Video Games Rule (408 hits)
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Submitted by gbusman (View user info) at 2004-10-25 02:01:19 EDT
I decided to take my own advice this weekend, ala:
http://www.ubersite.com/m/45493
I've been playing video games since their inception with my Dad's Commodore 64 and Intellivision when I was a kid. I got a Nintendo the year it came out, same with Gameboy Super Nintendo, and DreamCast. I skipped the N64 and Playstation, and frankly I don't care. I'm not wild about anything on those platforms and the controllers blew. But I caught up with the Xbox, and I'm even online with it playing Ghost Recon.
It was funny watching my dad progress through all these stages of technology change. He entered the Navy in the late 50's, right around the invention of computing technology in general. He had a choice of going into either electronics or electrical information systems. Since my dad had never heard of the latter, and it sounded pretty boring, he went with electronics.
So about the time I'm old enough to understand the difference between the top and bottom channel dials on our TV, my dad realizes he made a big mistake all those years ago. My uncle, who chose the boring sounding one, went on to work for IBM's government funded "Top Secret" classified projects. My dad became an electrician. Funny those little choices isn't it?
So anyway, every now and then he'd be sitting in the living room, tapping at some keys on the Commodore plugged into the TV, trying to teach himself Basic. My dad is a very bright individual, and excelled in math; he probably would have been an excellent programmer. But one thing Dad never had a lot of was tenacious focus. It quickly became a seldom practiced hobby. Of course I remember watching him code between games of Q-bert and thinking what a cool concept it was to make a computer do whatever you want. When we got our next computer I picked up his Basic book and continued where he left off.
From the Commodore we graduated to the Apple 2e, but only in the summers when my mom got to bring one home from the high school. Finally we broke down and bought our own Apple 2gs. What an impressive machine that was, it took the little hard disks (I know they're SUPPOSED to be called floppies.) That little guy got me through many a grade school essay with AppleWorks. You had to put in 2 floppy disks every time you booted it up. They were even labeled "Boot Disk" and "Program Disk." A word processor, spreadsheet, database, and spell check dictionary all on 2.88 megs worth of 3.5 inch magnetic disk. What happened to those days? Enter the age of the "IBM Compatible."
Our first was a 33 MHz IBM PS/2. It had a 211 MB hard drive and 4 megs of ram. The 5 ¼" and 3 ½" drives were side by side and there was space for a third on the bottom. We quickly installed the tape back up drive and backed up Windows 2.5 occupying 30 megs of our hard disk. That sucker came on like 8 floppies, I know because we backed those up too
When I got my first SoundBlaster card one birthday so I could hear the sound effects on X-Wing, it was getting pretty obvious that Dad was no longer the person to turn to for computer questions. We upgraded that beastly thing at least 15 times, until it was finally retired as a 96 MHz Pentium running Windows 95.
When I left for college, I got a new 266 MHz Dell. I was plugged into the campus network and along came glorious Napster. I remember paying $150 bucks for some crappy steering wheel and pedal set that bolted on my desk so I could play Need for Speed 2.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that I'm going to tell my grandkids that I was there for it all, and witnessed everything. I may have even had a small hand in shaping it myself.
"Wow, you mean you had an actual original Nintendo? You played Wolfenstein 3D copied from a disk floating around at school? You actually used modems to call people's houses to play games?"
"That's right" I'll say into the video phone tied to the house central computer. "Crazy, huh? I'll show you something else. There's this place called Ubersite where I wrote about this very moment 50 years ago."
-Bus
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