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[OM] Re: Geeks and nerds (That can't be OT in this crowd.)

Subject: [OM] Re: Geeks and nerds (That can't be OT in this crowd.)
From: Olaf Greve <ogreve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:32:04 +0100
Hiya,

 >Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is classic  
beyond classic.

Yeah: "Ken sent me!" ;)

Those really were the days -IMO-... Back in 1990 we went on a 6-week  
trip through the mid-west with an extensive visit to California,  
including Yosemite. Being a BIG Sierra fan back then, I made sure we  
paid a visit to Oakhurst. At first we thought the direction must have  
been off. Surely that dull grey logo-less building couldn't be _THE_  
Sierra Online?
Well, knocking the door revealed it was and they told us they  
intentionally kept a low profile. We were given a free tour, with all  
sorts of previews too, and we got free Sierra t-shirts, and best of  
all.... In popped Ken Williams himself, with whom we had a chat and  
who was delighted to see such interest from as far away as The  
Netherlands; I should still have the Sierra magazine he signed for  
us...:)

Great fun; those AGI- and SCI-based games were the best and thanks to  
their keyboard-based interface (actually typing instruction like  
"throw cannister at Orat" (SQ1)) I learned a lot of English. :)

Later, when they went with the new point-and-click mouse-based  
interface, the games simply weren't as fun anymore, and though I still  
played several of them, and the graphics and sound were better than  
ever, I really already back then longed back for the old interface...

Hardware-wise I started out with these games on our -back then- top of  
the line 8088 with something superfancy: a 21MB HD, AND no less than  
an EGA graphics card (causing several gamers from all over town to  
come over and check out those games in 16 colours). Later, we went  
towards another real 'beast of a machine' (for that time), being a 386  
DX-33MHz, with a cool 4MB configuration and a 100MB HD, AND a VGA card  
with 1 MB of memory on board. :) Running all sorts of different  
bootmanaged memory configurations (himem, QEMM, etc.) one managed to  
squeeze every last byte out of the system in order to run as optimally  
as possible. Another thing that had people from all over town coming  
over, was when I directly bought the Adlib music board when it was  
first released, and later the same with the Gravis Ultrasound (on  
which I upped the memory at little cost by buying some broken VGA  
boards for a few bucks, that were equipped with the correct memory ICs).

Nowadays, computers for me are 'just a job', or better put: 'just a  
tool to do my job', the fun part of it is gone, and though I now have  
a Macbook Pro with plenty of horsepower in it, I have hardly played a  
single computer game this millennium. I never cared much for the  
realistic 3D games; IMO much cooler were the old Sierra games, and  
several of the other games that used to fit on 1 or 2 floppy-disks,  
like Iron Man, Dune 2, etc. :)))

Still plenty of great memories though...:)

Cheers!
Olafo


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