{"id":4586,"date":"2024-03-12T14:06:45","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T21:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/?p=4586"},"modified":"2024-03-12T14:06:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T21:06:54","slug":"hey-its-3-12-24-happy-baudday-yall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/2024\/03\/hey-its-3-12-24-happy-baudday-yall\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey, it’s 3\/12\/24! Happy BaudDay ya’ll."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The first computer my family owned was an Atari 400, the 8k entry-level machine with a membrane keyboard so kids wouldn\u2019t muck it up with their grubby hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned to type on that keyboard, ingraining a stompy two-finger typing style that I\u2019ve never been able to shake. On the night my dad brought it home, we all gathered around the portable TV with a 4inch black & white screen that the Atari was plugged into and played Star Raiders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Me playing Canyon Climber on the Atari 400 (by this time we’d replaced the little portable tv with a proper television). Look how minty fresh white that 400 is!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There was a BASIC cartridge, too, but that was dumb and boring because Star Raiders. A couple years later the 400 was upgraded to 48k.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our first modem was a 1200 baud Prometheus ProModem, purchased alongside an Atari 800 in the mid 80s. Compared to the 300 baud modem socketed into the back of a friend\u2019s Commodore 64, it was blazing fast, with text appearing faster than I could read it. I used that modem well until after 1200 baud was slow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"\"
That chair was pretty uncomfortable. I still have that monitor!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I had a BBSlist that I would call, printed out on a scroll of 40 column paper filled with scribbled notes for reference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On of my favorites was The Ethereal Plane, a small board with a friendly sysop and a handful of games. The only place I regularly called that is not on the textfiles 702 bbslist<\/a>, I believe it ran on a Commodore, maybe an Atari. One of those platforms folks went to war over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I loved the Space Empire genre, and Ethereal Plane had a medieval game with a similar turn based strategy concept that I haven\u2019t been able to track down since\u2026 I remember soldiers and crops of wheat and titles like Baron and Count and Prince based on where you landed in the standings but I can\u2019t remember what the game was called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, I was a regular on Quicksilver, a multi-line Major BBS (alongside Multi-Comm, one of two in Las Vegas) and my first encounter with local realtime chat. We\u2019d play tabletop RPGs in chat and on the forums; I GMed TMNT & Other Strangeness, maybe Rolemaster. I think I’ve still got archives of those campaigns on floppies, it’d be fun to revisit teenage storytelling and huh, I wonder if those disks are still readable. I’ll try pulling the data off them soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first computer my family owned was an Atari 400, the 8k entry-level machine with a membrane keyboard so kids wouldn\u2019t muck it up with their grubby hands. I learned to type on that keyboard, ingraining a stompy two-finger typing style that I\u2019ve never been able to shake. On the night my dad brought it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nostalgia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4589,"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4586\/revisions\/4589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driph.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}