Days of Yore Post-Credits: Video Games

You know how the past few years, certain movies have enticed you to stay through the credits by including a scene at the end of the credits? It often reveals something you need to know for the sequel. (Pro tip: Pirates of the Caribbean and Marvel movies are never over until the credits have finished rolling!) Think of this post like that, except that this isn't necessarily important to understand for future blogs. But you never know!

Image by Sergey Nivens on Adobe Stock

As you may recall, I covered some aspects of video games in my post on computers, but there is more! We had games on floppy disks back in the '80s. When friends came over, sometimes they brought their games on floppy disks to play together. I loved playing games like Digger, Carmen Sandiego, Mario Bros, Arkanoid, Galaxian, Tetris, Pac-Man and others. I learned how to play Solitaire on the computer and have only played it a couple times with real cards.

At that time, most of those games could be played using the keyboard (particularly the arrow keys, and certain numbers and letters). Some could also be played using a joystick, a small hand-held device with a knob that looked a bit like a gear shift in a car. Joysticks were generally pretty cool, but could be frustrating as well. For example, if I accidentally moved the knob in the wrong direction playing Tetris, the blocks would drop where I didn't want them to drop. As I grew up with a tremor, involuntary movements from time to time could be annoying. (That can also be annoying at times when trying to hold a camera still to take a picture.)

Space Invaders
Jason Kotecki
Oil on canvas
Used with permission

Occasionally we would go to a video arcade where we could play games on bigger machines. Depending on the nature of the game, we would be standing and pressing buttons or a joystick knob built into the machine, or we might be sitting on a motorbike built into the machine. Or we could be seated and turning a steering wheel. Games like Duck Hunt involved a toy gun that you pointed at ducks as they crossed the screen. Last time I was at the Seattle Museum of Flight, I used a flight simulator that works very much like an arcade game, where you try to land a plane smoothly.

As I grew older, smaller devices became more popular, such as Game Boy, Nintendo DS series and others. There were also some tiny ones like Tamagotchi, which involved a digital animal or character that the user could feed and nurture.

Photo by Cláudio Luiz Castro on Unsplash

Some of my friends in school got into Call of Duty, which I haven't tried. One job where I worked, a bunch of my coworkers were into World of Warcraft. As I am told it is very time-consuming, I haven't gotten into that one, but I'm curious. My brother Aaron works for Blizzard, who makes it. I did a seasonal job testing the French versions of games at Nintendo in 2009. That was when I got to know the Wii. This is a bigger console, and includes a board that you put pressure on in different places. The console also has other components. I tested Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort, which had exercises you could do on the board and it kept score. The player was represented on the screen by a customizable character called a Mii. I also tested the New Super Mario Bros Wii, which didn't use a Mii due to Mario, Luigi and Toad already being there. I then got to know Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks on the much smaller Nintendo DSi. I'm not sure why I didn't get into Zelda when I was younger, but it was fun! 

As time has gone on, video games have become more available. I even (I know this may be shocking) have some on my cell phone! (My favorite story there is one time when I downloaded a Mario Bros app. I can get very competitive, and I got so into it on my cell phone that my thumbs were sore the next day!) Pokémon Go was particularly popular a few years ago on cell phones. "Gotta catch 'em all!"

This seemed to be an appropriate way to end this post:

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Days of Yore: Computers

Many of us have heard about how our parents walked 5 miles to and from school, in blowing snow, uphill both ways...and they enjoyed it! Did they? I don't know, as I wasn't born yet, but they did teach me to be honest, so maybe? I know I did not. (That may be partly because most of my childhood was in the Philippines, just north of the equator, where they don't get snow due to the tropical heat. I ran 5 miles to school in pelting rain, uphill both ways, slipping and sliding all the way, arriving at school and home muddy and drenched to the bone, and I enjoyed it! My homework was so waterlogged that my dog ate it. OK, maybe that didn't happen, though occasionally some of the rain-related details came close to the truth.)

Another thing we often hear is "Kids today will never know the struggle..." I hope to go through a few things that have changed over the years in the next few blogs (between poems). I feel like "Days of Yore" may be exaggerating a bit, but I was going to call it "Before the Internet" and then realized some of the things I might want to include were when the internet was young.

Photo by Boffy b
CC BY-SA 3.0 license

We got our first computer in the Philippines in 1988. Once we turned it on, we had to know the codes to get around. (It's been so long that I had to look it up just now because I've forgotten a lot.) We didn't have Windows yet, so we had to learn a lot to navigate MS-DOS.

C:\> kljadh
Bad command or file name
C:\> cd games
C:\games>

Once we turned on our computer, we had to navigate to the program we needed. The <dir> command came in handy when we couldn't remember the specific file name that we needed to open. Our IBM computer at home informed us there was a "Bad command or file name" when it wasn't happy with what we told it. Our Apple computers at school preferred the term "Syntax error" instead.

When I was working on a paper for school, I would open WordPerfect and type it up. We didn't have font choices at first, and when they were introduced, a different font was indicated by a different text color on the screen. We had to print the document to see what the fonts looked like. I remember coming back to the US in 1991 and being amazed with the new-fangled computers that actually showed on the screen what the fonts looked like!

When we wanted to print, we used our dot-matrix printers. Sheets of paper were attached to each other with perforations. We strung the papers into the printer with strips of paper on either side of the sheet with holes down the side so it could go into the rollers in the printer. The printer made loud noises as it printed. Once we were done printing, we would tear the last sheet off the ream on the perforated line, and then tear each page apart. We then tore the sides off the page, which also had perforations for that purpose.

When friends came over, they would sometimes bring their large floppy disks (so called because they were, well, floppy) with games on them. We would insert it in the disk drive (the computer above has two such disk drives) to play games. We didn't have them on the computer, just on the floppy disks, so we had to have the disk if we wanted to play the game. I loved to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Digger (also called Dig-Dug), Tetris, Pac-Man, Mario Bros, and more. (Side note: Seeing some of this on Stranger Things in more recent years brought back memories.)

As technology moved forward, the floppy disks got smaller and rigid. However, as we learned at BCTI, they were still floppy if you opened the outer case (not advisable if you're planning to continue using them, but a great way to destroy them if you needed to make sure to eliminate sensitive data on them).

When turning the computer off, there were several ways. The "proper" way was to type "quit" in the DOS prompt. (I learned the word "acquit" because I accidentally typed "aquit" and thought it was funny, so I asked my parents what "aquit" meant. But as I was asking them verbally, they didn't hear the way I spelled it, so they told me the definition of "acquit." I was surprised it was actually a word!)

If necessary, you could do "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" to turn the computer off. Now that only opens a screen with choices to lock your computer, open the Task Manager, or other options. In an emergency (such as the Blue Screen of Death or the diabolical cascading error messages, see below), it was sometimes necessary to hold down the power button until the computer turned off.

There were several errors that got annoying. "Bad command or file name" was one. "Syntax error" was another. But with those, you just had to retype the command correctly. You never wanted to see the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), which was when the entire screen turned blue and had text explaining that the computer would be turning off now (but in a lot more words), whether you liked it or not. But as computers continued to advance, nothing struck more panic and the idea of diabolic laughter coming out of the computer (not literally, but nearly) as this, which was the stuff of horror movies and nightmares:

Picture found here

An error message would pop up and start jumping pell-mell around the screen, leaving a long trail going everywhere. It was a bit reminiscent of a leprechaun gleefully jumping all over the room and causing mischief, mayhem and destruction of everything in its path. It moved too fast for me to try to click the button as I chased it around the screen.

In 8th grade, we started learning about a new concept called the information superhighway. At first I pictured a literal paved highway across the US with circuits running through it, where people could exchange information. That turned out not to be the case. It is now called the internet. Our first modems used the phone lines. We could connect to the internet, but we couldn't use phones at the same time. (This was an issue for some customers when I had an IT job helping with tax preparation software a few years later.) As the modems connected to the internet, they made very loud dialing noises and then a loud staticky noise. I'm glad that has gone away since then.

On the whole, I loved computers. But they had some quirks that I am thankful have been worked out over the years.

My grandpa and I had a running good-natured argument about what was better: computers or typewriters. He used his typewriter, and couldn't see the point of computers. I insisted that computers were better. Someone tried giving him a computer once, and it just sat there and collected dust while he used his typewriter. One time our power went out and I called him to ask if I could borrow his typewriter. He laughed for several minutes. Another time he commented he had seen a typewriter exactly like his in a museum. He didn't get an e-mail address until the last couple years of his life, and I helped monitor it. Toward the end, he commented that he wished he had learned more about computers sooner, as he was starting to see the benefits more.