Getting All Retro

Although I'm an IT professional, I rarely write about computers. There's always a lot going on in this field with the new version of Windows ("Windows 7") getting a lot of press now. Here in Madison, Google has officially opened its office down on Blount Street. The politicos were out in full force touting our city and the UW for the occasion. Be nice to those folks if you see them on the street. They are hardcore geeks who are designing Google's infrastructure which will be able to remember every search for porn that you make at their site.

I was chatting with a co-worker recently and found out that, like me, he had a Commodore 64 computer back in the 1980s. Our discussion turned to GEOS, a graphical user interface for the C64 that came out in 1986. I remember it well. It was odd to go from using a command line exclusively to having a GUI like my Mac-loving friends.





I found a detailed history of the OS which made for some interesting reading and I figured I'd link to it if any old C64 users stumble by here. Computer geeks should find it interesting as well since it explains how the programmers managed to create a GUI for the C64 which had such limited computing power. Improbably, the article notes that there are folks today who just can't give up the C64 and have retooled them to do things like serve streaming audio.

Reading the article brought back a lot of fond memories such as typing up a school paper on the GEOS word processor, geoWrite, and printing it out on my daisy wheel printer. Plus there were the games. The C64 had some great games written for it. I played a lot of Hardball by Accolade in the second half of the 1980s. Their football game, 4th and Inches was also a favorite. Another great title is Portal. It came on several floppy disks – it was massive for its time. You play an astronaut who returns to Earth from a galaxy far, far away only to find that it is devoid of people. So you hunker down in front of a computer terminal to access planetwide databases in order to suss out where everyone went. Plus there were all the great text adventures by Infocom such as the Zorks and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And I can't forget those text adventures that had some graphics like Mindshadow. Lastly I'll mention the LucasArts games that I loved – Maniac Mansion and Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders.

For some more good retro-geekage, check out the video below of The Mother of All Demos. The demo's 40th anniversary is next week. It featured computer scientist Doug Engelbart showing off a mouse in public for the first time as well as other computer features that we take for granted these days – copying & pasting, hyperlinks, et al. He even did some video conferencing and outlined the Internet. It's a real treat to see core PC functions back when they were bleeding edge.