DoctorSpuds Reviews Things

This was released (early 82) just as I transitioned to computers - received VIC-20 for Xmas 81. A friend had it though, and I recall playing a few times at his house before we moved from northern Illinois to Texas that summer.

 

I became involved in the Corpus Christi BBS scene, so much so that I wrote BBS software for my VIC-20, launched The Dragon's Lair BBS, and became known as The Dragon Master (often abbreviated to The Dm). It was odd how many people wouldn't believe my BBS was running on a VIC, commonly citing "but it only has a 22 column screen!" as if screen resolution mattered when sending/receiving text over the phone.

 

Over time I migrated the software to the C= 64, then 128 at which point I tapped into the 128's PLAY command and created MusicTerm which could send music in realtime at 300 baud (it also support sprites, joystick, etc while online). From then on I maintained 64 and 128 versions of the BBS that supported the features.

 

In the late 80s I was in the process of writing BBS software for my Amiga 2000HD when I gained access to the internet at the University of Houston. "The web" didn't exist yet, instead we had email, USENET (forums), Archie and Veronica (search engines), FTP sites for files, and so on. Eventually the web subsumed all these discrete features. Didn't see much point in continuing that project as I could see BBSes would be obsolete in the near future even though internet access was fairly restricted at the time (you needed to be associated with the government, a university, etc). Called that right, a few years later is when dial-up internet access became available to the general public and calls to The Dragon's Lair (still running on my 128) took a nosedive.

 

Regrettably I decided to sell my now-obsolete 128 and all its peripherals, including the now hard-to-find 1581.