I smell a potential children’s cartoon franchise.

I don’t know what’s more ridiculous: the fact that the Spikemaster surge suppressor has a humanoid superhero mascot with powers of unknown capacity, or the fact that the company producing the suppressor is named “Discwasher.”

Either way, I know what I’m dressing up as this Halloween.

Discussion topic of the week: What do you think Spikemaster’s superhero powers should be?

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From my pocket to you.

My mother was born in Texas, and my immediate family usually visited her parents every summer when I was a kid. During one of these visits as a teenager, my grandmother invited me to look through her Time Magazine collection. She led me to the back of the family’s wash house, a detached building on their rural Texas property where she did the laundry. Through a side door, we entered my grandfather’s generally dark and cluttered workshop. In the far corner — beyond the tools, beekeeping equipment, and motorcycle parts — I spotted three or four large cardboard barrels overflowing with old magazines. The mouse-chewn issues spilled over the edges of the containers where they had been piled haphazardly for decades.

I spent the rest of the day thumbing through musty old magazine issues from the 1970s and 80s. While reading a copy of Science Digest from 1983, I ran across the ad for Wizard of Wor and Gorf you see above. I was amazed. In my youthful zest to discover and collect all things vintage, I felt like I had uncovered a lost Egyptian tomb. I’d never before seen a vintage video game print ad — and prior to that, I didn’t know that CBS had published a version of Wizard of Wor (a game I love) for the Atari 2600.

I eagerly tore out the ad page, folded it up, and stuck it in my pocket. Why I didn’t take the whole magazine is unknown to me; I guess I just didn’t want the rest.

Until now, the page you see above has been sitting, still folded, in my collection of vintage print materials. It’s been waiting for a day like this when it can finally end its long journey from my mid-1990s pocket in Texas to you, on the Internet, today.

Afterword

A year or two later, I revisited the Texas magazine pile and found even more material, especially in Time Magazine. There were issues with cover stories on personal computers, video games, and computer viruses. That time, I took the whole issues themselves. Among them, I found a few ads for IBM systems (like this and this). I probably still have more from that collection that I can scan in the future.

Discussion topic of the week: Tell us about your ancient computing or video game discoveries. When have you felt most thrilled at uncovering old video game or computer history?

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The iPhone has nothing on this. (Click for full advertisement.)

Here we see the state-of-the-art in 1983 pocket computer technology, the TRS-80 PC-4. I have the PC-1 in this series, and it still seems advanced. How many other pocket calculators allow you to program in full BASIC?

I remember taking my PC-1 to high school in the mid-1990s and programming on the sly in my ELP class. It felt so high tech — and my model was made in 1980! Ah, those were the days.

Discussion topic of the week: What was the first PDA or pocket computer you ever used?

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Your wish is my command.

If my previous posts on the Game Genie are any indication (wow, they’re from 2005 — that’s vintage), then I’m a huge fan of the game-manipulating device — assuming, of course, that my 2005 self wasn’t lying just to throw off the accuracy of a future Retro Scan post.

But heck; I shouldn’t have to read my old blog posts to know that. In the early 1990s, I spent untold numbers of hours developing my own Game Genie codes for games like Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES, and also for Super Mario Land for the Game Boy (I need to make a homebrew gallery about that). I loved the Game Boy Game Genie so much that I took a hacksaw to its extraneous plastic parts so it would fit on the Super Game Boy. It was a weird kind of love, but it worked.

From there, I moved on to the Super NES Game Genie (I don’t recall developing my own codes for that), and I eventually bought a used Game Genie for the Sega Genesis. The only one I never acquired was the Sega Game Gear version. But I didn’t have a Game Gear back then, so that would have just been silly.

Discussion topic of the week: The Game Genie: reality-bending peripheral or wussy crutch for bad players?

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Resistance is futile. (click for full advertisement)

Long-time readers of VC&G may recall me talking about my adventures on CompuServe from time to time. Needless to say, they never looked like this. But I did have a few nightmares featuring enormous floating hive-mind spaceships hooked up to my computer when I was 12.

On second thought, maybe this thing is the machine God uses to create snow — if snow indeed exists.

Discussion topic of the week: Star Trek or Star Wars? Better yet: Han Solo vs. William T. Riker in a knife fight — who would win?

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