Adventure

I had some friends growing up that had parents working in the computer and technology industry when things were new and exciting and the breakthroughs were big and yet slow at the same time.  I wish I could figure out exactly what year it was when this happened to me, but I'm going to have to make a guess.

My friend's mother worked at SAS.  I don't know what she did, but she frequently would go over at night and do things for work.  Her son and I were friends and we played together a lot.  It must have been around  1982 when we went to her office one evening.  It was dark outside and I remember being impressed with the big open center area of the SAS building in which she worked.  We ran around the atrium and her son showed me some big machines that were computers doing computer hings.  Then, he took me to a terminal and introduced me to Adventure.

It was a game.  It was one of the first computer games I had ever played and I was entranced.  You started the game and it told you, in text, where you were.  You were in a woods somewhere and there was the entrance to a cave in front of you.  You would then enter a cardinal direction (N/S/E/W) that you wanted to move in.   After entering that, you would be given a description of your new location.

You could die if you moved in a direction that turned out to be inhabited by a fierce monster.  Then, you would have to start over.  I don't remember how far we got and I don't think we could do more than move in directions, but my memory of the game experience itself is one of a rich world underground with exciting things happening in all directions.

Was it exciting?  To me, certainly, I have loved video games ever since.  Were a few lines of text on a terminal truly that exhilarating?  No, but the mind has the capacity to fill in the details and my mind, at twelve-years-old had plenty of imagination to do so.

The Big Boy Update:  Food stealer.  He was reaching over and taking his sister's food off her plate.  She was looking away and didn't notice at the time.  When my husband asked him what he was doing, he said, "I  was just borrowing it" as he chewed on the food he had just taken.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Head stand.  She is like me in that she likes to do things like forward rolls, climbing, jumping, and anything that an almost two-year-old can do that's in the realm of gymnastics.  Last night she had her head in the crack of two pillows on the sofa and was standing in a piked position with her butt in the air.  She worked for five minutes to be able to kick her feet backwards and do a head stand against the sofa.  And she succeeded.  We were all impressed.

Fitness Update: Five miles.  Tomorrow we're planning for ten.