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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
Despite a lot of personal computer systems existing well into the next decades, by the time the 1990s roll around, there are mostly two major types of computers that exist - the International Business Machines compatible (IBM-compatible or IBM-clone) machine and the Apple Macintosh. While both PCs (which IBM-compatible machines will shorten down to, despite both compatibles and Macs being personal computers (that's the PC part) or minicomputers/microcomputers) and Macs are a part of my life and will be showing up in various places, my journey mostly stays on the side that doesn't involve the Motorola 68000 CPU.
The Intel 80286 is in the same family of programmable Central Processing Units that spawned out of the 4044 chip, but because of the anti-trust lawsuits against HAL, err, IBM, that chip could go on any sort of motherboard with any kind of combination of expansion cards or other elements. Which could sometimes have some very terrible effects that required some debugging and batch file modification to get to work.
The specific computer in question, however, is one that I remember having something that likely had at least an EGA capable machine, because I remember blues along with reds and browns. At this point in time, while there are still plenty of games (and always will be), I know for a fact that there was WordStar on this machine, and also a graphics program from Bröderbund software (before they became known for the Carmen Sandiego games) called Print Shop Pro that got some pretty hefty use along with the dot matrix printer that was in the computer area. When I first went to kindergarten, the name tag that I had identifying me and who my grownups were had been printed off of the printer with a more calligraphic script, instead of a handwritten one. I am told I was the only one who had such a thing in kindergarten.
All the same, we're still not actually in the world where assignments are expected to be typed instead of written, so I'm still mostly relating to these computers through games. The CGA palette of four colors (in one or another possibility) certainly made for some interesting decisions for a lot of the licensed games that I remember playing (many different forms of Jeopardy in eye-searing yellows, Concentration in the same, a really, really terrible game that had the Mega Man license and name), as well as a surprisingly difficult advertisement for Domino's Pizza called Avoid The Noid. You can watch sometime demolish it in ten minutes at an Awful Games Done Quick, but for a smaller audience, memorizing the layout of the trap doors on each floor, knowing which enemies are going to appear on what floors, then learning which phones are the ones that are going to blow you up and which ones are going to give you what you need to continue on is a great of memory and repetition. These, too, had CGA graphics, but for she reason, it worked better with a pink Noid and a cyan world. And a very public domain soundtrack. (The top two levels use, respectively, the William Tell Overture and the Ride of the Valkyries in all their early-MIDI glory.) I think I'd already beaten the game at least once before I realized there was an additional tool at my disposal, the screen-wiping Noid Avoiders that could be used to get out of a sticky situation just in the nick of time.
It was also in this machine that I learned to be a little less afraid of a command line. Dad the engineer had set up the computer so that, after everything was done booting, it would load Automenu, a program meant to build menus so that it would execute the correct commands to get to what was installed on the machine. There was one very tiny problem associated with that on this machine - if I wanted to run Sharkey's 3D Pool, especially in EGA mode, I would run out of memory to play the game and it would kick me back to the menu screen. My dad, the engineer, saw this as a learning opportunity for me, since there was something I wanted to do and a way of figuring out how to do it. And like a true child of an engineer, I went at it as best I could, looking at how the menu entries were constructed and seeing what they did and trying to do the same thing. Which didn't work, but because I could articulate my thought process, my dad helped me understand the commands better so that I could do it correctly. So I learned to leave the ease of the automenu and go to the command line to directly invoke games, because, as it turns out, games tend to be something that involves a lot of memory space. (We'll come back to that later on in the series.)
I also remember a games pack of various things, some of which were text based games, like investigating the kidnapping of the President, a helicopter simulator of some sort that I never got any good at flying anything for, and a game that I played an awful lot on the slow setting, where you were a thing that kicked blocks, and the point was to crush bees with those blocks. You could also score lots of bonus points by looking up three specially marked boxes next to each other. I remembered it as Pango, but it appears the game is actually called Pengo. Although the DOSGames page on the game, that has the right graphics, calls it Pango, while also mentioning the arcade version was called Pengo. In any case, it's a lot easier game to play as a small child when the computer is running at 8MHz rather than 16. Even then, things eventually got too fast and frantic, like they do with just about every other arcade game.
This machine was the first home computer I remember a lot of. It had an alcove of its own, so that when work or other things were being done, it was tucked away and it of sight, although not it if hearing, certainly. That idea would change design when the family computer got network access, because my parents believed in the idea of making sure that nothing untoward happened by virtue of all network activity being observable by anyone and everyone say any time, but before that time, it was a bit secluded away and could be a useful place to retreat to for good sessions.
- CPU: Intel 80286 or compatible chip, with the ability to toggle between speeds of 8 MHz and 16 MHz through the combination of Ctrl-Alt-Minus(-) and Ctrl-Alt-Plus(+) or the use of a Turbo button on the case.
- Memory: Up to 4MB of RAM
- Graphics: Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), 4 colors, 320x200, Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), 16 colors, 320x200, Video Graphics Array (VGA), 256 colors, 320x200 or 16 colors, 640x480
- Sound: A SoundBlaster (or, more likely, a SoundBlaster compatible audio card), with an RCA mini jack connected to speakers, but also, the internal speaker of the motherboard itself
- Inputs/Outputs: Keyboards (AT or PS/2), Mouse (DE-9 serial or PS/2), Joysticks and gamepads (DE-9 serial), Printers (parallel), basically anything that will fit an ISA 8-bit or 16-bit slot and provides an appropriate port and cable.
- Storage: This machine had to have a hard drive on it, but it couldn't have been more than 100 MB. It also game with both a 3.5" disk drive and a 5.25" disk drive, for all your floppy needs.
- OS: MS-DOS (likely 5.0 for this system)
Despite a lot of personal computer systems existing well into the next decades, by the time the 1990s roll around, there are mostly two major types of computers that exist - the International Business Machines compatible (IBM-compatible or IBM-clone) machine and the Apple Macintosh. While both PCs (which IBM-compatible machines will shorten down to, despite both compatibles and Macs being personal computers (that's the PC part) or minicomputers/microcomputers) and Macs are a part of my life and will be showing up in various places, my journey mostly stays on the side that doesn't involve the Motorola 68000 CPU.
The Intel 80286 is in the same family of programmable Central Processing Units that spawned out of the 4044 chip, but because of the anti-trust lawsuits against HAL, err, IBM, that chip could go on any sort of motherboard with any kind of combination of expansion cards or other elements. Which could sometimes have some very terrible effects that required some debugging and batch file modification to get to work.
The specific computer in question, however, is one that I remember having something that likely had at least an EGA capable machine, because I remember blues along with reds and browns. At this point in time, while there are still plenty of games (and always will be), I know for a fact that there was WordStar on this machine, and also a graphics program from Bröderbund software (before they became known for the Carmen Sandiego games) called Print Shop Pro that got some pretty hefty use along with the dot matrix printer that was in the computer area. When I first went to kindergarten, the name tag that I had identifying me and who my grownups were had been printed off of the printer with a more calligraphic script, instead of a handwritten one. I am told I was the only one who had such a thing in kindergarten.
All the same, we're still not actually in the world where assignments are expected to be typed instead of written, so I'm still mostly relating to these computers through games. The CGA palette of four colors (in one or another possibility) certainly made for some interesting decisions for a lot of the licensed games that I remember playing (many different forms of Jeopardy in eye-searing yellows, Concentration in the same, a really, really terrible game that had the Mega Man license and name), as well as a surprisingly difficult advertisement for Domino's Pizza called Avoid The Noid. You can watch sometime demolish it in ten minutes at an Awful Games Done Quick, but for a smaller audience, memorizing the layout of the trap doors on each floor, knowing which enemies are going to appear on what floors, then learning which phones are the ones that are going to blow you up and which ones are going to give you what you need to continue on is a great of memory and repetition. These, too, had CGA graphics, but for she reason, it worked better with a pink Noid and a cyan world. And a very public domain soundtrack. (The top two levels use, respectively, the William Tell Overture and the Ride of the Valkyries in all their early-MIDI glory.) I think I'd already beaten the game at least once before I realized there was an additional tool at my disposal, the screen-wiping Noid Avoiders that could be used to get out of a sticky situation just in the nick of time.
It was also in this machine that I learned to be a little less afraid of a command line. Dad the engineer had set up the computer so that, after everything was done booting, it would load Automenu, a program meant to build menus so that it would execute the correct commands to get to what was installed on the machine. There was one very tiny problem associated with that on this machine - if I wanted to run Sharkey's 3D Pool, especially in EGA mode, I would run out of memory to play the game and it would kick me back to the menu screen. My dad, the engineer, saw this as a learning opportunity for me, since there was something I wanted to do and a way of figuring out how to do it. And like a true child of an engineer, I went at it as best I could, looking at how the menu entries were constructed and seeing what they did and trying to do the same thing. Which didn't work, but because I could articulate my thought process, my dad helped me understand the commands better so that I could do it correctly. So I learned to leave the ease of the automenu and go to the command line to directly invoke games, because, as it turns out, games tend to be something that involves a lot of memory space. (We'll come back to that later on in the series.)
I also remember a games pack of various things, some of which were text based games, like investigating the kidnapping of the President, a helicopter simulator of some sort that I never got any good at flying anything for, and a game that I played an awful lot on the slow setting, where you were a thing that kicked blocks, and the point was to crush bees with those blocks. You could also score lots of bonus points by looking up three specially marked boxes next to each other. I remembered it as Pango, but it appears the game is actually called Pengo. Although the DOSGames page on the game, that has the right graphics, calls it Pango, while also mentioning the arcade version was called Pengo. In any case, it's a lot easier game to play as a small child when the computer is running at 8MHz rather than 16. Even then, things eventually got too fast and frantic, like they do with just about every other arcade game.
This machine was the first home computer I remember a lot of. It had an alcove of its own, so that when work or other things were being done, it was tucked away and it of sight, although not it if hearing, certainly. That idea would change design when the family computer got network access, because my parents believed in the idea of making sure that nothing untoward happened by virtue of all network activity being observable by anyone and everyone say any time, but before that time, it was a bit secluded away and could be a useful place to retreat to for good sessions.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-07 12:11 pm (UTC)Pengo I seem to remember as involving a cartoon penguin and blocks of ice, so it's possible there are multiple games of the same name.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-07 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-07 03:28 pm (UTC)Incidentally, while looking at the pics in that does jog my memory, I think I was thinking of a completely different game with a penguin protagonist - a side scroller where you have to hop from ice flow to ice flow.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-07 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-07 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-07 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-07 05:34 pm (UTC)I can't remember, off-hand, anything that required slow speed. There might have been some games that had clock-dependent timing loops, but that was a long time ago and I've slept since then.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-10 01:27 pm (UTC)At one time I wanted to make a proper cycle-accurate 80286 emulator and do an OS in its protected mode. But alas no time...
no subject
Date: 2021-12-10 02:07 pm (UTC)