Nostalgia VII (ByProxy)

Today, visitors to the English language Wikipedia site are met with a black screen and a message in protest against the American SOPA legislation.

 

(In contrast, visitors to the castle are met with a nice fresh cup of tea, a game on the table and, if necessary, a bar of Soap).

 

Critics of the legislation, currently passing through Congress, are concerned that the Americans are trying to bomb the internet back into the dark ages; and I tend to agree with them.

 

Having said that, I do hold a faint nostalgia for the early days of the web. Back then, it was not too crowded, there were nice green fields everywhere and the only people you ever really bumped into were fellow geeks. These days they let any old riff raff loose in cyber space and, if some of the comment sections of the news media are anything to go by, a fair few criminally insane trolls.

It's pretty dangerous out there.

 

Only yesterday I was thinking about the early days of online gaming, when the web was young and RPGs were acted out using single line text prompts.

The reason that this came to mind was because we played Acquire on Monday night - and this was the first game I played, real time, online.

 

I can't remember the name of the website - but it was a fairly clunky user interface that you had to download to Windows and that used an unstable web server somewhere to receive and send out the moves. It was great.

I used to spend hours playing despite the fragility of the system.

 

There was only ever about three to four people online, at any one time, but just enough for a game.

Strangely, even then, I struggled to get the username I wanted (Steerpike) but I was never online at the same time as the person who had stolen it. In those days you couldn't have a period in a username, so I could not even pull my usual trick of instantiating myself as Steerpike.Instance. In fact I'm not even sure if the technique of instantiation has been invented in those heady days.

So I was Cyrano.

I always seemed to end up playing against a lady called "TexanByProxy". Of course I had no way of substantiating that she was either a lady or in Texas (and these things never change) but she did claim to be a bored housewife in said state. The conversation did not get much further than that, due to the poor quality chat window on offer, but I like to feel we had a bond.

 

Whenever  a Texan visits the castle, topped in a huge cowboy hat, I think back to those halcyon days.

As, indeed I do, when I pwn the ThreeAmigoSpieler at Acquire. All that practice sure came in useful. 

YeeHaaaw