Take the law into your own hands.
Discussion topic of the week: EPYX made a number of great games in the 1980s. Do you have a favorite?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
It’s the software Vikings!
Heh. And you thought digital piracy was a new problem. It’s actually as old as the PC software business itself. Some of the earliest evidence of this comes from a famous February 1976 open letter to the Homebrew Computer Club in which Bill Gates (then “General Partner” of a small company called Micro-Soft) protested the rampant “theft” of his company’s popular Altair BASIC.
Reflect on that date for a moment: February 1976 — less than a year after the Altair 8800 launched the personal computer revolution, people were already illegally copying Microsoft products with great abandon. (Some things never change.) Of course, selling pre-programmed software for personal computers was a new concept back then. And heck, personal computers were a new concept back then.
But as time passed and PCs grew in influence, the piracy problem didn’t go away. In fact, it continued as a hot-button topic throughout most of the 1980s. BYTE magazine devoted its May 1981 issue to the subject, commissioning its regular cover artist, Robert Tinney, to provide a visual hook for the monthly theme. Meditating on “software piracy,” Tinney concocted a potent and iconographic image of a fierce viking ship cutting through rough seas, its massive floppy disk sail standing at full mast. To this day, the image (seen above) remains Tinney’s most famous illustration from the BYTE years.
If his prints of this image hadn’t sold out long ago, I’d buy one in a heartbeat.
Discussion topic of the week: Do you pirate commercial software? Why or why not?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
(click to see full scan)
Discussion topic of the week: What’s your favorite entry in the Ultima computer game series?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
You might accidentally crush it. (click to see full scan)
Discussion topic of the week: Have you ever had trouble using an electronic device because its buttons are too small or your hands are too big? Tell us about it.
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
Click above to see the full page scan
Here’s a scan of Basketball’s appearance in a 1982 Atari product catalog for their 8-bit home computer line. Basketball, programmed by Alan Miller, is notable for possibly introducing the first obviously black video game character. And hey, it’s also the first game I remember playing.
Discussion topic of the week: What is the significance, if any, of the first black video game character appearing in a basketball game, rather than a game based on another subject matter?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
Scott Wolf fans rejoice!
In the early ’90s, I recall being excited when I heard that a Double Dragon movie was in the works. But after that, the film kinda fell off the radar until I ran across it in a video rental store. I never did rent it, but I’m guessing it was pretty terrible. Am I right?
Discussion topic of the week: What’s the best video game movie movie based on a video game of all time?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
Click above to see the full advertisement
This ad for Tech-Sketch’s Paint-N-Sketch Level II brings back memories. My first encounter with computer art came courtesy of KoalaPaint and the KoalaPad tablet on the Atari 800. Later, I fell in love with MousePaint on my family’s Apple IIc. Using the mouse and creating shapes on the screen was a magical experience, and I regularly begged my father to boot it up for me so I could doodle around in four glorious colors. Because of the program’s title, I was convinced it had something to do with Mickey Mouse.
Not too long after, my dad sold the Apple IIc, and I lacked an outlet for computer art until he bought a Macintosh SE in 1987. But that’s another story all together. Now it’s your turn.
Discussion topic of the week: Tell us about your first computer art experience. What computer and software did you use?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
Ah yes; a worm pun.
Around the turn of the 1990s, “WORM” (Write Once Read Many) became a common computer industry buzz-word for a new mass-storage concept. Numerous companies released their own WORM drives that used proprietary forms of optical media, most of which were incompatible with other WORM drives. Seen here is such an attempt: a curious “Optical Card” from Canon that obviously didn’t achieve widespread usage. According to the ad, it stored two megabytes of data on an optical layer that could be written once and never changed — much like a CD-R, but without the spinning disc.
Cursory Google searches reveal that the Canon Optical Card eventually saw limited trials as an identification card, either for travelers or medical information. Whether it’s still in use today is unknown to me.
Discussion topic of the week: Do you recall using any strange computer storage media that didn’t become a standard? (i.e. Bernoulli, magneto-optical, WORM, VHS, tape, cassette, Jaz, etc.) Tell us about the most exotic computer storage media you’ve used.
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
Click above to see the full advertisement
Of all the Christmas-themed vintage computer ads I’ve seen, this 25 year-old specimen stands out for its rich, colorful illustration as one of my favorites. The item for sale in this case is PeachText 5000, an otherwise-boring productivity application (from a modern perspective, anyway). But hey; at least they hired a good illustrator.
By the way, I’d like to wish everybody out there a Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays from VC&G. While being relatively lazy for the next week, I’m going to take this opportunity to do some serious video game playin’. I hope you get the chance to do the same. Mother 3, here I come!
Discussion topic of the week: It’s Santa time. If you could magically (and freely) have any one item for your classic computer or video game collection, what would it be?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
Click to see the 2600 ad in context.
Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a vintage video game ad from a newspaper. The subject in this case is the Atari 2600, and it appears in a “Howard BRANDiscount” advertisement from 1981. It’s especially amusing to see the Atari 2600 marketed in this particular context, peddled among such diverse items as spray paint, pocket t-shirts, picture frames, and disposable diapers (click on the image above to see what I mean).
Remember my grandmother’s cedar chest I talked about in September? Well, this is from the same chest, from a set of newspapers that my grandmother saved. I scanned many things from those papers, so you’ll probably be seeing more examples of vintage newsprint ads in the future.
Discussion topic of the week: What do you think this ad says about the state of the video game industry in 1981?
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
