creepingnet
Veteran Member
Reminicing, being retro, 2 of the things I love to do the most, and a lot of it has to do with Vintage Computing.
I was born in 83', and grew up during the golden age of DOS, x86 processors, and a major transitional stage in computing....from computers being these "magical" objects of whimsy that only bespectacled programmers and electricians like to mess with, to being as commonplace as a television set (and about as well used as one). I also was in a split family with computing power on one side, and old video games on the other.
My formitive geek years started when I was 8. Our school got a computer lab, we would have a period once a week where we would go into the lab and play games like Reader Rabbit or Math Rabbit. Through this, I got rather used to the idea of computer games, they seemed so much more complex and capable than the things my Atari 2600 at home could do.
Back then, our school system had 2 major corporation dealings with eductation going on - the Book-IT Program through Pizza Hut, and later, the RJR Nabisco Public Education Grant. Both of them were tied in with IBM, and that tie in with IBM granted me a lot of opportunities to get my interest stoked. I probably spent a good deal of my pre-pubescent years hunting and pecking on Model "M" Keyboards because of them. However, this stuff did not give me enough insight as to what was REALLY out there on a PC.
Neither did the family Tandy 1000 SX at my sister's house. All it had was Microsoft Adventure, and me being an Atari and NES game player, and being used to 4 color CGA games at school, I was rather bored by the super-business-like Tandy and lost interest....
Then the days came that my sisters got into Auburn University, and got a 386, and moved into a house together. Of course, what are college students with cutting edge computing power going to do? Get GAMES!
One night we came over and my oldest sister had something "Cool" to show me on the computer. She said "this program is called DOSShell, to exit hit alt, then scroll down to exit. Now you are at the DOS prompt. Type this....C-:-\-MONKEY.VGA....." I watched as the once cryptic MS-DOS 5.00 command line finally did something by my own hand, and then she said "Type MONKEY"....next I was greeted with a blue screen saying "Wait a minute! Before we begin....let's have a quick history quiz....press enter to continue", I was handed a purple codewheel, told to match the faces and the territory and type in the date.....and people, that was when I discovered The Secret Of Monkey Island......well, not the actual SECRET of Monkey Island, but the game. And let me tell you, this 9 year old boy was HOOKED for life.
After that, more games came in. Her friends brought her a disk with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy on it, which I was shown at one of their college parties. Man oh man, wonderous stuff. Then she got ASCII version of Dungeons and Dragons which I liked well, and then MAXIT and DepthCharge for BASIC, which I thought was another...older version of the DOS Command line at the time.
The next big game though was Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist, written by Al Lowe and Josh Mandel, the former of which created Leisure Suit Larry, a game I was NEVER allowd to play (well, until I was 16 and got my hands on the 720K Floppy from my bro in-law's stash of floppies). Just like Larry, it was a raunchy game full of lewd-ish humor that warned that it was not for children on the box. However, being the naughty guy I am, I used my newly aquired DOS navigating skills to get into Freddy Pharkas when sis was at school/work, and was always careful NOT to mess up the savegames. She only ever found out once....and it was the part when Freddy and Madame were in bed together, which was about as inconsequential as an episode of Barnie the Dinosaur to my 10 year old mind.
Next I got pinkeye, and was quarantined to the house for a week and a half, on my 10th Birthday no less, but what did I aquire but a copy of Ultima VI: The False Prophet to play on my sister's 386. Now, I had played Ultima before, Exodus in particular, on the 8-bit NES, but NEVER on a computer. I thought it was going to be totally lame, just like Exodus on the NES was to me....at the time...but what I discovered through Ultima was what an x86 DOS Based PC REALLY Could do game-wise. Unlike Nintendo, it seemed PC games of the early 90's let you do just about anything you wanted, and Ultima VI was the posterchild of that. You could pick up a set of ingredients, use them on each other, and make bread! You could attack doors and chests to break into them when locked. You could attack anyone or anything on screen, you could play musical instruments, or even talk to what otherwise would be fore NPCs. Ultima VI has been a mainstay on EVERY Computer I've had ever since that birthday.
It seemed at that age, I got to play all of the great titles. X-WING, yep, my slightly younger sister had a boyfriend who had that on his computer, and a surprise...Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. He then loaned it to my elder sister, and we both played through it on her computer, and for the first time in my life, I actually beat my sister at solving a computer game, so much so, I became the family hint service on Monkey Island 2 and wrote a whole walkthrough on the typewriter at home. I wish I still had that walkthrough. Then a friend of mine got his dad's Compaq 386 and introduced me to Wolfenstein 3D.
Eventually, my sister moved away to another state for a post-graduate program, and took the 386 with her, and my other sister got a Pentium 100, which introduced me to the latest computing craze, the internet. I remember coming over one day, and my now other bro-in-law sat down at the new Windows 95 equipped Pentium 100 and showed us what this thing could do. Let me tell you, I was HOOKED. This was 1995...everything was the latest and greatest. I remember surfing in Netscape 2.0....which opens another part of my vintage computing hobby...vintage-gaming...this is when the retro-gamer who became Mad-Mike was created.
There was a conflict with that 386 that I vowed (and evetually completed albeit years later)...once, I was the scapegoat for corrupt files on my sister's computer. The bill was $60.00, high for 2 college students, and I was told I Could not use the computer again.....which lead me to vow that someday, I would get what my sister what whining for at the time - a 486! A 486 with lots of RAM, SVGA, and enough hard disk to install all those games I love so much on it! I took to reading catalogs from my moms' work that sold computer parts and tried to learn enough to build my own PC...
There were contributing factors then to my retro-hobby, and all start with the same word - VINTAGE! The 1990's were the definitive VINTAGE decade. Everything was vintage! The Grunge bands I got into (another story totally) played VINTAGE guitars, products started to emulate the looks of yesteryear in many cases, and apparently, the Atari 2600 STILL had a loyal following of "Vintage Atari Enthusasts" and amongst them, me, 13 year old Mad-Mike. Eventually, I bought another 2600 off the internet from a guy named Joseph Pelitri and so began the collecting of vintage games.
When I was not playing guitar (Which I did more than vintage gaming at the time...by far...and I have the callouses and chops to show for it), I was going to the pawn and thrift shops snatching up bundles of Atari hardware and games, and eventually, I missed my 8-bit Nintendo too, so I got another one of those, and started snatching up all the closeouts at Wal-Mart and K-Mart, mowing lawns and doing "man of the house" chores for my mom and her friends to earn the money (ie, mowing hte yard, cleaning the rain spouts, painting walls, fixing plumbing, replacing outlets and switches, diagnosing faulty appliances, fixing the lawn mower...much of which I enjoyed).
Then my other sister was married moving away, and had a "gift" for me.....it was none other than that blasted Tandy I played Adventure on when I was 8. Older, and more mature, I wondered what kind of things I Could coax the lowly old 8088 based Tandy to do.
Around that same time, a family friend who had a new career in IT started hanging out and though he was quite helpful, I still got the occasional "Doorstop" and "dinosaur" comments about my Tandy from him....and I wanted to fullfill that 486 promise I said to my older Sister years ago. Eventually, he made a promise to build a 486 under special educational cricumstances (ie. grades), and brought a ZEOS Convertible 386/486 motherboard over as a token of the future. That motherboard laid in the closet for 4-6 years, collecting dust in it's anti-static bag.
In 2000, after years of DOS Games and writing my schoolwork in Deskmate and Professional Write, the Tandy gave up the ghost, and I decided to begin trashpicking to build a new computer....one that would keep me from having to walk 12 miles a weekend to and from the Auburn University library to surf the web, or go to my friend's house 16 miles round trip to play Ultima or Wolfenstein 3D on the Compaq.
I went to a classmates dingy trailer park and grabbed 2 Packard Bell chassis, a 386 bottom half with motherboard, and a Packard Bell 486 top half (Which fit quite well considering differences). I got my Dremel and went to town, cutting supports out to fit the ZEOS AT motherboard into the case. The power connectors matched, and I basically built what may have been a functional computer (and possibly the very first major chop case mod ever). I had no idea what I was doing, but apparently, I did not mess anything up with my super-modified Tandy/Packard Bell/Zeos nearly functional frankenstein.
This all changed when I joined a band in Montgomery called Lithium, the true beginnings of Creeping Net, the Creeping Network, and my IT career.
I was born in 83', and grew up during the golden age of DOS, x86 processors, and a major transitional stage in computing....from computers being these "magical" objects of whimsy that only bespectacled programmers and electricians like to mess with, to being as commonplace as a television set (and about as well used as one). I also was in a split family with computing power on one side, and old video games on the other.
My formitive geek years started when I was 8. Our school got a computer lab, we would have a period once a week where we would go into the lab and play games like Reader Rabbit or Math Rabbit. Through this, I got rather used to the idea of computer games, they seemed so much more complex and capable than the things my Atari 2600 at home could do.
Back then, our school system had 2 major corporation dealings with eductation going on - the Book-IT Program through Pizza Hut, and later, the RJR Nabisco Public Education Grant. Both of them were tied in with IBM, and that tie in with IBM granted me a lot of opportunities to get my interest stoked. I probably spent a good deal of my pre-pubescent years hunting and pecking on Model "M" Keyboards because of them. However, this stuff did not give me enough insight as to what was REALLY out there on a PC.
Neither did the family Tandy 1000 SX at my sister's house. All it had was Microsoft Adventure, and me being an Atari and NES game player, and being used to 4 color CGA games at school, I was rather bored by the super-business-like Tandy and lost interest....
Then the days came that my sisters got into Auburn University, and got a 386, and moved into a house together. Of course, what are college students with cutting edge computing power going to do? Get GAMES!
One night we came over and my oldest sister had something "Cool" to show me on the computer. She said "this program is called DOSShell, to exit hit alt, then scroll down to exit. Now you are at the DOS prompt. Type this....C-:-\-MONKEY.VGA....." I watched as the once cryptic MS-DOS 5.00 command line finally did something by my own hand, and then she said "Type MONKEY"....next I was greeted with a blue screen saying "Wait a minute! Before we begin....let's have a quick history quiz....press enter to continue", I was handed a purple codewheel, told to match the faces and the territory and type in the date.....and people, that was when I discovered The Secret Of Monkey Island......well, not the actual SECRET of Monkey Island, but the game. And let me tell you, this 9 year old boy was HOOKED for life.
After that, more games came in. Her friends brought her a disk with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy on it, which I was shown at one of their college parties. Man oh man, wonderous stuff. Then she got ASCII version of Dungeons and Dragons which I liked well, and then MAXIT and DepthCharge for BASIC, which I thought was another...older version of the DOS Command line at the time.
The next big game though was Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist, written by Al Lowe and Josh Mandel, the former of which created Leisure Suit Larry, a game I was NEVER allowd to play (well, until I was 16 and got my hands on the 720K Floppy from my bro in-law's stash of floppies). Just like Larry, it was a raunchy game full of lewd-ish humor that warned that it was not for children on the box. However, being the naughty guy I am, I used my newly aquired DOS navigating skills to get into Freddy Pharkas when sis was at school/work, and was always careful NOT to mess up the savegames. She only ever found out once....and it was the part when Freddy and Madame were in bed together, which was about as inconsequential as an episode of Barnie the Dinosaur to my 10 year old mind.
Next I got pinkeye, and was quarantined to the house for a week and a half, on my 10th Birthday no less, but what did I aquire but a copy of Ultima VI: The False Prophet to play on my sister's 386. Now, I had played Ultima before, Exodus in particular, on the 8-bit NES, but NEVER on a computer. I thought it was going to be totally lame, just like Exodus on the NES was to me....at the time...but what I discovered through Ultima was what an x86 DOS Based PC REALLY Could do game-wise. Unlike Nintendo, it seemed PC games of the early 90's let you do just about anything you wanted, and Ultima VI was the posterchild of that. You could pick up a set of ingredients, use them on each other, and make bread! You could attack doors and chests to break into them when locked. You could attack anyone or anything on screen, you could play musical instruments, or even talk to what otherwise would be fore NPCs. Ultima VI has been a mainstay on EVERY Computer I've had ever since that birthday.
It seemed at that age, I got to play all of the great titles. X-WING, yep, my slightly younger sister had a boyfriend who had that on his computer, and a surprise...Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. He then loaned it to my elder sister, and we both played through it on her computer, and for the first time in my life, I actually beat my sister at solving a computer game, so much so, I became the family hint service on Monkey Island 2 and wrote a whole walkthrough on the typewriter at home. I wish I still had that walkthrough. Then a friend of mine got his dad's Compaq 386 and introduced me to Wolfenstein 3D.
Eventually, my sister moved away to another state for a post-graduate program, and took the 386 with her, and my other sister got a Pentium 100, which introduced me to the latest computing craze, the internet. I remember coming over one day, and my now other bro-in-law sat down at the new Windows 95 equipped Pentium 100 and showed us what this thing could do. Let me tell you, I was HOOKED. This was 1995...everything was the latest and greatest. I remember surfing in Netscape 2.0....which opens another part of my vintage computing hobby...vintage-gaming...this is when the retro-gamer who became Mad-Mike was created.
There was a conflict with that 386 that I vowed (and evetually completed albeit years later)...once, I was the scapegoat for corrupt files on my sister's computer. The bill was $60.00, high for 2 college students, and I was told I Could not use the computer again.....which lead me to vow that someday, I would get what my sister what whining for at the time - a 486! A 486 with lots of RAM, SVGA, and enough hard disk to install all those games I love so much on it! I took to reading catalogs from my moms' work that sold computer parts and tried to learn enough to build my own PC...
There were contributing factors then to my retro-hobby, and all start with the same word - VINTAGE! The 1990's were the definitive VINTAGE decade. Everything was vintage! The Grunge bands I got into (another story totally) played VINTAGE guitars, products started to emulate the looks of yesteryear in many cases, and apparently, the Atari 2600 STILL had a loyal following of "Vintage Atari Enthusasts" and amongst them, me, 13 year old Mad-Mike. Eventually, I bought another 2600 off the internet from a guy named Joseph Pelitri and so began the collecting of vintage games.
When I was not playing guitar (Which I did more than vintage gaming at the time...by far...and I have the callouses and chops to show for it), I was going to the pawn and thrift shops snatching up bundles of Atari hardware and games, and eventually, I missed my 8-bit Nintendo too, so I got another one of those, and started snatching up all the closeouts at Wal-Mart and K-Mart, mowing lawns and doing "man of the house" chores for my mom and her friends to earn the money (ie, mowing hte yard, cleaning the rain spouts, painting walls, fixing plumbing, replacing outlets and switches, diagnosing faulty appliances, fixing the lawn mower...much of which I enjoyed).
Then my other sister was married moving away, and had a "gift" for me.....it was none other than that blasted Tandy I played Adventure on when I was 8. Older, and more mature, I wondered what kind of things I Could coax the lowly old 8088 based Tandy to do.
Around that same time, a family friend who had a new career in IT started hanging out and though he was quite helpful, I still got the occasional "Doorstop" and "dinosaur" comments about my Tandy from him....and I wanted to fullfill that 486 promise I said to my older Sister years ago. Eventually, he made a promise to build a 486 under special educational cricumstances (ie. grades), and brought a ZEOS Convertible 386/486 motherboard over as a token of the future. That motherboard laid in the closet for 4-6 years, collecting dust in it's anti-static bag.
In 2000, after years of DOS Games and writing my schoolwork in Deskmate and Professional Write, the Tandy gave up the ghost, and I decided to begin trashpicking to build a new computer....one that would keep me from having to walk 12 miles a weekend to and from the Auburn University library to surf the web, or go to my friend's house 16 miles round trip to play Ultima or Wolfenstein 3D on the Compaq.
I went to a classmates dingy trailer park and grabbed 2 Packard Bell chassis, a 386 bottom half with motherboard, and a Packard Bell 486 top half (Which fit quite well considering differences). I got my Dremel and went to town, cutting supports out to fit the ZEOS AT motherboard into the case. The power connectors matched, and I basically built what may have been a functional computer (and possibly the very first major chop case mod ever). I had no idea what I was doing, but apparently, I did not mess anything up with my super-modified Tandy/Packard Bell/Zeos nearly functional frankenstein.
This all changed when I joined a band in Montgomery called Lithium, the true beginnings of Creeping Net, the Creeping Network, and my IT career.