While General Electric (the company originating with Edison in 1878) is not much remembered for computers now, they were involved quite early. They started a relationship with the Air Force in 1948 manufacturing jet engines (only a year after that branch of the military was founded); this relationship let to the OARAC (Office of Air Research Automatic Computer) being built by GE and installed in 1953.
The military computer’s success led some in GE to push for going into computers more generally, but it didn’t happen until 1955. Bank of America did a call for bids to develop an electronic accounting method; while GE put in a bid, they fully expected to lose to IBM, but instead came out with the win at $32 million (in 1955 dollars). This led to the development of the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition system, and at the same time, GE established a computer department in Phoenix, focused on business mainframes.
Through the 1950s and 1960s they producing a long line of machines: the GE-100, 225, 312/412, 635, and 645. Mainframe manufactures, with IBM being the “old man” of the industry, were dubbed Snow White (IBM) and the Seven Dwarves (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA). I’m going to guess GE was Grumpy. RCA was a spinoff from GE in 30s, so they were competing against their own spinoff.
GE was heavily involved in operating system development (notably the GECOS for their GE-600) and time sharing (allowing many people to use alternating cycles of mainframes). The ground zero of timesharing, Dartmouth, used GE hardware and was a joint project between the college and the company; this was the same system where Dartmouth developed the first version of BASIC.
From a 1968 GE brochure.
GE eventually started losing ground to competitors and sold their computer assets to Honeywell; however, they still kept their time-sharing services, and after a number of changes, they were dubbed the General Electric Information Services (GEIS).
This remained a business-only service, but the number of unused computer cycles led GE to make a commercial spin-off in 1985 that would serve as a competitor to the dial-in services of the time, CompuServe and The Source. GE’s long-standing time-sharing infrastructure — dating back to the very invention of the concept — enabled them to charge less than their competitors.
While CompuServe had Forums, where people of common interests would gather, GEnie had RoundTables. For our story today, the important RoundTable is the Tandy RoundTable; the TRS-80 community there became the big hub for online enthusiasts. One of the sysops, Tim Sewell, uploaded his public domain and shareware library of software (keep in mind “public domain” was a vague notion in the 80s); as a second outlet he created a disk distribution group known as the File Cabinet, so that people who weren’t on GEnie could get the same access. In a survey from 1989 he found only 10 percent of the people who answered even had a modem and only a small fraction of that group even used one. (To be fair, even with GEnie’s lower prices being online via dial-in was quite expensive at the time. Note the launch article touting $35 an hour primetime — essentially, day hours. Even by the 90s when things were slightly cheaper primetime use went for $18 an hour. That’s about $41 an hour in 2024 money.)
This all leads to my recent thread about lost adventure games from 1982 and before. The proprietor of El Explorador de RPG had mentioned in a comment that the entirety of the File Cabinet was online. A catalog of the files as of 1991 is up here.
Whilst browsing, Raspion Adventure caught my eye as something I had never seen before and was not in any of my references. That File Cabinet link seems to be the only reason the game survives today. The BASIC source was entirely devoid of an author name or year, but the distinctive name led me to find an ad in 80 Microcomputing (May 1981).
This is the only reference to RanDob (P.O. Box 1662 out of Boca Raton, Florida) I’ve been able to pull up. It lists a second adventure game (It Takes a Thief) and it is one I’ve played before! Not only that, that game gives an author name: Randy Dobkin. Previously, it was a game I only knew about via mysterious index card, and I had thought it might just have been someone’s unpublished side project, but apparently the author tried to sell it at least a little.
While it is not guaranteed Raspion has the same author as Thief, by source code similarity I’m marking it as essentially certain. It Takes a Thief placed you as a criminal robbing a home, with no preface: you just start in your getaway vehicle and get to work. It didn’t really need any explanation. Raspion, on the other hand, is cryptic even after it starts progressing:
We’re supposed to “visit the deserted city and find Syl and its treasures”. This is a treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures; so far, normal. The game even has a “your house” opening (the only useful item is a spade) and there’s a storage room where the treasures go.
Going out to the door, however, leads straight to the aforementioned city.
Is this …. a horror premise? Has our house been mystically tossed into a future city? The adventure-collection aspect suggests not, but the “no escape” is striking. I haven’t finished yet so I don’t know if there’s some plot turn.
Here’s a meta-map of what I have so far:
The city part has a park where you can find a keys and a book hidden in bushes. The book requires unlocking with the keys. The book gives various “key phrases” if you TURN PAGE but only one of them is useful.
Say Lymbar in tomb is the useful one. The “stop reading books” warning is literal and if you TURN PAGE again you will die.
Also near the park is a moving walkway (WAIT will cause the player to change rooms) and there’s a computer off the side; I’ll get back to that later. Let’s check out the Tower of Lorgon next.
The tower starts with a ground floor that has spinning mirrors, and if you are in the room for more than two turns, you get dizzy and die. This means you can safely pass through and safely pass back but can’t linger (otherwise you’ll die on the way back).
The tower leads up to a roof with a vent, which you can climb to find a stair described as “mile-long”. Again I get cryptic vibes, although the path down only lets you go a hundred yards before getting stopped.
The “impassable” stone has an inscription
There is a better way. Give my regards to the keeper of the records. — Ranon of Lymbar
which will come up later. I have yet to find a use for the hammer (even though SMASH is a verb).
Moving back to the park, on the far east side is the Tomb, which is where the clue from the book gets used.
This opens a route down to a subway that has a “Yttrium capsule” you can ride.
At the end of the line there are two branches. One leads to a desert where, so far, all I’ve managed to do is get thirsty and die.
The second branch goes to the “Caverns of Syl” which is a maze, at the end of which is a *synthetic ruby*.
This is the absolutely standard “drop items to map” maze, no gimmicks.
That’s the end of the line for my exploring, except I said I’d come back to the computer. This is if you ride the walkway at the park, where there is a side room described as a “computer archive” with a “computer keyboard/screen”. I tried very hard to locate a verb that would work for interaction.
This included using LOAD which tried to load a saved game I hadn’t made, causing everything to crash. Oops.
This is meant more as a riddle: there is no “normal” verb here. I did my standard verb search and found
DIG, READ, OPEN, WAIT, UNLOCK, SMASH, TURN, SAY, CLOSE, EXAMINE, GIVE, ENTER, DIVE
and the right command is off one of those. Specifically, the message back at the tower told us to give our regards to the keeper of records. This indicate we should type GIVE REGARDS, and I have no idea what that would look like physically (“press F to pay respects”?) but it works, and I’ll provide the full animation:
“SLIT”, blinking. Is that supposed to be a reference to the double-slit experiment from quantum physics? It is not possible to repeat the action.
To summarize, I have a a hammer (not yet used), spade (not yet used, I’ve tested everywhere), the book and keys, and a synthetic ruby which counts as a treasure. My only obvious obstacle is a desert where I die of thirst and the only unused clue is a mysterious flashing SLIT message; I have not tried SAY SLIT everywhere but that’s the only thing I can think of. My point score is 100 out of 450, but the entirety of those 100 points comes from dropping the ruby at the storage room.
Regarding if this is “horror” or “science fantasy” or something else, I get the vibe this aligns with the 90s Myst-clone games like Obsidian filled with bizarre future devices (and no people because that would be too hard to handle technically). The ultra-minimalist style gives it a unique flavor and the game will just throw a “control room” out with no description and you’re just supposed to imagine.
This could be a scene out of L-Zone or Rhem. If this was a real 90s game that message from Ranon of Lymbar would have been rendered as a blurry QuickTime video.
Renga in Blue 
for the benefit of Jade etc. who like to collect the games I write about I have a download link here, the file drags and drops on trs80gp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZTnXaO8GPw07rYLYKBq43tdePgsCoaT9/view?usp=drive_link
it doesn’t autoboot, so you need to type BASIC, then LOAD “RASPION/BAS”, then RUN
Two guesses:
Surely “SLIT” is a reference to the contents of the book — that was one of the acronyms that it listed, “say Lymbar in tomb”!
Have you tried smashing the dizzying mirrors with the hammer?
ha! completely forgot about that having an acronym
I guess the author thought that needed an extra clue
smashing mirrors doesn’t work, alas
(also, I did manage to finish but I still wasn’t sure what was up with the computer, so thanks)
I think this game’s vibe might have been informed by a certain strain of TV and movie sci-fi that I remember from my early childhood. It includes stuff like the post-Trek Roddenberry pilots (Genesis II, Planet Earth, Strange New World), Fantastic Voyage, The Ultimate Warrior, ARK II, some episodes of the PoTA and Logan’s Run TV series, etc. I’ve sometimes referred to it as “terrestrial sf”, but Plaid Stallions I believe once described it as “bell-bottoms era sci-fi”, which I think captures the 70s-specific feel. Picture lots of familiar TV faces with feathered hair and wide lapel safari jackets exploring lightly populated, vaguely future-ish/post apocalyptic land and cityscapes, puzzling over cryptic technological artifacts, having dangerous encounters, etc., all punctuated by the sound of bleeping analog synthesizers and the occasional commercial break featuring James Garner and Mariette Hartley hawking Poloroid cameras, and you’re pretty much there…
Great guesses! Just the other day I had a theme song running through my head and sought it out on Spotify–UFO. It was one of my favorites as a kid. And probably my favorite theme song of that era was the Rockford Files.
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While Rob’s ’70s sci-fi theory seems pretty spot on, the vibe I got reading about it was like something out of Lovecraft’s Dreamcycle, which was mentioned here during the game Kadath. Basically, Lovecraft had these short stories where someone would have a dream where they go to some ancient mythical city of impressive structure musing about the civilization that made it. It sounds like it wouldn’t count for that because there are no musings about the game or grand descriptions about the city…but the player fulfills that role here, doesn’t he?
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The yttrium capsule is funny to me for personal reasons. Inform 7 automatically supplies a/an for texts depending on whether the first word starts with aeiou or not, and one of the more esoteric things I tried in Inform 7 was writing something that would allow the author to supply a list of exceptions to that rule. The test bed included a uniform, an honest unicorn, an hourglass, a yak, and a one-pound yttrium block. And it turns out that yttrium exists in the history of text adventures! (I don’t know anything about yttrium and I suspect the author here didn’t either.)
An internet search shows there was a Randy Dobkin working at IBM Boca Raton in the late 80s/early 90s. I wonder if that’s the same guy.
Yes, I confess.
Welcome!
Thanks for writing your games, they were quite creative! Would you be able to answer some questions?
1.) Was there any particular motivation behind the tinier file size (most TRS-80 adventure games filled the 16K available)? You managed quite well in terms of parser for having less space.
2.) How long did RanDob last? Did/do you know Scott Adams?
3.) Relatedly, do you still have any of the materials from when you sold the games commercially?
4.) Was there any “canon” about the Raspion universe not seen in the game?
Thanks for your kind words, Jason. I did have a business partner, so I can’t take all the credit.
Ah yes, there are references to ‘It takes a thief’ in volume iv of the sourcebook (page 193) and Raspion (page 207). https://archive.org/details/Applications_Software_Sourcebook_Volume_IV_19xx_Radio_Shack [as well as Etch, Keysound, and Propix]. Dodgy OCR so didn’t show up when I searched for the games.
Prompted by Strident’s comment, I decided to comb through the first four TRS-80 sourcebooks (all published between 1980 and 1982) and as far as lost and/or very obscure possible adventures, here’s what I came up with:
-Shipwreck, Teller Enterprises
-Haunted Mansion, Teller Enterprises
-Haunted House, Doug Eby
-Action Games Pack W/Adventure Game, Alexander Crawford
-Adventure # 2 – Catal Huyuk, Computer Programs Unlimited
-Adventures 1-5 (by Role Simulations) –
Nuclear Doomsday
Medusa’s Revenge
Missile Submarine Warfare
King Rex III’s Tomb
Castle of Doom
-Advent2, T.L. Lottes
-Alien Adventure, Thomas Chou
-Dragonslayer, Graham Software
-Harvey I, Chandler Data Services
-Harvey II: The Lost Civilization, Chandler Data Services
-Lord of the Rings # 1: Journey Forth, Eric A. Seiden
-Lord of the Rings # 2: Mines of Moria, Eric A. Seiden
-Lord of the Rings # 3: Mordor Bound, Eric A. Seiden
-Lord of the Rings # 4: Mordor Burzgash (Black Fire), Eric A. Seiden
-Medieval Magic, Liberty Software Co.
-Skid Row Adventure, Dale Dobson
Some notes:
– Shipwreck is on Ira Goldklang, but Haunted Mansion seems unknown.
– Catal Huyuk appears to have been put out by a couple or husband and wife team, as you sometimes saw back then. I wonder what Adventure # 1 was?
– Alien Adventure is on Ira Goldklang, listed as from 1981.
-Medieval Magic was advertised a few times, and is listed on both Goldklang and Mobygames. From 1981.
– Skid Row Adventure, despite being by a teenage Dale Dobson, never seems to have been mentioned on Gaming After 40. He did release a “25th anniversary edition” written in Inform back in 2005, which can still be downloaded from an older website of his. Doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere else online though, which is kind of weird? Haven’t tried it out yet, but I don’t think it’s related to the later Coco/Dragon game of the same name.
– Lord of the Rings might be the most interesting thing here. It’s a very elaborate sounding series of games (he was also offering maps and other extras), which could be purchased all together for the whopping price of $75. These may or may not be text adventures (hard to tell from the descriptions), but I also don’t think they have any relation to that odd Kansas title you mentioned in your early LOTR games round-up recently, and they’re listed as (c) 1980, so we may have a new contender for earliest commercial Tolkien game here. I found an old homepage for Eric A. Seiden, and while these games aren’t mentioned, his age, location (Florida) and mentions of the TRS-80 all sync up with the sourcebook listings, so it must be him.
I played Alien Adventure. It was, ah, memorable.
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/alien-adventure-chou/?order=ASC
Oops, missed that somehow!
I was combing through the File Cabinet collection mentioned by El Explorador and found a game I hadn’t seen before, Castle Adventure (no author mentioned). After playing through it, I looked into the Sourcebook vol.IV and found it listed there as being by David Hanes. Interesting… he’s the same author of Medieval Magic, according to Mobygames and the ad, which description fits the theme for Castle Adventure too. Could they be the same game with different titles, probably being published by Hanes himself and later Liberty Software changed the title to Medieval Magic?
A reference to the Mordor game by Eric. A. Seiden https://videogamegeek.com/videogame/269079/mordorburzgash Eric A. Seiden’s DAR Systems International is also mentioned in the 1984 Programmer’s Market book and he’s mentioned at least once in Questbusters, such as issue 13 (1989) where he writes a letter about his Pits of Doom game (which was reviewed in the previous issue).
Eric writes about his LOTR-inspired games here: http://www.darsys.net/dsi.html
Good catch there on the DAR stuff! It looks like some later versions of his games and some documentation is also available for download:
http://www.darsys.net/dsi.html#product
It’s strange, because this stuff all seems to have been hiding in plain site for a long time, but appears to have slipped through the cracks for various reasons. For instance, when you look up Mines of Moria for Apple II, all that comes up is an Eamon module that came out at around the same time as the later version of Seiden’s game, including on the Tolkien game reference site. Compounding this is the fact that Ira Goldklang himself helped to preserve the later TRS-80 version many years ago (sounds like the original cassette versions were not preserved, sadly), but the only listing in his database wouldn’t really point you to the original history of these titles.
Re Gus Brazil:
I did see that Castle Adventure listing in the sourcebook, but didn’t include it on my list because I wrongly assumed it was a TRS-80 version of the David Malmberg game for some reason (it’s the only one listed in the Goldklang database). Would be interesting to check back and compare those two descriptions again, but Internet Archive is down right now.
I should also note that links to his site for the Apple II version of the later Mines of Moria do show up on a few Apple II archives in searches, which makes it even more curious that all of this seems to have flown under the radar for so long…
Some follow-up here:
Turns out that all the later TRS-80 revisions from 1985 of the LOTR games are actually listed in the Goldklang database under their individual names. Just enter “Seiden” in the author/publisher search box and they’ll all come up, with screenshots. Even if a bit quirky, they do indeed appear to be text adventures. Be sure to check out the screenshot for Journey Forth. Looks a bit like the opening of a certain well-known Australian game, doesn’t it?
Regarding Medieval Magic/Castle Adventure, after checking everything out again, I think it’s quite likely that Gus Brazil’s theory is correct. Pretty funny that the game got listed separately under both titles in the same sourcebook! At least that means that some version of the game had been preserved and is playable, although I wonder if the Liberty version may have been updated/revised, as they also released it on disk.
Note that Goldklang has them listed with a “nuke” symbol — that means the author has specifically requested that they not be downloadable from trs-80.com. Based on the DAR Systems website you linked it looks like they very specifically downloads only to come from them. (What I find confusing is that they clearly had Ira dump all the TRS-80 games but doesn’t include all of them in the downloads. I might just ask but I have yet to even try Mines of Moria out.)
Got back from a trip and I was all ready this evening to start my next post and the Internet Archive is down from hackers. Oof.
Jason, just found that if you click on the “-” in TRS-80 from the DAR downloads page you link to a secret page where you can download all four TRS-80 games in the series. Notice the last link is wrong, just replace mbound with mburz.
Wow, how bizarre! Great catch there once again, Gus.
Reading these pages more carefully, Seiden drops a number of interesting details:
Mines of Moria was actually the first game, and was originally (presumably circa 1979, based on other comments) influenced by the mainframe game Moria, and only became a Tolkien-based game itself after he retrofitted it to match the rest of the series he wrote shortly after. Journey Forth was actually written as a prequel, and then slotted in as the first game in the series by the time he had submitted them to the Sourcebook for advertising, I would guess around 1981 (all four games are listed as (c) 1980 in the Sourcebook). Later on, in between these and Pits of Doom, he wrote and completed another prequel, The Hobbit, but it was never released. The versions that Goldklang helped preserve, despite having a revision number and 1985 dates, do appear to be direct conversions from the original cassettes, but they were never actually released in this form, as he had stopped selling TRS-80 software by that time.
One other piece of follow-up here, on a different game. Here’s the link that I mentioned for Dale Dobson’s Skid Row Adventure:
http://www.offworldmarketing.com/intfiction.html
Would be interesting to know if he still has a copy of the 1980 TRS-80 original that could be preserved,
Also, I still use my ProPix football predictor, though now it’s an Excel spreadsheet.
Did anyone get Castle Adventure/Medieval Magic working? The only version I found that mentions “MAGIC.DAT” as a save file and is therefore the likely candidate is in some weird BASIC I cannot idenfity and can’t get to work.
It starts with “:IFPOS CASTLE ADVENTURE” and is listed as “Model 4” on cpmarchives, but nothing I try will run it. I’ve found a working CP/M for Model 4, but no BASIC that goes with it yet.
I used trs80gp and first booted up Model 4 mode, exported the disk, then used TRSTools to toss the BASIC file in there.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hoJr4f-GbP5mY7uwmeBp6mHL8vCEOd9v/view?usp=sharing
to run in trs80gp, go to Diskette -> 0 -> Replace and pick the file in the zip file up there
then pick hard reset
after it has booted, BASIC and then enter, and then LOAD”CASTLADV/BAS” and then enter, and then RUN
It’s bizarre how difficult this was given how easily trs80gp runs everything else. I tried every Model 4 under the sun, but only the disk Ira graciously supplied worked in the end.
Speaking of that File Cabinet archive, I was looking around in the catalog, and noticed something on MD4GAM01 called ADVEN2/BAS, described as a “Medieval forest adventure”. I checked out the code, and it turned out to be a seemingly undocumented port of Ken Rose’s “Horrible Dancing Dragon…”, or maybe the altered “Adventure of the Dancing Dragon” version for Atari. I don’t know if there are any differences here, but weirdly, the code says:
“Another Adventure from softline Written for the Atari But modified for the IBM By Andrew J. Wysocki”
So, maybe it’s an undocumented port of another undocumented port?!
Another from the vast, murky deeps of unknown/undated TRS-80 material that’s caught my eye is the German adventure INSEL.BAS (tagged as “Island Adventure” on Goldklang). I took a close look at the code, and I’m pretty sure this one is from a very early date. It’s almost entirely Crowther & Woods derived, with a few elements reminiscent of Scott Adams and other early TRS-80 adventures. I think it’s a similar situation to Skatte Jagt, where a 1980-1982 time-frame is quite likely.