It’s the Datalife Holiday Pack!

It’s Christmas morning, 1983. You eagerly run downstairs to the fireplace and notice a stocking stuffed to the brim with goodies. You dump it out and find ten boxes of Datalife 5.25″ floppy diskettes.

Choose your own Adventure:

a) You are happy because disks are expensive for a kid and you use a personal computer.

b) You’d rather have candy.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What did you get for Christmas this year? Any gadgets, games, or computer stuff?

Who will win the battle of the Zappers?

Discussion Topic of the Week: Name any item you received as a present for Christmas in 1987. Don’t remember? Guess!

How your Apple II sees itself.
(click above to see full ad)

This early Apple II video digitizer (the DS-65 Digiselector) took a regular video input and…well, digitized it. The result was a 256×256 pixel greyscale still image that you could manipulate on your Apple II. In an age before consumer digital cameras, this was quite a novel feat of technical wizardry.

It sold for $349.95 in 1979, which is equivalent to $1,054.24 in 2010 dollars. That’s actually not too bad.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a video capture card? Tell us about it.

“Your Game Boy is about to become a man.”

While I’ve been a fan of Duke Nukem since his initial shareware debut in 1991, I’ve never played this 2D platformer for the Game Boy Color. It arrived relatively fresh on the heels of the mega-success that was Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, along with a handful of other spin-off titles for various game consoles.

The true sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem Forever, is supposedly coming soon (after 14 years in development hell), and I look forward to playing that when it arrives.

By the way — if you like Duke Nukem, you may enjoy reading this interview of 3D Realms founder and president Scott Miller that I did last year.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Which is the better game: Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, or Quake? (Not just technologically speaking, but based on the overall experience.)

Every once and a while, I receive emails from people looking for a certain game, electronic toy, or computer from their distant past. I then pass it on to intrepid VC&G readers to crack the case.

The Clues

Pete writes:

Hi…

I was thinking about a game I played as a kid, probably came out around 1982-1986 or so. I think it was called Space Shuttle, but I could be wrong. I’ve searched for it online, but all I see are flight simulator type games, and the one I’m looking for was very different.

There was a roster of astronauts with different skills and personality types, and depending who you picked for your crew, they could either get along well or go crazy onboard! One of the astronauts was Fred Pfister, I think, don’t know why I remember that. There was a way to go EVA, and each shuttle mission required you to land and take off. If I recall correctly, you even had to watch how much money you had in the budget – you could make money by carrying satellites and every mission launched had a cost to it.

I think this would have been a Texas Instruments TI 99 4A game, but it could have been a Commodore 64 game too. Any help?

Thanks,
Pete

The Search Begins

It’s up to you to find the object of Pete’s fuzzy memory. Post any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below. Pete will be monitoring the comments, so if you need to clarify something with him, ask away. Good luck!

—

Have a memory of a computer, video game, computer software, or electronic toy you need help identifying? Send me an email describing your memories in detail. Hopefully, the collective genius of the VC&G readership can help solve your mystery.

“…thus we are very skinny.”

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite first-person RPG of all time?

“And you say this is some sort of football simulator?”

Discussion Topic of the Week: Does your family play video or computer games around the holidays as part of a tradition? Please discuss.

“This product is not intended for the unlawful copying of copywrited material.”

Rewritable CD-RW discs seemed like a good idea when CD-Rs (which could only be written once) still cost $10 a piece. But as the price of CD-Rs fell to pennies per disc over the course of about five years, the CD-RW format’s popularity quickly faded.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you burn your first CD-R or CD-RW? How did you feel when you did it? What did you write to the disc?

“System Requirements: 48k Atari, 1 disk drive, modem”

You’re looking at an ad for what may have been the world’s first multiplayer graphical online gaming service, Games Computers Play (1985). It may also have been the world’s first graphical multi-user environment, as it predated the Lucasfilm Habitat beta test for the C64 (1986) by six months or more.

I don’t know else much about this Atari 8-bit-only service beside what can be gleaned from the advertisement above, a 1985 article in Antic magazine, and this thread over at AtariAge.

One of the posters in the forum thread linked above mentioned that he/she found the creators of the service, whom I’d love to talk to myself. I’m trying to get in touch with that poster, but if anyone knows anything about this service (including info about who created it) or has stories to share, please email me here.

[Update – I did get in touch with one of the creators of this service. More info to follow. ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first game you played with another human (or humans) over a modem?

Shades of Tasha Yar

If you were shopping for a home PC in 1984, you were bound to face this decision: should I get an Apple IIc or the flashy new IBM PCjr?

From late 1983 to early 1984, the press hyped the PCjr to absurd proportions, which set IBM’s consumer machine up for a mighty fall not too long after its introduction (IBM withdrew it from the market within a year of its release). The Apple IIc, on the other hand, was one of Apple’s more successful products of the era. Apple won the battle, but IBM won the war with the PC line overall.

(…or did they?)

Discussion Topic of the Week: It’s 1984, and you can only buy one computer: an IBM PCjr or an Apple IIc. Which one will you choose and why?