In the 1960s, Qantas wanted to improve their flight reservation system. At the time, reservation clerks would get tickertapes from travel agents and enter flights manually; every single sales office needed to be contacted whenever a flight was full. Cancelling involved, again, manually calling every office.
To make the company run smoother, they obtained three IBM S/360s (each with 64K of memory) and spent 18 months with IBM creating a new system.
IBM S/360 being unloaded from a plane in 1966, from IBM Australia.
By the end of the decade the IBM systems were interlinked with Honeywell H632s, which weren’t even out when the reservation system was first being developed. Source.
The information on reservations still needed to be sent by wire; this meant engaging the PMG (Postmaster-General’s Department), which was responsible at the time for both postal and telegraph duties. The project manager for the Qantas job was Owen Hill (electrical engineering graduate in the ’60s, he was a “cadet” which means PMG paid for his degree while he worked three weeks a year for them). Tapes were sent at an approximate rate of 75 baud. The “end transmission” text was NNNN which was a problem in Australia due to the presence of Shannon Airport (SNN). While the system made everything run smoother it required constant nurturing, and Hill remembers being “down in Melbourne every two weeks” handling issues.
He found the situation frustrating enough that as soon as his contract was up he left for a job with IBM, and from there hopped to creating his own company: Applied Technology. He had discovered the magic of buying electronics in bulk and made his own mail-order business selling individual parts and especially kits.
Applied Technology didn’t stay pure mail order; they had a shop in Hornsby (just northwest of Sydney). A group of enthusiasts started to cluster there, one of them being David Griffiths. Griffiths had designed his own video card, the ETI 340, with plans printed in Electronics Today International starting in their April 1978 issue. It had a resolution of 64 characters across by 16 down (same as a TRS-80). It slotted into an S-100 bus meaning it could be used with an Altair or other S-100 compatible computer.
From the front cover of the issue.
The hobbyist Stephen Dennis tried to embark on the challenge of building the machine, but even after soldering it together it wasn’t working; he called the magazine to get a hold of the designer (Griffiths) and the two collaborated to turn the plans into a more general kit. It started to be sold (in the kit form) by Applied Technology. The store in Hornsby became a tight-knit cluster of enthusiasts.
In January 1981, the idea sprouted to make a new “complete” kit.
[Matthew] Starr, who was just finishing high school, had become a regular visitor to Applied Technology’s nearby retail hobby shop. He’d already built his own David Griffiths system and even helped fix customer problems while visiting the store.
Matthew Starr (see above) and Owen Hill co-designed (along with some other Applied Technology regulars) a computer based around the already-created video card. It was codenamed “Granny Smith”. Hill and Starr went down to the offices of the publication Your Computer to do a pitch around Christmas 1981. Hill wanted to put a 32-page brochure in the magazine which essentially counted as a manual for the kit, with the last page giving ordering instructions. The editors agreed but thought the system needed a better name; on the drive home Starr suggested the Bee, which Hill improved to the Microbee.
You can read the insert/ad that printed shortly after here. The brochure promised that users could “build the most powerful state of the art kit computer complete for $399.00”. (That’s worth about $1,785 Australian dollars today.) It’s heavy on technical details including schematics.
Technically, the Microbee is similar to a TRS-80 (not only the 64 by 16, but a Z80 processor) although it had more expandability (something the company emphasized in early advertising) and the character graphics are programmable enough to allow for arbitrary graphics. While dK’tronics had to make a custom graphics rom as a piece of hardware for new character graphics on the ZX-81, the Microbee has the character-modification feature built-in.
The upshot is a system whose graphics float between pixel-based and character-based and have a feel unlike anything I’ve seen before. To give a general idea, here’s Halloween Harry from 1985; this was later the basis for the much more famous Apogee game:
So: high-res relatively speaking, but also divided into tiles to enough an extent there’s a “Game and Watch” feel even though animations are quite possible? You’ll also see this distinctive look in the adventure game I’m about to get to shortly.
The kit sales took off and Applied Technologies soon after started selling pre-made computers; where they really hit their stride was winning (along with Apple) the New South Wales education contract in April 1982, so they became one of the embedded “education computers” of Australia. (Apple was the expensive option, Microbee was the cheaper option.) I have the video cued where Hill talks about how the shop was so busy customers starting stepping behind the counter to help:
They eventually peaked at 11% of the market in Australia and with presence in more than 3000 schools. Most of the software for the system was Australia-developed (despite some sales elsewhere, most notably Sweden).
Microbee had its own software branch, Honeysoft. Outside authors sent in products and received royalties; one of their products from 1983 was a trilogy of adventure games by C. W. Norman. I think the name is Chris W. Norman but I haven’t unearthed anything else about the author yet; since I’m just doing the first game for now (and this is only part 1 of ?) there’s still plenty of time for information to come up, or even the author to find himself while Googling.
In high-res mode the ratio of pixels wide vs. pixels tall is 1:2. This makes for a much wider look than the TRS-80 despite the character counts matching.
Eye of Min is a “single target” treasure hunt where you’re just looking for one treasure, the “priceless gem” in the title that is protected by “deadly traps and hideous monsters”. The game helpfully gives a complete verb list:
UNLOCK, LOCK, OPEN, CLOSE, SHUT, GET, TAKE, PUT, DROP, GIVE, THROW, EXAMINE, LOOK, READ, PUSH, PRESS, PULL, LEVER, DIG, LIGHT, BURN, EXTINGUISH, KILL, HIT, ATTACK, INFORMATION, INVENTORY, FILL, FIX, TIE, DRINK, HELP, QUIT
There’s a graphical window consistently drawn in the lower right corner of the screen; it’s top down somewhat like Ultima. I think the programmable-character style essentially encourages this, and if you flip back to the brochure excerpt you’ll even see the same standing figure used in both the sample and this game.
The figure moves around as you move around the map, and is actually quite lovely for an automap from this era. We’ve seen a few like with Time Adventure but they tend to be fairly abstract.
Here’s a map drawn by myself to compare:
The action starts outside and is a little deadlier than it might initially seem. From the pond with the bench, going east into the swamp immediately kills you via quicksand; north is a dark cave where going in without light kills you; west is a well with no rope where going down kills you.
Heading back to the start (with the curious broken pick, no idea if that’s just scenery) and going northeast is the ruined castle, and a switch of map scene:
It’s less deadly than the outside. The ground floor has a broken dagger, not-broken sword and scabbard, candle (on a dining room table) and pen (on a writing desk). The inventory limit is tight enough that you can’t just take them all.
Also, there’s a door you need to open to reveal the northern part of the map.
Off the side of the entry hall there’s also a guard room (shovel, torch) and a tower with a tinderbox. You can use the tinderbox to light either the candle or the torch and safely go into the cave.
The cave is seemingly a dead end. I have not been able to find a noun that the game lets you use to refer to the “8 living trees” and it really might just be scenery (the game is consistently using CAPS for when there’s an object you can do things with).
The only other piece of progress I made is with the shovel back at the guard tower; I did DIG while at the pond and the game asked me where, so I said BENCH.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to use the wand! The verb list has no “WAVE” verb or anything else typical; I ran through the entire list without luck. Perhaps it merely needs to be held at the right place, or there’s a magic word involved.
The game did warn about enemies, and after enough fiddling around with the wand, two bandits appeared blocking the way to the castle.
Unfortunately, due to the inventory limit (and me prioritizing the shovel) I hadn’t brought the sword from the castle along, so my attempts to beat the bandits over the head with a wand failed.
I suspect I’m just missing something basic that will break things open, but for now I’m stuck.
Testing the game isn’t as rapid as I’d like because the emulator I’m using (MAME) starts eating inputs if I try to speed the computer up. There is a walkthrough so I’m not looking for “spoilers” but I will take suggestions from anyone who hasn’t played the game. I sense this won’t be long and this will be part 1 of 2 (it’s just BASIC, and if nothing else, the graphics take up space) but I’ve been fooled before.
Enormous thanks to Sebastian Boell who (along with Graeme Philipson) interviewed Owen Hill and Owen Hill himself who gave permission to use the interview. Thanks also to Ewan Wordsworth, current owner of Microbee (he was formerly an employee and has a modern website).
Renga in Blue 