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An Old Choice Found Anew
Delving into "old computers" may be no better or worse than any other form of "catching up now on what you missed out on at the time," but I can suppose it doesn't have to be as expensive as something like collecting old toys. The only problem there is that it doesn't have to be as expensive because one way to find documentation and applications is to dig into obscure archives for scans and disk images instead of the more upright method of buying actual products from whatever sources there may be. Still, when one archive being updated right now with new "cracks" of Apple II disks made before their physical media demagnetizes altogether had one of the very first versions of Zork I show up, I saved a copy of the disk image. In the process of realising there'd been one version even before it for the TRS-80, looking through the older archives for that computer, and pondering if the specific "Z-Machine" data files for those versions could be extracted and played outside of hardware emulation (it took looking in a third, interactive fiction-specific archive for patch files and installing a command-line interpreter), I did get to contemplating what else I might have missed in the first archive. When I searched for a particular piece of software, all of a sudden I'd completed another quest that had been going on for a while already.
I do remember getting to use an Apple II back in elementary school, and recall the computer already having been an Apple IIgs, one lone machine in the office of the school library. The specific program I got to use on it was called "Story Tree," and it let you set up branching "Choose Your Own Adventures." There had been plenty of those books in the school library to begin with, but I have to admit I took the bad endings in them harder than I could have. For the story I did finish, a sort of Indiana Jones parody, I might have had just two major branches with a few side digressions; after finishing it, inspired by an adventure game review in a later issue of the Color Computer magazine I started on a "survive the zombies" game (long before those stories began to seem so inescapable as to feel troubling) but didn't get very far up the tree before I didn't have the chance to use the program any more. When I started poking away at Apple II emulation long years later, I made a point of looking for the program. The only problem was that the program on the cracked disk image that seemed shared among all the archives would crash as soon as I made any attempt to start a new file, no matter what emulator I used. (I'm not sure now if I went so far as to try the disk image on actual hardware.)
Now, I had a working version (if a version advanced from the previous disk image, with blockier on-screen text doubtless meant to try and cut down on the green and violet or blue and red fringes of Apple II graphics on a colour monitor), and I found myself thinking of something else I'd only thought about for a while. I had experimented a bit with the modern "Choose Your Own Adventure" creator Twine, but perhaps trying to come up with a multi-threaded story had seemed that much trickier with all of Twine's options. The thought of "utter simplicity" did seem appealing enough for me to plot out ideas on paper. When I did start experimenting with Story Tree, though, waiting for the program to save every small text screen on disk in an emulator started taking enough time I did get to thinking I could go back to the "learn to use Twine" book I'd bought a while ago and finish it this time; I did have my ideas, after all.
I do remember getting to use an Apple II back in elementary school, and recall the computer already having been an Apple IIgs, one lone machine in the office of the school library. The specific program I got to use on it was called "Story Tree," and it let you set up branching "Choose Your Own Adventures." There had been plenty of those books in the school library to begin with, but I have to admit I took the bad endings in them harder than I could have. For the story I did finish, a sort of Indiana Jones parody, I might have had just two major branches with a few side digressions; after finishing it, inspired by an adventure game review in a later issue of the Color Computer magazine I started on a "survive the zombies" game (long before those stories began to seem so inescapable as to feel troubling) but didn't get very far up the tree before I didn't have the chance to use the program any more. When I started poking away at Apple II emulation long years later, I made a point of looking for the program. The only problem was that the program on the cracked disk image that seemed shared among all the archives would crash as soon as I made any attempt to start a new file, no matter what emulator I used. (I'm not sure now if I went so far as to try the disk image on actual hardware.)
Now, I had a working version (if a version advanced from the previous disk image, with blockier on-screen text doubtless meant to try and cut down on the green and violet or blue and red fringes of Apple II graphics on a colour monitor), and I found myself thinking of something else I'd only thought about for a while. I had experimented a bit with the modern "Choose Your Own Adventure" creator Twine, but perhaps trying to come up with a multi-threaded story had seemed that much trickier with all of Twine's options. The thought of "utter simplicity" did seem appealing enough for me to plot out ideas on paper. When I did start experimenting with Story Tree, though, waiting for the program to save every small text screen on disk in an emulator started taking enough time I did get to thinking I could go back to the "learn to use Twine" book I'd bought a while ago and finish it this time; I did have my ideas, after all.