A novelty cocktail ice cube for giants.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Has one of your computers or video game consoles ever overheated? Tell us about it.

The cover of the first issue of "Family Computing" magazine, September 1983.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What's your favorite food to eat for Thanksgiving? Favorite video game to play?

That spot in the upper left is actually mold that grew on the paper.

When is a text adventure game not a text adventure game? When it's Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor.

Infocom's fourth entry in the Zork series (actually the 8th if you count the related Enchanter series and Wishbringer) combined interactive fiction with light RPG elements such as equipment, stat sheets, an on-screen map, and character leveling to create a unique game that may be best compared to a single player MUD (a SUD?).

Beyond Zork sports procedurally generated maps in some areas, so replay value is theoretically infinite. But randomness is a double-edged sword in this case: its magic items move around between saves and loads, and that can frustratingly break the suspension of disbelief (i.e. you see it, you die, you come back, and it's gone). Still, Beyond Zork is an amazing game that deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What's your favorite entry in the Zork series? Every Zork-related game counts.

Stranded in a jungle with only a desk, a cup of coffee, and an Atari 800.

I've always enjoyed the illustration style found on the earliest Atari 400/800 instruction manuals, such as the one here for the Basic Reference Manual. I've included an extra large scan this time so you can enjoy the detail up close.

Does anybody know the name of the artist who did them? I'll admit I haven't looked very hard.

By the way, this manual was written by River Raid creator Carol Shaw.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever programmed with your dad? Tell us about it.

Dungeon Master: Theron's Quest - The video game for brutal dictators.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever dressed as a video game character for Halloween? Tell us about it.

Text in bloom.

Here's an interesting piece of obsolete technology — a plastic Lanier daisy wheel for a daisy wheel printer. Its actual size is about three inches in diameter.

There was a time when having a "letter quality" impact printer meant that the machine printed text using pre-formed, typewriter-like type elements. Some printers held these elements in the shape of a cylinder or a sphere, but in the case of the daisy wheel printer, the character forms projected from a central wheel in a shape that resembled a daisy flower.

Daisy wheel printers produced text by rotating the wheel to the proper character spoke and striking the back of it against an ink ribbon, which would leave a mark on the underlying paper.

Each daisy wheel rendered a different font (or type size), and thus fonts could be changed as easily as replacing one wheel with another. In this case, you're looking at a wheel for the font called "Prestige Elite 12," but printer makers sold dozens of other font wheels, such as those for Courier 10 or Cubic 15.

The daisy wheel method reproduced fonts using a dramatically different technique than, say, dot-matrix printers, which used a single matrix of metal pins to form various characters.

Laser and inkjet printers, which produce much less noise and use software-based fonts, made impact printers thoroughly obsolete for every-day PC use by the late 1980s (though stragglers used dot-matrix printers well into the mid-1990s due to lower prices). Even so, impact printers still reign supreme in specialized applications that require physical force, such as document reproduction via carbon copy paper.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used a daisy wheel printer? Tell us about it.

It's a trap!

Discussion Topic of the Week: What's your favorite static-screen graphical text adventure game?

The iBook: a minimalist scan in honor of Steve Jobs.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What did you think of the original iMac when you first saw it?

"Introducing 3DO Blaster — the ultimate game platform for your PC."

Of all the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer devices made in the 1990s, the Creative Labs 3DO Blaster was perhaps the most unique. Retailing for $399.95 in 1994, the full set contained an ISA expansion card for an IBM-PC Compatible computer, a special CD-ROM drive, a game pad, and a couple games.

With the 3DO Blaster, 3DO software didn't run on the PC's computing hardware itself (as would be the case with a software emulator). Instead, the Blaster's expansion board contained a nearly complete set of 3DO console circuitry that merely used its PC host for power, video output, and as an optical media reader with the included CD-ROM drive. To get sound, you had to have a Creative Labs Sound Blaster card already in your PC.

Once installed in your PC, you could use the 3DO blaster to play 3DO games loaded from official 3DO game CDs that displayed on your computer's monitor. 3DO Blaster supported a windowed graphics mode in Windows 3.1 and full-screen in MS-DOS.

The 3DO Blaster did not fare well in the marketplace due to its high price, impractical nature, and the fact that the 3DO platform never really took off. If you happen to own one of these, treat it kindly, as it is most assuredly a rare gaming artifact from the early 1990s.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a 3DO console? What are your favorite games for the platform?

"It's so small I nearly swallowed it."

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was an amazing little gadget. This 1980 calculator-sized computer packed a full QWERTY keyboard and the BASIC programming language built in. The ability to program BASIC on such a tiny pocket machine was incredible in an age when few calculators were programmable at all, and the ones that were required arcane rituals to program.

I used this exact model myself in high school on some math tests to perform some trigonometry equations in a BASIC program I wrote. Even though that was in the mid-late 1990s, the Pocket Computer seemed so futuristic that the teacher had no idea it was possible. Even today, the Pocket Computer remains incredibly useful for certain tasks. That's an amazing thing to say about a device released in 1980.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What's the smallest computing device you owned prior to the year 2000?