Adventure 751 (1980)

Summary

COME WITH ME TO COLOSSAL CAVE. WHERE MAGIC ABOUNDS AND TREASURES ARE FOUND. BID YOUR FINGERS FOLLOW YOUR COMMANDS AND I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. YET BEWARE THE FIERY DRAGON, FOR HE KNOWS NOT WHETHER YOU ARE WIZARD OR SIMPLE CHARLATAN! HOW BEST TO CONQUER COLOSSAL CAVE? WITH DARING AND SKILL … OH CLEVER KNAVE! — Early 80s Adventure poster, from the CompuServe Incorporated Information Service Division Adventure 751 has been, by my reckoning, the most sought-after variation of Crowther/Woods Adventure. It was generally available on the online portal CompuServe from nearly the beginning of the service and it disappeared when they shut down their games in the 90s. Arthur O’Dwyer started a web page in 2012 (with semi-regular updates!) dedicated to hunting down a copy. To finish off a wild 2025 in game preservation, Arthur O’Dwyer announced the game has been found (by LanHawk, a regular amongst the comments here) and is playable. Via eBay. You could purchase this from CompuServe. I love how they tried to contextualize this like a swords-and-sandals epic, with a goblin-esque dwarf and the trident used as a weapon. It still includes the bird-in-cage, though! In 1958, the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Arizona in Tucson received a donation of equipment in order to form an Analog Computer Laboratory. Analog computers deal with full electrical signals rather than 0s and 1s (think music on record vs. on computer). These could do particular computations (like differential equations) faster than digital devices of the time. An EAI TR-20 from eBay. $7,495.00 or best offer. As the ad copy notes, “It offers up to 20 amplifiers plus components for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, integration and generation of powers, roots, logs, antilogs, sine, cosine and arbitrary functions — in one cabinet, and available to one patch panel.” The University of Arizona’s lab was more cobbled-together than the for-sale-new device depicted above, as they made...