I’m such a nerd.

I also remember in 5th grade seeing a cd-rom for the first time and thinking it high technology.

But my first memory of computers was in Kindergarten in ‘88. Our school just had a bunch of old Apples (I’m terrible at model names, forgive me) donated (I think that was a big thing Mac did back then, right?) and they were OBSESSED with trying to figure out what a bunch of little five year olds could even DO with a computer. It was a lot of fun. I remember some kind of game with Kermit and Miss Piggy that taught simple math and reading schools. Since I was 6, I was more “Oh! Miss Piggy!” Than fun learning.

I also got to see the internet in our school library for the first time in 6th grade. I think all we could find was, like, a site that had some upcoming movie news in all text. But I had seen War Games, The Net and Hackers by that point and was trying to get my nerdy friend to show me how to hack and all that, lol.

I also really loved Sim City and Civilization.

and of course Doom and Wolfenstein.

My brother loved the Art of War series.

Anywho, since we got shoved back there frequently, we would have a grand old time playing Scorched Earth. Lots of fun. By the time I left, they had redone the computers in those labs 3 times. The final incarnation saw the Math and Science lab thrown away in favor of a TV studio (For the morning “News”), handicap computers (With touchscreen monitors), and a few other solid computers. It was a definite improvement over our previous lab, for sure.

Of course, by that point, not many classes stole our computers. They either went to the Writing lab, which also got a facelift, or they used their own computers. By that point, each class had at least 2 computers in it.

I was a lot of fun to live through the Computer boom in high school. Not to mention, there was that big computers for schools program that happened during the Clinton era.

Old school gaming to me is Pong and Space Invaders. I remember the Quest series, and the Infocom text adventures (there is still a community of folks writing those games with stuff like the Inform engine).

I was more or less the opposite of Polygon Wizard… I only played most computer games at my aunt’s or various friends’ places, or at school (often instead of lunch, during breaks, or after school), since my home computer at the time was a TI-99/4A, which was already nearly obsolete when we got it. That didn’t really change until I got the Amiga 500 that served to get Saberj and myself onto the budding internet.

I was considerably better off, console-wise, up to that point. I’d had, at one time or another, almost every major console (and several minor ones) from Pong through the SNES era (the ones that I didn’t were mostly flops, or that forerunner of the PS3 pricing model known as the Neo Geo).

This may be where Randy got his original preference for console gaming, but then again, by the time he was getting his own systems, we no longer lived in the same place.

Commander Keene was the funnest! Me and my sister would sit in front of the computer taking turns on levels with it. But we only had a demo version, so we could only play so many levels… still haven’t been able to find the whole game of it. :(

I watched my brother play these games so much as a kid that I feel like I played them too. I remember his computer being so slow that whilst waiting for a character to exit the room we’d go outside, play with the dog, come back in and it’d STILL be trying to come out of the room. So funny, a bit aback I dl’d a pack of these old games and apparently my computer now is too fast to run these games. Oh, the irony…

And, seriously, they need to resurrect Sierra Online so badly… Some of their more hidden gems include a really righteous Robin Hood game called “Quest for the Longbow” and a King Arthur game. And seriously, how the hell were you supposed to find the horse’s bridle in KQ4??? I STILL hold that that was in the game to force people to call their tip hot line.

Okay, ten bucks if anyone can recite from memory the song they tried to make a pop hit from King’s Quest 6.

Anyone ever play the Kyrandia games? They had a lot of filler to them, but that labyrinth in the first game was the biggest bitch ever.

Sim City
Sim Ant
Lemmings
Scorched Earth
Theme Park/Sim Theme Park
and Total Annihilation

Granted, a couple of those are probably closer to the end of the SNES era than the NES era, but still. That’s about as far back as I go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15bvpznQP5M