Sunday, October 18, 2015

Dial-up Speed, Mr. Sulu!

My first computer game. A friend and I played this thing endlessly on a GE mainframe terminal at my old high school in the mid-70s. All text-based – you had to print out each turn on a dot-matrix printer to keep track of where you were. (The terminal didn’t even have a screen.) You also had to be able to calculate cosines (on paper – no calculators!) to know which way to point the torpedoes, and it took three or four days to complete a game. And I hate to admit it as a taxpayer, but we spent a lot of time in the early 80s playing this on the mainframe computers at the Navy Department.

No comments: