1. You understand "It is pitch dark--you are likely to be eaten by a grue."
2. You are familiar with the command, "Load *, 8, 1."
3. You remember why you made copies of disk 1, instead of playing the game right out of the box. Yes, games came in boxes then, with direction manuals.
4. You know why there's a disk 1, a disk 2, etc.
5. You still occasionally call some lowlife a "dippswitch."
Translations for you (to us) newbies:
1. From Zork, arguably the first computer game ever.
2. BASIC commands for reading, then playing, the disk in the drive.
3. Disk 1 was always the installation disk. If the original disk was inadvertently erased or damaged (frightfully easy to do, back then) you were s____ out of luck for ever playing the game again. Making copies was just a safety precaution.
4. Disk 1: installation; disk 2: usually a disk for the characters; disk 3 and on: the actual game commands, disk 4 (sometimes): the map disk.
5. The old computers frequently required different settings for different games and/or "serious" computing (letters, calculations, etc.) It was frequently necessary to physically change the DPP switches (usually called "Dippswitches.) It just sounded more genteel than "Dipstick" as a term for a lowlife.
