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I'm probably quite a bit older than you, but +1 for King's Quest. The first time I ever loaded a game was on my dad's IBM PC XT when he wasn't around. He had t

I'm probably quite a bit older than you, but +1 for King's Quest. The first time I ever loaded a game was on my dad's IBM PC XT when he wasn't around. He had those old slide-out floppy disk drawers. One of them was labeled "games". I had watched him put floppies into the disk drive and switch on the computer. One day he was out and I cheekily decided to try out his computer without permission. I must have been around six years old. I opened the games drawer and pulled out a floppy of King's Quest I, put it into the drive, and switched on the PC (with glorious CGA graphics). It loaded successfully. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do anything in that game and the first eureka moment was when I was standing in a field and typed "pick up carrot". The most notable takeaway from that experience was, I thought there was a real world running inside the computer and from that day the only thing I really wanted to do was mess with computers. I played all the king's quest games, KQ4 (The Perils of Rosella) came quite a bit later, and I loved it.

johndhi 3y ago
Awesome story. Similar for me but my dad showed me this stuff on purpose, haha.
ninkendo 3y ago
My experience was so identical to yours, except replace Kings Quest 1 with Kings Quest 3, and replace “pick up carrot” with “kick cat”. Other than that I could have written this post myself.
- karim79 3y ago
  This comment just made my day. What I didn't mention in my initial comment is that when people ask me, even today, "how did you get into computing and programming" that is the story I tell them. Of course, there's hell of a lot more to it, but that's mostly where it started. (That and my mom teaching me Logo on some ancient Apple machine)
NikolaNovak 3y ago
Lol, eerily similar experience, late 80s in eastern Europe. My dad had a 286 for work. I saw him start t a weird version of space invaders in possibly COBOL of all places. So when he was at work I had to figure out how to navigate to right folder, load up what I guess must've been like an online interpreter environment, load up the program, and execute it. But oh the satisfaction! The pride! The feeling of conquering the machine and puzzle! Following that I was on space quest rails more than king quest but what an experience - even if it were on black and white Hercules graphics. Being in east Europe all games were pirated. No manual, no details, foreign language. Playing mean streets without knowing the coordinates for places. And eventually spending first hour of dune 2 terrified of my trike falling off the island into the space chasm... Which turned out to be fog of war not a hole :) Good innocent exciting times!
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  I do think Kids These Days (tm) are being done a disservice by how opaquely polished computing environments have become. It's hard to learn about what is going on when everything is abstracted away and the guardrails work so hard to keep you inside the walled garden. It's gotten to the point where cloud services and search interfaces are being pushed so hard that the actual filesystem is a mystery to people at a high school/college level.

johndhi 3y ago

Awesome story. Similar for me but my dad showed me this stuff on purpose, haha.

ninkendo 3y ago

My experience was so identical to yours, except replace Kings Quest 1 with Kings Quest 3, and replace “pick up carrot” with “kick cat”. Other than that I could have written this post myself.

karim79 3y ago
This comment just made my day. What I didn't mention in my initial comment is that when people ask me, even today, "how did you get into computing and programming" that is the story I tell them. Of course, there's hell of a lot more to it, but that's mostly where it started. (That and my mom teaching me Logo on some ancient Apple machine)

NikolaNovak 3y ago

Lol, eerily similar experience, late 80s in eastern Europe. My dad had a 286 for work. I saw him start t a weird version of space invaders in possibly COBOL of all places. So when he was at work I had to figure out how to navigate to right folder, load up what I guess must've been like an online interpreter environment, load up the program, and execute it. But oh the satisfaction! The pride! The feeling of conquering the machine and puzzle! Following that I was on space quest rails more than king quest but what an experience - even if it were on black and white Hercules graphics. Being in east Europe all games were pirated. No manual, no details, foreign language. Playing mean streets without knowing the coordinates for places. And eventually spending first hour of dune 2 terrified of my trike falling off the island into the space chasm... Which turned out to be fog of war not a hole :) Good innocent exciting times!

empyrrhicist 3y ago
I do think Kids These Days (tm) are being done a disservice by how opaquely polished computing environments have become. It's hard to learn about what is going on when everything is abstracted away and the guardrails work so hard to keep you inside the walled garden. It's gotten to the point where cloud services and search interfaces are being pushed so hard that the actual filesystem is a mystery to people at a high school/college level.