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ArtistA small computer cable warehouse, showing many angle-iron racks of illuminated power valves, bleeping power supplies with meters, and large glowing vacuum tubes. At the counter stands a beautiful pink-haired woman wearing a flouncy-sleeved ankle-length tie-dye kaftan and beige platform sandals.
After working for the kitchen company in Morden in 1981_1986, where I developed KDS5000, the 3D perspective kitchen design software, I wrote some software and a multi-user adventure game (MUG) called Wanderland, for a computer cable company in Croydon High Street. Richard Bartle's MUD (at Essex University) was in yoyo mode, and Shades (the Prestel multi-user adventure game) had just opened, so I thought I'd have a go. Originally I coded in Pascal on my Apple ][, but since I didn't want to give up my expensive development machine I bought a cheaper Atari 800XL in Dixon's (later to become PC World) and wrote an RS232 multiplexer using the 800XL's joystick ports as RS232's, along with a few 1488's and 1489's (RS232 level converters). By 1987 we'd got about 200 users, of whom four could play simultaneously on our 4 phone lines. We later upgraded to a second-user PDP 11. which the company bought from my old college for £500.
