Adam Norwood: Tumblr

joshreads:

btothef:

Here it is: the book we’ll be reading together.

I found in a box of my brother-in-law’s old stuff: he had the complete trilogy in novelization form, which is frankly awesome.  All I had in novelization form was Ghost Dad, and to be fair, I remember it being awesome.

“Back To The Future: A Robert Zemeckis Film” (this seems to be the title of the book, judging by the cover) is a fascinating book for several reasons.  One, the author was working off of the screenplay, but clearly a version of the screenplay that was not the final one.  Two, the author (George Gipe) seems to not have had an editor, as there are sections of the book that are crazy loco.  And three, after putting out this book in 1985 to coincide with the release of the film, he was stung to death by bees (this can happen) and was dead in 1986.  The other two novelizations were written by a different author and are not nearly as insane/interesting.

I’ve read this book last year and dog-eared all the parts that caught my fancy.  In this blog we’ll be hitting the dog-eared pages and you’ll get the experience of reading “Steven Spielberg Presents: Back To The Future: A Robert Zemeckis Film: The Novel by George Gipe based on a screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale” (full title?) without actually having to read “SSP:BTTF:ARZF:TNBGGBOASBRZABG”

Ryan North, of Dinosaur Comics fame, is reviewing the Back to the Future novel, in Tumblr form!  Please follow along with him on what I am 100% sure will be a magical journey.

BOOK TO THE FUTURE

Ars Technica has up a history article on the early web browsers, a rare glimpse into the largely-forgotten software that beat NCSA Mosaic to the punch but didn’t quite make it into pop culture consciousness (seen above is ViolaWWW, notable for early stabs at browsing history, bookmarks, styles, and even embedded scripting — probably also the first web browser I remember using on my Slackware copy of X Windows circa 1994! </old>).

For all of the developments in web technology since 1991, it’s remarkable to see how many UI features and browsing concepts emerged almost immediately and are still with us today.

OMG OMG, some kind soul is posting good-quality, full-page scans of all of the old LucasFilm Games / LucasArts Adventurer magazines! Created at the company’s artistic height, these gems were half retail catalog, half inside scoop trivia treasure trove, decked out with never-to-be-seen-again Steve Purcell art (including single-page Sam & Max comics parodying the major Lucas game release featured that issue). They now sell for an arm and a leg on eBay.

I used to have every one of these, but they all vanished to whatever corner of the landfill my triangular Day of the Tentacle box and Dial-A-Pirate wheels ended up in…

(Via MixNMojo)

idrawnintendo:

Dragon Warrior* is probably the hardest RPG I’ve ever finished. I remember playing the game when I was a little kid, but I didn’t end up beating it until years later when I was in middle school and my cousin lent me his copy (along with his NES-101).

At that point in time, I was consuming every RPG that I could get my hands on because the ravages of puberty had transformed me from a once charming, active, young boy into a quivering mass of shame and awkwardness that was temporarily relegated to the status of weird-indoor-kid. At that time though, less than a year after FFVII came out, I was used to the new wave of nerfed PS1 RPGs and SNES RPGs that I’d already beaten several times—and I was ill-prepared for the cold, harsh reality that Dragon Warrior offered up.

I remember heading out of the castle after hearing the King’s wise advice, which I completely ignored as the arrogant gamer that I was, and getting killed in my FIRST RANDOM ENCOUNTER because I’d wandered more than ten or so squares away from the town. That game was no joke. And don’t even mention having to find the Stones of Sunlight…forget about it.

*I don’t say “Quest” because the game that I am specifically referencing, the one that I played here in the US, was called Dragon WARRIOR. Word.

Dragon Warrior was the first JRPG I ever played through (Final Fantasy came out a couple of years earlier, but I didn’t quite understand it well enough to get very far), and it really was tough. I had one of the free copies that was given away to all Nintendo Power subscribers in 1990, so at least I had the cool Explorer’s Guide and hint cards. That was a good summer.

If you’re a fan of the old Lucasfilm Games (and the kind of video game nerd that likes this sort of weird find…), don’t let your week go by without watching this internal Lucasfilm Games parody video unearthed by Mix n’ Mojo. Shots of Skywalker Ranch, Ron Gilbert, Larry Holland, jokes riffing off of the “Bo Knows” and “Spielvergnügen” (erm, Fahrvergnügen) ads, and even a song sung on the Ranch’s porch about their adventure games. It doesn’t get much more 1990 then this, folks!

(Bonus: watch for the boxed copy of King’s Quest V on the desk at around 8 minutes in — how’d that get in there??)

Happy 30th birthday, MS-DOS. Thanks for all the memories, whether they were extended, expanded, highmem, or in UMBs.

Sure, you were cobbled together from various other x86 OSes, had features that often felt bolted on, and were scheduled to be “dead” in 1987 (see: OS/2, which Microsoft actively helped develop and then subsequently torpedoed), but you’re somehow still with us today in Windows 7, at least in virtual machine emulation form.

(Pictured above, the OEM box for MS-DOS 3.2, probably from the era when I first started playing around on our AT&T 6300. Photo credit: unknown, but not for lack of trying…)

Screenshot from an interesting project, olduse.net ― Usenet posts reappearing in realtime as they did exactly 30 years ago, a new way of experiencing the history of the early Net. See how things were mere months before the launch of B-News, long before the Great Renaming and the creation of the alt.* hierarchy, and best of all, the introduction of spam is more than a decade away still!

You can use either the browser-based client to poke through the messages, or point your favorite NNTP client to the site and experience it as you would the real Usenet. Nice!

Also, I like this answer from the FAQ:

Can I post to olduse.net?
Your posts will be accepted, but will not show up for at least 30 years. :)

(Via Waxy Links)

abobobo:

The Secret of Monkey Island (DOS). Lucasfilm Games, 1990.

Guybrush confronts The Beast. The horror, the horror.

nevver:

Lemonade

Lemonade Stand was great. O, Internet, great font of good things, if you ever come across a working dump of the related MECC game The Market Place, please let me know! (I’d buy the linked copy, but I don’t exactly have a way to read off of 5¼’s these days…)

The IBM 2250 graphics display, introduced in 1964. 1024x1024 squares of vector-based line art beamed at you at 40Hz, with a handy light pen cursor. Much more handy than those older displays that just exposed a sheet of photographic film for later processing!

(Via Columbia University, via Ars Technica’s recent quick primer on computer display history)