FOSSILS TRAPPED IN AMBER

The sense of smell, they say, is very closely tied to memory. Well, the other day I had some Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Popcorn (not my first choice, but Target doesn't have non-microwaveable popcorn, for some odd reason), and the smell wafting from the kitchen reminded me of playing computer games in my teenage years, in the house on Craig Street in Hazlet, NJ where I spent my formative years (10-18). Very strange. Sweet Jebus, what hallucinogens does Orville put in that shit?

The funniest thing is the actual games I used to spend hours upon hours playing, like Lode Runner and Ultima III. I mean, just take a look at this crap screen shot of the "pub" in this ancient RPG. This is the full color version, which I couldn't even enjoy on the amber monochrome screen of my old IBM Portable PC. This game was so primitive yet so addicting, and imminently playable, a quality lacking in most games. It's hard to believe, but I used to play this until dawn during the summer, when I was 15 or so. I even remembered my foolproof way of avoiding the death of your characters: just eject the 5¼" floppy disk from the drive before it got a chance to save it; since there was no hard drive, this worked every time! Check out the specs on this bad boy:

Introduced: February 1984
Price: US $4225
Weight: 30 pounds
CPU: Intel 8088 @ 4.77MHz
RAM: 256K, 640K max
Display: 9-inch amber display, CGA graphics, 80 X 25 text
Storage: Two 360KB 5.25-inch disk drives
Ports: 1 parallel, 1 serial, CGA video
OS: IBM PC-DOS Version 2.10 (disk)

That's right, the processor ran at a blazing fast 4.77MHz, whereas the average CPU in 2006 is 3GHz, or 3000MHz, which is about 628 times faster. Add to that the included memory being 1000 times less than today, and this gives you some idea as to how far personal computing has come. There were many other games that I played on this thing over the years, like early EA games like "Dr. J vs. Bird One-on-One", "Earl Weaver Baseball" (the first to feature MLBPA players, and actual ballpark dimensions), "Archon" and "King's Quest III". Of course, there were also the text-based adventure games like "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "Zork", which I never finished. But Lode Runner was one of the first ones I remember playing, and Ultima III was the first one I lost a lot of sleep over.

Sorry, that was my geek moment for the day. I just had to get that out.