The 1980s- Old School Meets New Fangled

The 1980s were a great time to grow up. It was the era of baseball and bicycles, Atari and computers; a mixture of old and new as history collided with the future. For better or worse, we would have to wait and see, but all these new gizmos held such promise. Mostly, they promised to make our lives easier and more efficient. I doubt anyone envisioned people sitting around in their underwear eating cheese doodles and surfing Facebook as the ultimate goal of modern technology, yet here we are.

There was a time in the late 1970s and early 80s when groups of people would gather at someone's house to watch in amazement as two white lines tried to contain a moving square on a TV screen. Simple blips and bloops were the soundtrack to this first home video game: Pong. People didn't even have to be playing, they were content to merely sit and watch, astounded by the new technology available to them and the world. The Pong console was quickly surpassed by the Atari 2600 and a song dedicated to Space Invaders, one of Atari's most popular games, got regular airplay. Technology had instigated not only an industrial revolution, but a cultural one as well.

We stayed up all night playing Berserk, Breakout, Kaboom!, Missile Command and Donkey Kong on my Atari. My best friend spent hours memorizing the patterns of Pac Man so he could get the high score at the arcade. Looking back, it’s all so primitive now; pixelated images on a screen that held our attention for hours at a time while we guzzled Pepsi and scarfed pizza. Modern games have the look of a highly produced film and are nearly impossible to control if you’re from my generation- unless you’re willing to spend hours reading the instruction manual that comes with each new release. My son makes me look like a bush leager whenever we play a game together. He takes great delight in carving my electronic avatar into numerous pieces with his lightsaber or shooting me from a hidden location before I can even say, “How do I move forward?”

I can beat him at Madden, maybe … sometimes. I’d like to see his face if I broke out with the old vibrating football I had as a kid. “C’mon son, let’s play! What’s that look for? Yes, I really used to play with this for hours; your dad is even more lame than you thought. You see, what you do is,  you try and complete a pass by sticking the little foam ball on the quarterback’s hand and then flicking it down the field toward your receiver. If you hit him, you've completed the pass, but you’ll never hit him in a million years so just run every play." As kids playing the game, we would line up all our guys on offense and defense and then turn the game on and watch the little dudes vibrate around and never get anywhere. This was marketed as being fun. "Countless hours of family fun," was the catchphrase used in commercials of the day, obviously targeting imbeciles. Actually, it was only fun when you would turn up the game until the neighbors could feel their own floor vibrating and the teams were jolted off the field. That was fun!

Imagine the reaction if you took away a kid's PSP and gave him an old, handheld electronic football game. “Okay; get ready for this unbridled excitement, you move these little red dashes around and that’s football. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice; I’m serious, and with this one you can run and pass.” Even with the wonderful, new technology of our day we still had to use our imaginations and pretend that we were playing football. There were no touchdown dances for our little red lights on the screen. And it was still addicting. Electronics had found their way into our minds and hearts even in their most primitive forms.

Speaking of primitive, my friend got a Vic 20 for Christmas the year they came out. Remember the Vic, with 20 K of RAM? The Wonder Computer of the 1980s? William Shatner used to advertise it on TV. It was the first  computer to ever sell one million units. The stuff of Science Fiction had become reality in our homes. As an optional expansion pack you could buy a little plug in; a peripheral, they were called, and add another 2K of extra RAM memory. Here's a commercial I found on Youtube:

Hey, we all have to start somewhere; right? Without these humble, 20 K beginnings you wouldn't be reading this now. It was only a dream to one day save up and get the Commodore 64, with; you guessed it, 64 powerful K of RAM.

K, that’s funny isn’t it; K, as in kilobyte? Then, before you knew it, Megabytes took over the memory world and now it’s all about the Gigs. They say the Eagle Moon Lander had about as much memory as a modern cell phone. And I read that fact back when most of us had flip phones, not the portable computers we carry around now. It seems scary going all the way to the moon with computing power so feeble you can't even post about it on Facebook.

We would stay up for hours programming the Vic 20 only to get a syntax error. Syntax is an ancient Greek word that translates to: waste of time. We endured for eight hours, painstakingly typing basic language gibberish, only to get that reward on the screen at 2 AM. Let that be a lesson to all you kids out there. When your parents tell you not to stay up all night it's because they know that only bad things happen after midnight; things like drug overdoses and syntax errors. And even then we were pretty sure the big payoff would’ve only been; wait for it … one dot shooting a dot at another dot in a game called Hunt the Wumpus. I’m not making this up and I wish I were. I wish I could say I wasn't that gullible as a kid to spend eight hours grasping at such a feeble dream, but back then it was all new and exciting. The blurb for programming Hunt the Wumpus sucked us in, the description sounded incredible; something about seeking out mythical creatures in the bowels of the earth with only your courage, bow and arrow and sword by your side. We never got it to work, but I found out five minutes ago- thanks Google- that Hunt the Wumpus was actually a text based game. It didn't have graphics, you just answered questions about choices you could make by typing them in and hitting enter. Meaning we would have programmed a pathetic version of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. We could have saved time and just read an actual Choose Your Own Adventure book and enjoyed ourselves a lot more.

Now how is this for irony? We could have read a Choose Your Own Adventure Book called Supercomputer:

The plus side to this would have been reading stories about computer programs that actually worked.

 

The Vic did have lots of cool sound effects, like bombs dropping and explosions that could be programmed with a countdown timer to work as an alarm clock. The effects could also be programmed to run on a continuous loop by adding a command to return to the first line of programming and start reading all over again. One time this was programmed into a Vic 20 on display in a store by some teenagers looking to harass and annoy everyone within a 100 foot radius; one of the first cyber attacks in history. Those goofs walked away laughing while a sales manager tried desperately to figure out what had happened to their computer. We also did this once when planning on waking up early for some stupid reason- probably to get an early start at programming Hunt the Wumpus. The Vic worked perfectly that time. The countdown timer reached zero and we were abruptly awakened to the sound of the German blitzkrieg, bombs dropping, explosions, alarms going off, all on a repeating loop which; at five in the morning, after finally drifting off at two, no one remembered how to stop. Joel came to the rescue with the tried and true American method of getting something to work properly, be it a TV, a radio or anything electronic: he bashed the crap out of the keyboard until it stopped. Smash, smash, smash, smash! Ah ... silence. No one considered unplugging it. Surprisingly, the Vic still worked fine after that, but one thing I wonder to this day; why did the Vic 20 have function keys? I don’t even use the ones on my computer now except to hit them by accident and wonder how to reverse whatever it was I just did. If we were smart, we would have programmed two function keys for the alarm; one for snooze and one for stop.

Another computerized toy I really loved was my Big Trak, a programmable vehicle that could go forward and back, left and right and fire a red light "laser" with sound effects. My uncle came for a visit and we spent hours programming it to go on a long journey down a hall, around several corners, through the kitchen and back into the living room to a strip of tape we had stuck to the carpet as our start and finish line. I also had the trailer that was sold separately. You could haul things around and it could be programmed to dump them out wherever you wanted.  As I'm typing this, I realize that this is a really great toy. Bring these back, I want one again. Just think of all the sandwiches wives could make and send to their husbands with one of these. I'm kidding ladies, calm down. My wife can't even cook so it would definitely be me sending the sandwiches to her, but what a cool way to do it!

We were also a generation that still enjoyed non-electronic toys like army men, basketballs and BB guns. My mother would never dream of letting me get a BB gun, but thankfully my friend got one; a nice one too, the American Classic. It looks lethal, but only shoots BBs. It's something Democrats would definitely try to ban because it's scary looking and Republicans would want as required curriculum in schools. The American Classic is a handgun model that you can still purchase, you pump it to compress air for firing the BBs. Once we were bored sitting in Joel’s room, shooting BBs at a drawing of our science teacher, a perfectly normal thing for teen boys to be doing if your science teacher is a tyrannical hag. He left the room to answer the phone or something and I took over the target practice. A few minutes later he comes in looking shocked. “Man, I can hear that all the way downstairs!” he said. “How many times are you pumping that thing?”

“Ten,” I proudly announced. “Why?”

“I was only pumping it once! Ten times is for maximum power,” he declared nervously, digging back into his closet behind our target. There, under the cardboard box and the pile of clothes behind our helpless target, were several BB holes in the drywall.

"Oops, sorry! I didn’t know. Powerful, isn’t it?"

Maybe the moms and the Democrats have a point? Nah...

The American Classic Pellet Gun

There were also some weird toys back in the 80s. Remember Stretch Armstrong? He was a rubber, muscle-bound doll that you pulled on, stretched and tied into various knots. What were people thinking? Maybe this was an attempt at getting kids to exercise by subterfuge. How long could something like this possibly hold a kids attention? I probably spent more time playing with the box it came in. Plastic army men could be burned and blown up with firecrackers, Big Traks could run them over, even Slinkys could hold your attention with nothing more than a staircase or a stack of books. What did this thing offer more than a minute's amusement? The only thing intriguing about Stretch Armstrong was wondering what was inside of him. I always was tempted to cut it open and find out; probably some cancer causing hydraulic fluid. If anyone knows, leave a comment.

 

Out of all the things we had to amuse ourselves with back then, even considering all the new technology that changed our lives and the world, I still think the best toys we had were sticks and rocks. We would all gather in the woods wearing army jackets and camouflage, form teams and launch full-scale wars against each other throwing spears, rocks and chunks of wood. Occasionally the odd BB gun would be involved, but it was usually all organic material; the original Green Party Movement. Nothing beats outdoor activity: being chased by an enemy combatant, jumping over streams, laughing and shouting while getting pummeled by sticks. Some things are just better without electricity.