Month 4- Hello..My name is AngryHamster...and I'm a -

[Hammy]

With all the hello's in here it feels like an AA meeting that I went to once in support of a buddy of mine dealing with the disease....

Anyways-
I've been here since January.
I've played games since Basic. In fact, I remember when you had to put the game in a tape drive and run it through the compiler before you gave it an initiation command in BASIC.

I've played games so long, that I remember those HUGE floppies that first came out where when you put them in the drive, which was about 100lbs, you had to be careful because the clamp could take your finger off.

I'm in my mid 30's, and I remember when Pong, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600 , Coleco Vision, Intellivision, and the TRS- 80 I, II, and III came out.

I remember that they were in GROCERY stores on the same aisle you found greeting cards. I grew up in Silicon Valley, and I remember when people would come to our house to get certain things done because the lines at the library and the community computer were so long. We not only had the first PC in the neighborhood, but maybe the entire city- Plus two more in the garage on the workbench workstations.

I can remember generation 1 macintosh clear as yesterday- mouse and Black and White screen and all. Little happy face when you loaded it. What about the Apple Newton? Wasn't that a scream? Use it for about 20 minutes and go plug it in.

Anyways, for as much as I know, I know nothing about what is under the hood in all this technology. You will see me asking for help as much as you see me offering up what I know.

Hope to see you all in a game very soon, and dont be a stranger. Too many people drop in for a hello and vanish these days.....

[BigTwinky]

You are pretty darn angry, aren't ya, you furry wittle rodent you.

[-IRC-MIKE]

You and I are about the same age Hammy. My computing background sounds kinda similar. I think I still have a TRS-80 and a game I cannot find anywhere called "Pyramid" which was a cassette tape text-based game.
I had a Tandy 100 and a Commodore 64 with one of those 100 lb 5 1/4 in. floppy disk drives that would shear your thumb off if you didn't close the drive properly.
I had some 286 machines in our garage that me and my neighborhood friends used to play games when we could find them.
One of the games I recall playing was called "Mail Order Monsters" by Electronic Arts. Another game I played was called "Archon". These games came after the atari, and the pong which was a big yellow and black console (ours was).

I used to actually charge the kids in the neighborhood to play all of my machines... since it was cheaper than going to the arcade. I actually held tournaments on the atari with my friends and charged them a quarter per game or five bucks a week to come in and play as much as they liked.

I remember being the first person in the entire school that actually brought his homework to class that had been printed from a computer. They all thought I was lying and had typed it up on a brother dot matrix typewriter. I finally had to take pictures of it and bring them to school.

I built my own programs to do the simplest of tasks, and my neighborhood friends and I had our own nerdy "Computer Club" it was named.

I was the first person I know of that had a modem for a pc. It was fascinating to wait your turn to get on a message board and post a message. When you finally got in you had the spotlight. I paid 109.99 for one modem and it looked just like an atari game cartridge that plugged into the back of the commodore 64. 64 KB of rom memory was nothing compared to the commodore 128 when it came out. The 128 took gaming to new levels.

About the same ERA, we had a video disk player that was a GIANT disk that was in a permanent sheath. The video disk itself was the same size as a full size turntable record. There was only one place in Dublin Georgia that had very few of this video type. We would check every other day to see if they had a new movie in the store, and it was like a kid in a candy store when they finally got one in.

Ahh the good ole days.

[Hammy]

You and I are about the same age Hammy. My computing background sounds kinda similar. I think I still have a TRS-80 and a game I cannot find anywhere called "Pyramid" which was a cassette tape text-based game.
I had a Tandy 100 and a Commodore 64 with one of those 100 lb 5 1/4 in. floppy disk drives that would shear your thumb off if you didn't close the drive properly.
I had some 286 machines in our garage that me and my neighborhood friends used to play games when we could find them.
One of the games I recall playing was called "Mail Order Monsters" by Electronic Arts. Another game I played was called "Archon". These games came after the atari, and the pong which was a big yellow and black console (ours was).

I used to actually charge the kids in the neighborhood to play all of my machines... since it was cheaper than going to the arcade. I actually held tournaments on the atari with my friends and charged them a quarter per game or five bucks a week to come in and play as much as they liked.

I remember being the first person in the entire school that actually brought his homework to class that had been printed from a computer. They all thought I was lying and had typed it up on a brother dot matrix typewriter. I finally had to take pictures of it and bring them to school.

I built my own programs to do the simplest of tasks, and my neighborhood friends and I had our own nerdy "Computer Club" it was named.

I was the first person I know of that had a modem for a pc. It was fascinating to wait your turn to get on a message board and post a message. When you finally got in you had the spotlight. I paid 109.99 for one modem and it looked just like an atari game cartridge that plugged into the back of the commodore 64. 64 KB of rom memory was nothing compared to the commodore 128 when it came out. The 128 took gaming to new levels.

About the same ERA, we had a video disk player that was a GIANT disk that was in a permanent sheath. The video disk itself was the same size as a full size turntable record. There was only one place in Dublin Georgia that had very few of this video type. We would check every other day to see if they had a new movie in the store, and it was like a kid in a candy store when they finally got one in.

Ahh the good ole days.

Pyramid- Red Booklet.
Yup I got that one, Asylum, and a few others.