His Majesty’s Ship “Impetuous” (1981)

The Fifth West Coast Computer Faire in 1980 captured the personal computer revolution mid-explosion. Three hundred vendors and a crowd of twenty thousand filled two adjacent San Francisco venues packed with new hardware and software, evidence of an industry that hadn’t even existed five years before but was now rapidly expanding into the lives of everyday people. If you’d been wandering the aisles at that particular Computer Faire, you might have bumped into a man handing out unassuming tri-fold brochures printed on single sheets of colored paper, plugging something that could run on those new home machines called “Interactive Fiction: A new Literary Artform based on Micro-computers.”

Continue reading at the home of my new blog series, “50 Years of Text Games.”