The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader.
Godzilla is one of the most popular movie monsters in film history. Here's the story behind Japan's largest export.
NUCLEAR AGE
On March 1, 1954, at the Bikini atoll in the South Pacific, the United States tested the world's first hydrogen bomb. It was 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bombs that had been dropped on Japan nine years earlier.
American ships were warned to stay out of the test area …but because the project was top-secret, the U.S. government provided little warning to other countries. U.S. officials were certain that the resulting nuclear fallout would land on an empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean and no one would be in jeopardy.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. The fallout didn't travel in the direction they expected, and a small Japanese fishing boat named the Daigo Fukuryo Maru ("Lucky Dragon") was in the area where the nuclear cloud came to earth. Within hours of the blast, the boat's entire crew became violently ill from radiation poisoning. On September 23, 1954, after more than six months of agony, a radioman named Aikichi Huboyama died.
The fate of the crew of the Daigo Fukuryo Maru made international news. In Japan, headlines like "The Second Atomic Bombing of Mankind" compared the incident to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
ART IMITATES LIFE
While all this was going on, Japanese movie producer Tomoyuki Tanaka arrived in Indonesia to oversee a film called Beyond the Glory. It was scheduled to be the main release for Japan's Toho Studios the following year but it never got off the ground; the Indonesian government refused to issue work visas to the film's two stars.
Suddenly, Tanaka found himself with time, money, and actors- but no film to make. In addition, Toho Studios had a big hole in their release schedule. The producer had to come up with a new movie concept… fast.
On his flight back to Tokyo, Tanaka stared out the window at the ocean below, desperately trying to think of something. His mind wandered to the H-bomb tests in the South Pacific and the crew of the Daigo Fukuryo Maru …and then it hit him: he would combine an American-style monster movie with a serious message about the threat of radiation and nuclear weapons tests.
PROJECT G
Commercially, it made sense. For obvious reasons, the Japanese public was very concerned about nuclear testing. And in theaters, monster movies were hot. The 1933 classic King Kong had been re-released in 1952 and made more than $3 million in international ticket sales -four times what it had earned the first time around. Time magazine even named the great ape "Monster of the Year." Its huge success inspired a "monster-on-the-loose" film craze.
One of the first to cash in on the fad was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, which featured a dinosaur attacking New York City after nuclear tests awakened him from a million-year sleep. The film cost $400,000 to make and was a critical flop -but with $5 million in box office receipts, it was one of the top-grossing movies of the year.
Tanaka got approval from his studio to do a Japanese version. He hired a prominent Japanese science fiction writer to write a knockoff screenplay tentatively titled Big Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea, but he still wasn't sure what kind of monster to use, or what to call it. So to start out, the film was referred to simply as "Project G."
A PAIR OF EXPERTS
Meanwhile, he began assembling a crew. For director, Tanaka picked Ishiro Honda, a documentary filmmaker who had been Akiro Kurosawa's assistant on The Seven Samurai (considered the best Japanese film ever by most critics). Like many of the Toho Studios crew, Honda was a veteran of the Imperial Army. He had visited Hiroshima several months after the atomic bomb was dropped. "When I returned from the war and passed through Hiroshima," he told an interviewer years later, "there was a heavy atmosphere -a fear that the earth was already coming to an end. That became my basis. Believe it or not, we naively hoped that Godzilla's death in the film was going to coincide with the end of nuclear testing."
Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya.
Special effects were handled by Eiji Tsuburaya. During the war, he had made unusual propaganda films for the Imperial Army -he recreated battle in miniature, so Japanese movie audiences could follow the progress of the war. His work was so skillful that when American occupation forces got ahold of his reenactment of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they were convinced that they were watching actual combat footage. Since childhood, Eiji had dreamed of making monster movies with his miniature sets. Now he would have his opportunity.
FAT CHANCE
As it turned out, finding a name for the monster was easy. "At the time there was a big -I mean huge- fellow working on Toho's publicity department," director Ashiro Honda recalled. "Employees argued 'that guy is as big as a gorilla.' 'No, he's almost as big as a kujira (whale).' Over time, the two mixed and he was nicknamed 'Gojira' (pronounced GO-dzee-la). So when we were stuck for a name, Tanaka said, 'Hey, you know that guy over in publicity…?'"
The name Gojira would turn out to be a great choice, but in the beginning it was very confusing. "Very few people, even the cast, knew what Gojira would be," says actor Yoshio Tsuchiya. "Since the name was derived from kujira (whale) and gorilla, I imagined some kind of giant aquatic gorilla."
GETTING STARTED
Since the scenes using human actors were filmed separately from the special effects monster footage, Honda didn't have to wait for Tanaka to work out the monster details before beginning to film. And he didn't: "Honda would direct me to act surprised that Gojira was coming," recalled actor Yu Fujiki, who played a sailor in the film. "But since I didn't know what Gojira would look like, it was kind of weird. So I asked Honda what Gojira would be like, and he said, 'I don't know, but anyway, the monster is coming!'"
DESIGNING A MONSTER
It took the model department three tries to come up with the right design for Gojira. The first model had fishlike scales for skin and a line of pointy spikes running down its back. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka liked the spikes, but thought the head was too big and the scales too "fishy." Next they created a "warty" Gojira with a smaller head and large rounded bumps on the skin. Tanaka didn't like this treatment either, so they came up with "alligator" Gojira, this time with much smaller, linear bumps arranged in rows like bumps on an alligator's back. Alligator Gojira got the nod.
SUITS ME FINE
Now Tanaka had a name and a look for his monster -but what kind of special effects would he use? Stop-motion animation (e.g. claymation) used tiny, moveable clay models, and was filmed frame by frame. It produced excellent results -King Kong was filmed with stop-motion animation- but was time consuming and expensive. Plus, it limited the amount of detail that could be shown -a big problem, since so much of the script involved the monster knocking down buildings. (It's almost impossible to make a building collapse realistically when filming frame by frame.)
The alternative: use a man in a monster suit. That could be filmed at a larger scale, making higher levels of details possible. And because the footage would be filmed in "real time" instead of frame by frame, it could be finished in a few weeks instead of several months. The problem with such a low-tech technique was that if the filmmakers weren't careful, the man in the monster suit would end up looking like …a man in a monster suit.
In the end, it was scheduling that decided the issue -a monster suit was quicker, and Toho Studios had only a year to produce the film, so Gojira became a man in a costume.
The special effects crew built a full-size Gojira model, which they used to create plaster molds for the monster suit. Then they poured latex rubber into the molds to make Gojira's skin. The skin was then attached to a cloth "inner skin" made of cloth stuffed with polystyrene foam and bamboo to provide the monster's bulk. The fully assembled suit weighed more than 220 pounds.
The actor entered the costume via a zipper that ran along the dorsal fin; he was (barely) able to see out of the costume through four tiny holes in Gojira's neck. The monster's head was then mounted on a brace that rested on the actor's head; an offscreen technician used a radio-controlled mechanism to open and close the mouth.
SWEATY WORK
Gojira's action sequences were filmed at a high speed so that when it was slowed down for viewing, the buildings crumbled more realistically. But this meant that the set had to be lit twice as bright as when filming at normal speed, and the hot lights caused temperatures inside to suit the climb as high as 120°F, with the only ventilation provided by the eyeholes in Gojira's neck.
Under these conditions it was nearly impossible to film for more than a few minutes at a time. Typically, the actor inside the suit would spend 7 to 10 minutes rehearsing a scene in costume with the studio lights turned off. Then the lights came on and the scene was filmed for about three minutes, which was all the actor could take before he risked passing out from heat prostration and suffocation. Collapsing mid-scene was not unusual, and two actors who alternated as Gojira (Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka) sweated so profusely that the crew drained as much as half a pint of sweat from the suit at the end of the day.
The onscreen result of filming in such difficult conditions was a slow, lumbering creature who shuffled and lurched across the tiny cityscapes …but that was just the look that Tanaka wanted: in the 1950s, paleontologists incorrectly assumed that most dinosaurs were huge, slow-witted, slow-moving creatures, and Tanaka's quest for dinosaur accuracy dovetailed nicely with the limitations imposed by the heavy suit and hot studio lights.
TINY TOWN
Entire city blocks of downtown Tokyo were reconstructed in elaborate detail for the film. For the scene in which Gojira destroys Tokyo's famous Ginza district, special effects man Eiji Tsuburaya's technicians reproduced a three-square-block section of the district in miniature, complete with interior floors and walls to make sure the buildings would crumble realistically when Gojira smashes them. Tsuburaya also insisted that the tiny automobiles, buses, and trains be hand made from cast iron to ensure that when Gojira stepped on them, the sturdy little vehicles would crush realistically.
MAKING NOISE
Finding a suitable roar for Gojira was one of the trickier aspects of creating the monster. The film's sound effects team tried numerous actual animal sounds: grunts, growls, roars, and other noises. They played them backward, forward, individually, and in groups, but nothing seemed to work. Then composer Akira Ifukube tried rubbing the strings of a bass violin with the fingers of a resin-coated rubber glove, and reverberating the sound. That did the trick.
OPENING NIGHT
Finally, after 122 days of filming, Gojira premiered in Japan on November 3, 1954. The film had cost a fortune to make- the final tally was 60 million yen (about $65 million in 1999 dollars), about 250 times the average cost of a Japanese film at that time.
But it turned out to be a good investment: Gojira was one of the most popular films of the year and earned a fortune for Toho.
Gojira was also a critical success. "While American monster-on-the-loose films used radiation to get the monster up and running around," David Kalat writes in A Critical History and Filmography of Toho's Godzilla Series, "Honda saw his monster as a narrative device to discuss the terror of the nuclear age." Less than a decade after World War II, Japanese critics understood and appreciated the implicit message.
COMING TO AMERICA
Gojira's box office success in Japan caught the attention of American movie studios; in 1955 Joseph E. Levine of TransWorld Films bought the film's U.S. rights for $25,000. The spelling of the monster's name was changed to Godzilla, an approximation of how it was pronounced in Japanese (GO-dzee-la), and the title was changed to Godzilla, King of the Monsters.
Levine knew that if he released Godzilla with Japanese dialogue, it would appeal only to art-house film crowds -and he wouldn't make back his investment. A subtitled film would miss the youth audience entirely, since many kids were too young to read them. So Levine adapted the film for Americans by dubbing it into English.
MADE IN USA
It wasn't the only change Levine made.The plot was revised, scenes were rearranged or removed entirely, and brand-new scenes were filmed to insert an American character into the perviously all-Japanese film. The American, played by Raymond Burr (of TV's Ironside and Perry Mason), is a newspaper reporter named Steve Martin who happens to be on assignment in Japan when Godzilla goes on the attack.
Burr couldn't appear on screen at the same time as the Japanese actors in the original version of the film, but numerous scenes of Japanese actors talking to one another were re-edited to make it look like they were talking to him.
FROM A TO B
The effect of Levine's changes was to turn what had been a polished, serious film for adults into a monster movie made for drive-in theaters and kiddie matinees. But that was precisely what he wanted: In the mid-1950s, the American film industry was in a slump. The advent of television, combined with laws that had forced the studios to sell off their theater chains, caused a dramatic drop in movie attendance and movie profits. Major studios became extremely cautious, making fewer A-films than they had in the 1940s.
As a result, several companies sprang up to make cheap B-movies for drive-ins and faded downtown movie palaces. Then, along came Gojira. "Though a big budget, major studio film in Japan," Stuart Galbraith writes in Monsters are Attacking Tokyo!, "the Americanized Gojira was released [solely] as an exploitation feature." Because it was intended for the B-movie market, the changes were done on the cheap, which lowered the quality of the American version of the film. The poor dubbing and sophomoric dialogue made it difficult for Western filmgoers, already used to cliched American monster movies, to take the film seriously. And they didn't.
SON(S) OF GODZILLA
Say what you will about the changes Levine made to the original Gojira, he knew his audience. Godzilla, King of the Monsters opened in the U.S. on April 26, 1956, and made more than $2 million at the box office, an astonishing sum for the 1950s. The American version did so well that it was exported back to Japan under the title Monster King Godzilla (Raymond Burr's dialogue was dubbed into Japanese), where it added to the profits already made by Gojira. And Burr's character was so popular with Japanese audiences that reporter characters became a staple of later Godzilla movies in the 1960s and 1970s.
Enthused by the success of the first Gojira film, Toho ordered up the first of what would become more than 20 sequels. Gojira's Counterattack (the U.S. version was called Gigantis the Fire Monster) was released in 1955. Toho made nine non-Gojira monster movies between 1955 and 1962, featuring such monsters as the Abominable Snowman, and a robot named Mogera. But as J.D. Lees write in The Official Godzilla Compendium, the release of King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962 made Godzilla a superstar. "The pairing with the famous ape elevated Godzilla from the swelling ranks of interchangeable atomic monsters of the fifties and placed him among the classic pantheon of cinematic creatures."
GODZILLA FLICKS
* Godzilla Raids Again (1955). The first cheesy Godzilla sequel, it was brought to America in 1959 as Gigantis the Fire Monster, to avoid confusion with the original. Plot: "Yearning for a change of pace, the King of Monsters opts to destroy Osaka instead of Tokyo, but the spiny Angorous is out to dethrone our hero. Citizens flee in terror when the battle royale begins." Director: Ishiro Honda (Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever)
* King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963). Developed from an idea by Willis O'Brien, creator of the original King Kong's stop-motion animation. O'Brien's story was about a fight between Kong and "the Ginko," a monster made by Dr. Frankenstein's grandson. But the only studio willing to make the film was Toho -and they insisted on using Godzilla. The Japanese played it as a satire, with the two monsters wrestling in Tokyo (where else?) and on top of Mt. Fuji. King Kong wins. Director: Ishiro Honda (A Critical History of Godzilla)
* Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964). Released as Godzilla vs. the Thing. "When the egg of giant monster Mothra is washed ashore by a storm, a greedy entrepreneur is quick to exploit it. Meanwhile, Godzilla reappears and goes on a rampage… Godzilla, who seems to be really enjoying his reign of destruction, shows more personality than in previous appearances… Excellent in all departments." Director: Ishiro Honda (Cult Flicks and Trash Picks)
* Godzilla vs. Monster Zero (1965). "Novel Godzilla adventure with the big guy and Rodan in outer space. Suspicious denizens of Planet X require the help of Godzilla and Rodan to rid themselves of the menacing Ghidra, whom they refer to as Monster Zero. Will they, in return, help Earth as promised, or is this one big fat double cross?" Director: Ishiro Honda (Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever)
* Godzilla vs. Sea Monster (1968). "This exercise in cardboard mayhem stars the saucy saurian as a crusty critter suffering a case of the crabs when he's attacked by colossal crustaceans (notably Ebirah, a giant lobster) and does battle with the Red Bamboo bad-guy gang." Director: Jun Fukuda (Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again)
* Godzilla on Monster Island (1972). "In this harmless, toy-like movie, Godzilla talks, and he and spiny Angillus battle alien-summoned Ghidra and new playmate Gigan, who has a buzz saw in his belly." Director: Jun Fukuda (Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide)
* Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1972). "A Japanese industrial city has an ecology woe; its bay of waste and rotting animal life breeds Hedorah, which shoots laser beams from its eye pods and flies at will… To the rescue comes flat-footed Godzilla to indulge in a duel-of-the-titans." Godzilla flies in this one, and it looks really cheap- "the army consists of about ten guys." Director: Yoshimitsu Banno (Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again)
* Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973). "The 400-foot-tall green lizard is aided by a jet-packed robot in fighting off Megalon (a giant cockroach with Zap Killer Beam), Baragon the stomper, and a race of underground Earthlings, the Seatopians." Director: Jun Fukuda (Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again)
* Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster (1974). "Japanese sci-fi sukiyaki with the King of Monsters battling a cyborg Godzilla controlled by aliens bent on conquest. A huge rodent creature said to embody Asian spirits comes to the real Godzilla's aid when the languid lizard squares off against antagonistic Angorous." Director: Jun Fukuda (Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again)
* Godzilla 1985 (1984). "After 39 years, the Big G recovers from his apparent death …and returns to destroy Tokyo all over again. Disregarding the previous 14 sequels, (most of which were set in "the future" anyway), the plot marches along much like a '70s disaster film." Director: Kohji Hashimoto (Cult Flicks and Trash Picks)
* Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989). "Genetic Scientist Surigama uses cells from Godzilla's body to create hardy new crop strains, while also splicing the cell's DNA to that of his dead daughter, using that of her favorite rose as a catalyst. His experiments result in the giant plant/animal monster Biollante, a nightmare of creeping vines, snapping teeth, and corrosive sap." Director: Kazuki Ohmori (Cult Flicks and Trash Picks)
* Godzilla (1998). Charmless big-bucks travesty starring Matthew Broderick. Bad career move.
* Godzilla (2014):
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader, a fantastic book by the Bathroom Readers' Institute. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
Comments (1)
Although most things on that list are long since obsolete, there is still a thriving MUD community online.
Anyone looking for a richer and more imaginative gameplaying experience than the likes of World of Warcraft, I'd advise you to check out http://www.mudconnector.com and the current top mud www.3k.org (my personal favourite).
Man we thought we were living in the FUTURE!
My mom used to bring home her 80lb portable computer and set the phone receiver on the computer hook to download the latest code every night and print it out on our dot matrix. I'm still astounded that our family slept so well during those years.
And Prodigy! Oh my god! I recently downloaded MadMaze. Then there were the NOVA "specials" on there. Man, I loved Prodigy.
My first job after school was designing dialog boxes in Visual C++ 2, and later in 4.2, and the computer ran Windows 3.51 with 4 MB RAM and 180 MB hard disk. When they upgraded my RAM from 4 to 16, I sort of threw a party, just for myself and a buddy :).
Everything has improved by about 10,000% in speed and durability. The only thing that hasn't changed must since the early 1990 is Unix/Linx.
I had an Amiga 500, then a 1200. I paid a small fortune (out of my allowance) for a 20 MB (yes, megabyte) harddisk and that was a cleap clone to start with. I've still got it and I've made an image of the WorkBench that runs on an emulator on my PC now. I still remember modems quite well: we had an extra telephone line installed and my uncle paid for that in exchange for me being his companies webmaster. I'd made the most Godawful website for his company: one very long page with job openings. Yes, I was one of the worlds first Webmasters, when that still meant something ;-)
Mind you, I kinda stopped learning about new stuff somewhere around the introduction of stylesheets and its gotten to the point I'm testing out a Mac these days, because I can't be bothered trying to get stuff to work. And I'm... 34.
I was the only one of my friends to have such 'internet access' - which meant that every one thought I was weird and didnt understand chatting via the 'instant messgenger' type program. I remember being able to change my screen name every other day (or everyday if I chose) because there were so few users it didnt really matter. What amazes me is that I did all this at around 11 or 12, and now I wouldnt even be able to do anything I thought was fun (joining chats with older users, randomly searching profiles and having mine searchable) with all the age restrictions. I still talk to one friend I met on Prodigy; we met by one of us randomly searching profiles for other users that lived in our area and
were similar age, we then moved to talking via AIM and now we usually communicate via Facebook!
Ah, the good old times...
http://www.compusa.com/
Uh.... the 3.5" floppies in the original 128k Macs held >400k<, not 1.4mb. The OS, a small application like Write or Paint and a few documents would fit on them, but usually a LOT of disk-swapping was involved.
And yes, CompUSA has returned. TigerDirect from Miami has bought the name and are re-opening stores under the CompUSA name. They just opened one in West Palm Beach but I haven't been able to get to it yet....
The best thing about computer classes in elementary school, though, was playing Oregon Trail on the Apples after you finished your typing lessons.
It was a bigger job than you might think. Each of the 3 DEC PDP-1170's was the size of 5 soda machines, cost over $1 million, and had an ENTIRE MEG of RAM!
The Hard Drives were the size of washing machines, and took a stack of seven 14" discs in a tiered platter. The drives held 750 Meg.
We ran 4 provinces worth of retailer terminals off this system...which is probably the source of my frustration with bloated code. If we could do so much with so little, why do modern programs have to be so huge?
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of memory! I eventually upgraded to a Commodore Vic-20, and then a Commodore 64. Programs were saved on cassette tape before Commodore came out with a disk drive. My first modem was 300 baud; it seemed as if I could almost type as fast as the modem could download. The first commecial online service I was on was Quantum Link, which was strictly for Commodore computers. I never had as much fun with an online service as I did with Quantum Link. When I finally moved up to a PC, it had a whopping 640K of memory, and a 5MB hard drive.
(a) give away and see if people will pay
or
(b) give away the first level and see if people will buy the others.
Wolfenstein is an obvious example since it was also by id.
Mystery house was certainly not the first computer game to contain graphics. It was the first text adventure to do so though.
In one place I worked we used a computer the size of a Honda Civic for testing microwave oven controller boards. The "drives" on that thing were as big as a jumbo pizza at Godfather's. Held about 100MB if I remember correctly. Or was it 10MB.
The first true PC I bought was an ancient PC XT. The hard drive had a problem where it wouldn't spin up when you first powered it on; a little percussive prompting (a whack to the side) would usually get it going. The first Mac I bought for home use was a second (or third) hand SE. It had 2MB RAM in it and a 20MB HD. I ran QuarkXPress on that thing, doing multi-page color layouts for commercial printing. Yes, multi-page color on a 9" grayscale monitor. No wonder my eyes are the way they are.
Before those two I had an Amstrad Word Processor -- basically an all-in-one computer with a green-on-black monitor, a floppy drive and a dot matrix printer. Ran some variant of C+ (I think) and used a weird proprietary floppy disk design. It got me through college though. And before that I had an Atari 2600 (I think); attempted some programming on it, but because I couldn't afford the floppy option, I used a cassette tape for data storage instead. Slow, slow, slow, then wait, wait, wait, then slow...
Another random memory... We had a Mac LCII, and I found a stellar deal to max out the RAM on that thing for $65. It had 4MB, and I added another 8MB (even though it'd only recognize 10). Just the other day I bought a 1GB stick of RAM for way less than that. One of the first things I had to do in my first tech support job in a print house was buy a replacement drive for a Mac Quadra 950. That 1GB SCSI drive cost well over $1,000.
Oh, also, I have an old Mac clone that I was able to rescue before my old employer sent it to the recyclers. It's a 68000 dash 30fx, basically a hot-rodded IIfx in a large case. That thing, when purchased new with a 19" CRT, a scanner and interface card and 96MB RAM cost over $40,000.
Cheaper, faster, more compact.
Pros: Easy to use, print clear readeable letters everytime without any mess, works with ink ribbon that almost never runs out of ink, cannot be destroyed
Cons: Takes a long time to print ( About 10 - 15 min for a page full of text ), can't print colors, can't details like facial detail very well, noisy
I got a Epson Stylus photo RX620 now and i'm afraid to use it because it drinks ink... litteraly... like some sort of printer who came back from a trip through the desert or something.
I wished I had kept an article that I read once, in Time magazine that said that with T1 speeds, the internet had reached its limit!
Thanks for the post!
THANK YOU for compiling this beautiful post!
Oh, and I was using some very very old dot matrix printer paper I'd found in my classroom the other day to rip up for ballots in a classroom vote. The high school students were confused that the edges had to be ripped off!
10 run
20 something
30 repeat
40 etc
programming language, I could never do anything special with it as a youngster but my brother managed to program a pretty addictive simple racing game using huge pixel blocks.. figures he makes money with computers now actually.
!
Later, I used paper tape to record and enter programs.
The Commodore 64 with its cassette drive was a HUGE advance in technology!
By time I was 17 I went on to further education in one of the few schools that had decent computer technology. They had 4 terminals connected to a mainframe a few miles away via modem, it was some sort of business partnership with a few local schools. The modem was basically a device that the old fashioned telephone handles had to plug into.
In the computer room there were paper tape and punched card readers/writers for storage and programing.
The game we played growing up was Mask of the Sun. And there was no way to save Raoul, which was very frustrating.
I also had these Choose Your Own Adventure-type books that required you to write in BASIC-provided programs to get clues. Neat.
Mask of the Sun:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/mask-of-the-sun
I tried to locate these books I was talking about, but couldn't find them online. Did I make this up in my head?
My favorite text-only game was Ballyhoo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballyhoo_(computer_game)
CUL
PS My lousy memory just stirred up something else.
Must have been related to the Vic-20. You could buy huge soft back books that had a TON of Commodore Basic
programs. Then you could spend hours and hours hand typing all this code into the computer and then saving it to a cassette. Used to take me AGES for one lousy program. Invariably they wouldn't work because all it
took was one wrong character and you were up the creek until you then went back and checked it out letter by letter which took even longer! The "good old days" of computing. GGGGGGGGGGG
Now I have MS Vista Ultimate (they forgot to add "piece of crap") which is about the most disgusting OS I've ever tried to use. This is called "progress"!
Wow. I spent many days and nights playing that.
I also remember building a heathkit computer with my dad -- he sprang for 4k of RAM vs. the standard 2k, and I think he paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege. No monitor -- it had LEDs and you programmed it with switches.
Then again, I also remember when calculators cost hundreds of dollars. Three years later they were a pop tart prize.
Good times back then, when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth...
The sad thing is, that in another 10-20 years, things like the ipod, laptops, land lines, and other now-modern technology might end up on this same kind of list.
I really miss the BBS days. The net in all it's shiny glory just doesn't hold a candle to the excitement of those days. Remember calling up a BBS in Ireland to get the "Jesus on E's" demo on my Amiga.
Those truly were great days.
How about Lantastic?
Does anyone remember Commander Keen?
Wildnet Echo Mail ring any bells?
The first computer I worked on was an Apple IIE.
or maybe SS!? MP was my all time favorite simulation
company. I just tried to get Silent Service II to run on this POS Vista. No luck. Now I'm trying on an XP Pro system.
Eric: I vaguely remember that but that's about all. I suffer badly from CRS* disease.
Regards
* Can't Remember Squat
READ ERROR B
Please rewind tape
also, the first computer game with graphics was the first computer game*, a thing called "space war" made wayyyyyy back in the sixties
* with the exception of computers playing chess and draughts
My first IBM really was an IBM - IBM DX2. As I recall it cost nearly as much as my first new car ~$4K . 15 Megahertz, with a push button "turbo" to run at about 25 MHz!! About as much memory as a cheap cell phone.
In the early 1980's I got hooked up at work - which utilized a mainframe and a field of IBM dumb terminals. My job required access from home, so I had a 70 pound dumb terminal (372 ??) on my bedroom floor. Acoustic phone coupler at 300 baud. I could literally watch each letter or number form on the screen.
Now I complain because my work system takes 30 seconds to boot up, and I have a 1 Tbyte HD at home.
I guess I've dated myself clearly enough......
I did my first complete system install was MS-Dos 6.22 + Win 3.11 at age of seven after I messed thigs up with DoubleSpace. Boy, my father was angry because of that and equally surprised when I fixed it all by myself. 4Dos rocked my world of MS-Dos and I've missed it since Win95 came along. Until recently, of course: Linux fixed my aching.
Cool games from that era were (but not limited to): Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D, Street Rod 1&2, Ducktales, One Must Fall 2047 and F1 GP. I also recall lots of Autodesk Animator & Triton FastTracker usage.
BBS:es surely were the thing and we ran our own BBS with my friend too. Our bbs was replicated on two different machines and depending from my or my friend's parents, we switched the location of our 9600 baud modem between our houses.
I blame my current level of geekism to that 386 and my father. Thank you both. Since our next computer was 1st gen Pentium, I had to learn to code and entertain myself with an aging system. Ultimate consequence of that is my current job coding with Delphi and C.
My first machine... RatShak Model 1. Cassette... 16K RAM. Boy I had fun hacking that thing... with help from TrashUG. First job had a Data General Nova 1600... boot using front panel switches to load paper tape, then that loader loaded the 9-track mag tape application (radio telescope, UTRAO).
Haven't seen Crystal Cavern mentioned... xyzzy and all that. "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all different"... my first text adventure. I think I first played it on a PDP11.
Still got the Model1, as well as a PCsLimited clone with Windows 2.0. HS science project used relays to count to 7 in binary... got third place (!) out of only three competitors at regional. Bet that's changed...
(My wife, with no previous soldering-circuitboarding experience, successfully built the HeathKit H14 printer. But she was already a professional programmer, proficient with wire-programmed circuit cards and punchcard coding, on mainframes where data-drum rotational latency needed to be considered in I/O timings.)
I quickly moved up to a Heath-Zenith HZ90 system (twin 4 MHz Z80 processors, MP/M multitasking, twin 360k floppy drives) and a 1200-baud! modem, blazing fast! Then I went hogwild and got a Godbout-Compupro S100 box with an 8 Mhz Z80, 258kb RAM, twin 1200kb 8" super-floppy drives, and even a 5Mb hard disk. Ooh, expensive...
Then some other CPM/MPM systems, including the nifty little PMC MicroMate, and a couple workhorse Televideo semi-portables. And Sinclair ZX80s and ZX81s, for which I commercially wrote financial software. And an Atari 800, a TI99a, a PET-20(?), And various other boxes and terminals, details of which I've forgotten. Networking and interoperability? Rudimentary at best.
And then I started on PC clones and had to leave all that old stuff behind, except some ANSI terminals as remotes. I tried an original Mac and was completely unimpressed. It's been downhill ever since. Now I stick to WinTel laptops, so I'm not tempted to constantly upgrade minor hardware and rewrite BIOS's and tweak interfaces. Actually accomplishing stuff - imagine that!
Hey, you picked my (personal) favorite ANSI from all the hundreds that are available on my site.. sweet!
I extended the content of my website a lot and its worth paying another visit. Some of the new highlights..
http://www.roysac.com/bbs.asp
http://www.roysac.com/learn
http://www.roysac.com/asciinudes
Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC
It was many years later when I finally enrolled in college, and majored in Automated Office Management. The primary operating system then was DOS 6, and all of the software was made for DOS. Back then, you could only run one application at a time - running multiple applications was unheard of, and when Windows 95 came out, I couldn't believe someone could run more than one app at a time.
Needless to say, as far as Windows was concerned, I felt it was making computers way too easy for the common person to use. I believed the mystery should be preserved, and keep computers complicated using command line only. I would exit Windows and use DOS anytime I could.
I also had a Commodore 64 as a kid, and had one of the first Pong games. What fun!
I remember seeing the first 66MHz computers, thinking they were blazing fast with 14.4 modems and 32MB of RAM.
Life was grand when technology was brand new...