end of the world tomorrow.)
Time (and technology) marches on. It sounds like pretty soon I may to have to consider trading in my horse and buggy for one of those new-fangled “automobile” thingies. Given the relative prices of gasoline and oats, maybe I should stick with four-legged transportation.
Robert Rothman
I’m probably in the “young’un” set on this board, and I obtained my very first typewriter on Craigslist just last week. (To be fair, it’s For An Art Project, but one that requires it to be functional, so I did clean it all up and such.)
Dave:
You are not the only one “afflicted” with programming. I’m just a bit shy of 80 now (I woke up one morning and there I was) I started my programming career on machines that required a rotary switch and a bunch of micro-switches.
About all I can say about I7 is that it is a long way away from any other language I have ever used. And because of this I have really been struggling with it. However, the human brain is just another group of muscles and I have no intention of letting them get weaker as I get older. I spend 3 times a week at the local gym keeping myself in walking condition so there is no reason I shouldn’t spend at least (if not more) time keeping my brain in thinking condition!
I hope all of you out there are prepared to keep it up until they nail the cover on your final “box”. :mrgreen:
hi, im cory, im 38. grew up playing IF via infocom and i always wanted to write my own, then about two years ago i stumbled upon the IF community online, thank god. now i can finally do it now that ive learned Inform 7. im an english/philosophy/film major and my writings never took off until i made them interactive. working on a magnum opus right now because i think we need more really long works of IF in this community. anyway, for anyone interested, here’s my blog about IF:
http://ezfreemann.livejournal.com/
ok, hit me up, im really friendly. thanks, all!