Four-dimensional games on low-resolution monitors

Usenet. BBS. DOS. Ah, folks! Just got through watching Dr Who, then I come here and I feel like I stepped through a time warp.

Radio Shack Model I. Originally had a memory of 4K, less some for the built-in rudimentary abbreviated BASIC. (Made my young nephew ROFL this summer to tell him that, while he played online multiplayer games on his laptop.) Later, outboard 5" floppies, a whopping 16K 64K of mem, lower-case conversion by doing surgery on the circuit board. TRS-DOS, then NEWDOS, then DOUBLE-DOS that doubled the 5" disc capacity. Acoustic modem hooked up to BBS at 300baud. Later a zippy 2400 baud actual plug-a-phone-line-in modem card. The geniuses who wrote TAPCIS for access to CompuServe freed me from my own interface sw, but I still had to write my own word processer. Home-made bookkeeping (with checkbook balancing ability!) in VisiCalc macros. A display of 16 lines of 64 characters each. Writing processor-level software for the Z-80 chip (half the commands of the original PC chip) to make 4-dimensional games on a monochrome display with maximum graphics of 128 by 48 blocks (don't call them pixels). I knew what every chip and byte in that computer did. That was the last time, though.

Then I were a hacker, by necessity. Now I be (mostly) a user, unavoidably. I just replaced my expired monitor with 1920x1080. Have about 3gig hard drive space on the LAN, sluggish cable internet at 100Mbps. Nearly 50 tabs open in two browser windows. Download hi-res full-length movies and watch them in wide screen. Power I could never imagine having in the late 1970s.

And I still can't make these things do what I want half the time.

I plugged in that Model I and it said "READY" -- sweet! How could I suspect... they would DESTROY MY LIFE!

Sorry. Blubbering in my cider-doused doddering senility. Time to take my rheumy eyes and long gray beard and shuffle off to bed!