Later's Always Better Than Never

I often suppose one part of what motivates me to seek out information about the computers of the 1980s, one particular subject among a good many others, is the sense I was around at the time but not quite aware of a lot of things outside the amiable corner of the Radio Shack Color Computer. That sense can be carried too far, though. My related interest in the text adventure games dignified with the name interactive fiction does have something to do with my family having been given a copy of the Infocom adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which first made me aware of adventure games that could accept more than two words at a time and then suggested in a catalog there was a whole line of other games like it. The only problem was that the regular hints offered for the game in the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow never quite explained how to solve its last and most elaborate puzzle. When I did manage to make out the faded hints in a high school acquaintance's old hint book, the sense of it being too late to play any other Infocom game was right to the extent of the re-release collections having less elaborate packaging and being for more elaborate computers.
( Advantages to the passing of time )