Typewriter Hacked To Play Zork 77
UgLyPuNk writes "Typewriters that can type by themselves are one thing. Typewriters that can type by themselves and play Zork are totally different — the stuff that dreams are made of (at least the dreams of little girls who spent hours in front of a Commodore 64 telling the machine to GO NORTH and such)."
No words required, see link for pic. (Score:5, Informative)
I used to have one of these... (Score:2, Informative)
Better link for the video (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No words required, see link for pic. (Score:5, Informative)
For more information on this model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASR-33_Teletype [wikipedia.org]
Trek? Roguelikes? (Score:4, Informative)
My very first computer game was TREK.BAS, hosted on a city hall computer and played on a DecWriter paper terminal hidden in a janitor's closet at my St. Petersburg, FL middle school.
Why the janitor's closet? Because that's where they could get to a phone line.
This machine could replicate that experience.
(OK, well, you'd have to pour some ammonia and pine sol on it, to really take me back, but I'm talking about the game...)
I used to play Star Trek on a Decwriter (Score:3, Informative)
I think it was actually called Star Trek at the time, but at some point, people started calling it "Space War".
We had eliza, and dungeon, too, and a chat program called "connect".
Once the connect fans had a party in the basement of one of the dorms, because they had really nice computer equipment. VT50s.
They all sat at their terminals and "chat"ted with each other. While in the same room.
Re:I used to play Star Trek on a Decwriter (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No words required, see link for pic. (Score:4, Informative)
Selectric Adapters (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the day almost every office had an IBM Selectric, so this provided a means of getting a "letter quality" printer into an office during a time when a letter quality printer could cost $1500 or more ($3000+ in today's dollars).