This keychain looks like it would hurt in your pocket

Here we see an ad for the Super NES version of Ultima VII: The Black Gate. Apparently, when VII received its port to Nintendo’s console, its Roman numeral designation got the axe. As a result, the title became merely Ultima: The Black Gate.

I’m not a big fan of the SNES ports of the Ultima games (VI and VII). In the process of chopping things down to fit in a reasonably-sized ROM cartridge, a lot of content and features were lost (including the Roman numeral in this case). But at the same time, those ports likely gave console fans a taste of the Ultima universe that they would not have had otherwise.

As for me, I was lucky enough to originally play the Ultima games on the PC (and the Atari ST, in the case of Ultima III), so I guess I am spoiled.

Discussion Topic of the Week: In your opinion, what’s the best console port of any Ultima game?

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See Also:

Ultima VII Immortality Contest (RSOTW, 2007)
Ultima VI (RSOTW, 2009)
Ultima V (RSOTW, 2009)
The Savage Empire (RSOTW, 2010)
Tiny Pocket Ultima (RSOTW, 2013)

Play it again, Samtronic

I ran across this ad for CasaBlanca’s Intelli-Touch, “the world’s first computerized ceiling fan,” in a 1985 issue of Home magazine that I found in my mom’s house.

My mother has subscribed to house decorating magazines for as long as I can remember, and Home is only one of many (other examples: Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living). I never thought that I’d feature a scan from one, though.

But this ceiling fan ad was too fun to pass up. It reflects a time when you could slap the term “computerized” on any electronically-controlled consumer product (even if it didn’t actually have a computer inside, which was often the case) and use it as a marketing angle.

The robotic take on Humphrey Bogart’s classic film reminds me of those famous Maxell ads. Perhaps the same people were responsible for both campaigns? I don’t know, but frankly, this would have terrified me if I had seen it as a kid. Luckily, I found it when I was 34, so I’m only slightly afraid.

Discussion Topic of the Week: If you woke up one day and everyone looked like a metallic, boxy robot, what would you do?

“I REPEAT, THIS IS NOT AN INVOICE”

Although Vintage Computing and Gaming turns 10 years old today, I actually registered the “vintagecomputing.com” domain name back on June 8, 2000. This is what Network Solutions sent to me in the mail. I was only 19 years old — now I’m 34. Time flies.

It wasn’t the first domain I’d ever registered, but it was an early one. I wanted to use vintagecomputing.com for an online computer museum that would show off my vintage computer and video game collection. I never got around to creating that.

Another project got in the way of all of those plans, and I ended up working on music at Request-A-Song.com instead until October 2005.

I finally put my vintagecomputing.com domain to good use — over five years later — when I decided to make a blog on that fateful day in November 2005.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first domain name you ever registered?

Happy Halloween from 1984

My family has this way of saving everything. Not through conscious, organized preservation, but by virtue of never throwing anything away.

In that vein, I was digging through some old papers at my mom’s house after my father passed away in 2013, and I came across this homemade Halloween greeting card.

From the looks of it, my dad made the card for me and my brother using Broderbund’s Print Shop on the family’s Apple IIc. It is printed on a single sheet of 8.5″ x 11″ paper; one is supposed to fold it in half twice to achieve a gatefold design with a front, inside, and back. Click the image above to see the whole thing unfolded — the other side is blank.

As for who colored it with crayons, I’m guessing I did (perhaps my dad or brother did it neatly, then I gave it a once-over with a brown squiggly line). What a great momento from the home PC era. Happy Halloween!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever made a personalized greeting card using your computer? Tell us about it.

Released because Americans like guns

The Nintendo Entertainment System turned 30 years old in the US yesterday — well, according to Nintendo, anyway. That date is still a little fuzzy, in my opinion. Still, it’s close enough.

When the NES turned 25 (exactly five years ago today — creepy!), I wrote a few features about this classic system like NES Oddities for Technologizer and a NES workbench teardown for PCWorld.

This year, I have done nothing to celebrate except scan this NES Zapper. It’s a beaut.

Just a few days ago, the designer of the NES hardware revealed that the NES shipped with the Zapper because “Americans in general are interested in gun.” Indeed they are!

In 1989, Nintendo changed the dark grey parts of the Zapper to “blaze orange” to meet new US Federal regulations about toy guns. That regulation involved required orange plugs or paint at the tips of the barrels of realistic or imitation toy guns.

The regulation passed because people were robbing banks with toy guns, and the orange plug was supposed to let cops know the difference between a deadly weapon and a hunk of plastic. (Turns out the plug requirement doesn’t work as planned. But it did ruin the toy gun industry.)

The Zapper isn’t exactly a realistic toy gun, but acting with its usual overabundance of caution, Nintendo went way beyond a barrel plug. Either way, I am proud to say that, to this date, no one has ever been shot and killed by a NES Zapper.

P.S. In January, I scanned a line drawing of the Zapper from the NES manual. You may enjoy that as well.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you think someone could rob a bank with a NES Zapper? What about in the 1980s?

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See Also:
NES Zapper Diagram (Retro Scan, 2015)
Model No. NES-001 (Retro Scan, 2010)
NES Oddities
Inside the Nintendo Entertainment System

An elephant never forgets. [Front]

Not a September 11th floppy slogan. [Back]

There’s a lot of information crammed onto this Elephant Computer Systems floppy disk, and I don’t mean the digital data. It’s overflowing with external, physical clues and markings that show how it has been handled and used over its lifespan. Archivists call this “metadata” — that is, data about the data — and it is often lost when things are digitized.

The most obvious pieces of metadata from the labeling on the disk are about who manufactured it (“Elephant Computer Systems”), its optimal capacity (“single-sided, single-density”) and intended usage (“soft sector”). If you familiarized yourself with the technical specs of the floppy drives of computers available in the 5.25″ floppy era, you could rule out a few systems. That could be useful if other platform-betraying clues were absent on the disk.

Another obvious set of metadata comes from the presumed contents of the disk, which we can infer from the printed file directories taped to the disk jacket. Again, if one were familiar with the program names in the listing, one could point to a specific computer platform. (In this case, the printout looks like a DOS 3.3 “CATALOG” listing from the Apple II.)

Let’s take a step deeper into the less obvious metadata presented to us by this artifact. From visually inspecting the disk, we can tell (among other things):

[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Metadata and The Well-Loved Floppy Disk » ]

Before the Sega Scream, there was the Sega Insult

This is a rather famous early ad for the Sega Genesis that I have never featured until now. It played upon the dramatic graphical differences between the Genesis and the NES, claiming “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t.”

It’s worth emphasizing that Sega is comparing its console to the 8-bit NES here, and not the Super NES — Nintendo’s 16-bit machine had not yet been released in the US, allowing Sega to get a jump on the next generation in the American market.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What year did you first get a Sega Genesis? What were your first games for it?

“In fact, don’t even come in on Monday.”

It’s amazing to think back to a time when the now-common mouse scroll wheel was billed as a labor saving device.

But that is exactly what’s going on in this early ad for Microsoft’s Intellimouse and Intellimouse TrackBall. The Intellimouse series, first introduced in 1996, popularized the scroll wheel.

(By the way, the first mouse with a scroll wheel was actually the Mouse Systems ProAgio in 1995 — see this timeline I created in 2008 for more neat mouse history.)

A long time ago, people thought modernization and labor saving devices would lead to shorter workdays and work weeks. As someone once said somewhere (fuzzy attribution, I know), it turns out that productivity enhancements cease to be productivity enhancements as soon as they are ubiquitous. We just acclimate to them and expect more output for the same amount of work time.

Oh well. Keep on scrollin’.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first get a mouse with a scroll wheel on it? How did you feel about it at the time?

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See Also:

The First Microsoft Mouse (RSOTW, 2007)
TrackMan Marble FX (RSOTW, 2008)
IBM ScrollPoint Mouse (RSOTW, 2010)

High on power pellets, Pac-Man seeks his next victim.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Excluding Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, what is your favorite Pac-Man-themed video game?

IBM and Disney go together like peanut butter and petroleum jelly

Just before my brother left for college in the fall of 1994, my whole family went shopping for a new PC to send off to school with him. We made our way to an IBM PC factory outlet near Durham, NC. Upon walking in to the store, I remember being amazed by rows of 20-foot tall warehouse-style shelves, each one stacked with large boxes for IBM PC systems. A salesman met us at the door and apparently steered my father toward this: the IBM PS/1 Imagination system. I guess it was a good deal.

The machine itself came equipped with a 25 MHz 486-SX CPU, 4 MB of RAM, a 2400 BPS modem, and a Disney Sound Source (a sort of primitive SoundBlaster that plugged into the parallel port). Unlike earlier PS/1 models, this one shipped with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. It also came with a suite of pre-installed Disney software that my brother promptly deleted.

My dad also bought an unusual IBM-brand external ISA CD-ROM drive that required its own peripheral card. There wasn’t enough room in the PS/1 case for a CD-ROM drive and a 5.25″ floppy.

After college, my brother took this machine to work with him as a programmer, and he used it there until it was long outdated — probably until 1999 or so. It now rests safely in my collection, although the hard drive is now shot, and I think the power supply is fried too. Almost a decade ago, its rubber feet chemically decomposed into the most abysmally black and sticky tar that you can imagine. I need to restore the machine.

Just recently, I found the rather large shipping box for this computer sitting in my mom’s attic. Today, it holds miscellaneous housewares. This “scan” is actually a perspective-corrected photo of the side of that box (here is the original photo).

Discussion Topic of the Week: What computer did you take with you to college?