The Long Road

My first computer was a 386. It had drives for both types of floppy discs, 2 megs of ram, a “turbo” button and a math co-processor. The hard drive was 50 megs big. Games were considered big if they came on more than four 1.4 meg discs. Amazingly, many fit on just 1. At one point they cost about 1$ a piece, I must have bought hundreds of them.

I remember playing with config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get “high mem” for certain games. I spent 50$ on 2 more megs of ram so I could play Simcity 2000; it entertained me for months. My first sound card cost hours in tweaking, but it was worth it to hear the digital voices in Dune 2 and the lasers firing in X-Wing. One of the first games to use polygons was Out of This World, it was incredibly beautiful and had a unmatched atmosphere of isolation and exploration.

Back then, we didn’t have 3D acceleration, surround sound, or multiplayer. There wasn’t even an “internet”. All our 14.4kbs modems could do was dial up our friends so we could play the 1 or 2 games that supported point-to-point connectivity. And piracy! Dear lord, piracy was difficult back then. Dialling into BBSs to download required that you were able to connect in the first place, busy signals were obviously very common, and then grabbing what you needed might have taken several nights of slowly leeching one byte at a time.

Today, well, today we have Crysis and torrents.