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THE
COMPUCAT MAGAZINE
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| Welcome to Neal & Carolyn's Home Page
We live deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains and spend our waning years trying various ways to keep our years from waning. One of these endeavors has us manufacturing puppets and selling them at local Arts & Craft Fairs and over the Internet. Another has me writing, Carolyn illustrating and me posting, our fantasy-adventure Laserbreath Caverns on the Internet. As seems appropriate for a Home Page, here are some of our very favorite links into the World Wide Web, and some very special ones of our own... Gary Watson's Home Page - Meet Gary and Maggie Watson, dog and bird fanciers exraordinaire. Without Gary's encouragement, we would not be on the Internet today ("Hey, Neal... you gotta see this..."). A fellow Atari BBS Sysop, Gary is also a train buff. While we built our BBS around the theme of a cave adventure, he designed his to replicate a train trip through the real ghost towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Laserbreath Caverns -
This is the starting point into an adventure that begins
in a "colossal cave" style but quickly expands
to encompass other planets, and other times. To solve the
riddle of Laserbreath you must "Think Pink" Just because you have visited our Home Page, we will give you a couple of special clues. The first one is the illustration included right here of the Central Park in Megalon. When you get there, enter the Aircar and take it East, and then North to the Aircar Terminal. When the "M" button on the control panel lights up, press it for a complete map of Megalon. The other clue is the link below titled "THE LEGEND OF LASERBREATH." When you have read it, you will better understand the premise for many of the "events" in the Laserbreath Caverns. Use your browsers BACK UP command to return here. The Legend of Laserbreath - This is (with my apologies) a poem. Loosely based on the puppet show, "Gilderspar, Last of the Dragons", which we wrote and performed for thousands of San Jose area school children in the late 1960's, this story was adapted in 1985 as a text adventure designed to run on an Atari BBS. The Laserbreath BBS ran on an Atari 130XE computer with two Indus disk drives for several years before being incorporated into the much larger Compucat BBS running on an Atari 520ST coupled to a mammoth 20 meg. hard drive. The Compucat BBS incorporating Laserbreath Caverns was on-line from January 12, 1984 until March 1, 1995. It opened on the Internet on January 1, 1995. The Compucat BBS - This is the starting place for the current Compucat, just as it was for the old BBS for the past decade. "You are standing in a Parking Lot..." and before you are the options to visit The Computer Emporium, peruse The Puppet Gallery or even follow that TRAIL up the side of the mountain and into an unknown adventure. The Muppets Home Page - Well if you haven't guessed by now that we are puppeteers by trade and children at heart, then all of this will be lost on you as well. After all, Kermit really is nothing but scraps from old lady Henson's discarded cloth coat. What value can there possibly be in that? |
| WHAT IN
THE WORLD IS COMPUCAT? SANTA CLAUS - Having been employed during the summers of my youth as a puppeteer at a local amusement park (Santa's Village of Santa Cruz and Lake Arrowhead, California, and East Dundee, Illinois), it was probably no surprise that my first real salaried position would be as a puppeteer working for the City of San Jose, California at it's Happy Hollow Children's Park. Over the sixteen years I worked there, I met my lovely wife Carolyn, I became the Park Supervisor over Happy Hollow Park and Baby Zoo, I bought my house in the Santa Cruz mountains... and I bought the first available home computer, a 4K Commodore PET as soon as I read about it in the pages of Popular Science magazine (Radio Shack's TRS-80 didn't become available for another six months). WILLIAM SHATNER - Retiring from civil service in 1982, I thought I would try my skills at the other end of the career spectrum, as a capitalist. I became partner in a small chain (three links) of computer stores selling Commodore products exclusively. Sadly, and contrary to the foresight of William Shatner, the VIC-20 did not become the "Computer of the Eighties" and the stores closed a couple of years after that. LEONARD NIMOY - Making the decision to work out of my home, I traded in my Commodore 8050 Business Machine for an Atari 800 and on January 12, 1984 put our mail order computer store on-line as the Compucat BBS (COMPU for computer and CAT for catalog). It was during this period that we had our most famous BBS caller. It seems that Hesware, a software manufacturer making products for the VIC-20, had used our BBS telephone number in their Hesmodem instruction booklet as a good example of a BBS to communicate with. They had also hired actor Leonard Nimoy to advertise their new Commodore 64 modem and their new line of VIC-20 science cartridges. As fate would have it, Leonard Nimoy a.k.a. Spock, Science Officer of the Federation Starship Enterprise, was computer dumb. That is to say, Spock didn't know a Commodore 64 from a photon torpedo, and in this age of "truth in advertising" a crash course was required. Late one night we received a telephone call on our private line. It was a Hesware executive asking us if we could clear the BBS for a special caller. The executive was at Mr. Nimoy's house in Los Angeles and had set up a Commodore 64 and modem for this first trial attempt at communicating on the infant information superhighway. Carolyn and I were transfixed as the words "Helo this s leonard" spelled across the Atari screen. Carolyn sat down at the console and typed "Hello Mr. Nimoy. This is Carolyn." After a short time exploring the BBS, Mr. Nimoy logged off and, though the connection was broken, his parting words were still on the CRT: "Live long and prosper, Compucat." The news spread like wildfire that "Spock calls Compucat" and hundreds of fans and BBS Sysops endured hours of busy signals trying to connect to the Compucat BBS. We forwarded the fan mail (via hardcopy) to Mr. Nimoy's studio office but, alas, he only called again one other time, some six months later, to request support from his fans on his proposal to direct and act in Paramount's Star Trek IV film. THE DRAGON IS BORN - By 1985 it was apparent that we needed a bigger BBS (Compucat had eight Atari 810 disk drives and 48K of memory) so we solved the problem by adding a second BBS on a second phone line. This one ran on an Atari 130 XE and used four of Compucat's drives. The expanded memory of the 130 XE allowed a more elaborate BBS structure so I wrote and initiated LASERBREATH, a Fantasy-Adventure BBS. It had the same shopping catalog and information magazines as Compucat, but added an extensive cave system to explore, and even a reward if one solved the hidden puzzle. THE INTERNET - In 1986 both the Compucat BBS and Laserbreath BBS were incorporated into a single massive system running on the then-mammoth Atari 520 ST. Surviving the 1989 earthquake (Loma Prieta mountain and the epicenter of that quake is approximately five miles away), the Compucat BBS survives today in much the same form. These last few years, while the Compucat BBS has dutifully responded to the telephone rings, a new light has begun to grow on the horizon. A new direction for an aging BBS of the eighties. A direction that would change Compucat forever. The Internet! THE WORLD WIDE WEB - As the last days of 1994 fade into memories, Carolyn and I began the arduous task of translating the entire BBS text into html (hypertext markup language) for installation on the World Wide Web. Where text descriptions and simple ASCII art were the norm for the past decade, the new Compucat WWW would have real hand-painted and digitized graphics and hypertext links throughout. COMPUCAT WWW - You stand now in the Parking Lot and see it all before you. The Computer Emporium still has unbelievable computer hardware and software bargains, and there's a new store now open that offers goods from our latest career move (regression?): The Puppet Gallery. To the East, a trail still leads up the side of a mountain... and Laserbreath awaits. |
COMPUCAT MEETS MR. SPOCK by Neal KinneyDoes anyone remember HES Software? They were located in South San Francisco and specialized in software for the Commodore Vic-20. In a desperate gamble to switch their product line over from the suddenly vanished Vic-20 to the sparkling new Commodore 64, HES brought out several innovative new products including the HESMODEM, a 300 baud modem that plugged into your C-64 just like a game cartridge. The author of the HESMODEM Instruction Manual wanted to include a BBS number that people could call to test their new modem, a number that wouldn't be "out of service" just a few months after the product was released. Imagine our surprise when we saw the COMPUCAT BBS listed as one on a list of one. I guess he picked the right BBS. We brought a lot of C-64 owners into the world of telecommunications with our assistance, downloadable software and online product ordering. Perhaps the most notable of our novice C-64 callers was the gentleman known by millions as Science Officer Spock, and as you might guess, therein lies a tail. HES sales were still falling and a drastic new direction was needed. They brought out a new line of education software (most of which never really saw the light of day - i.e.: vaporware) and hired a TV personality to tout it across the country. What better personality to advertise computer software than the Federation Starship Enterprise' own Science Officer and computer expert, Mr. Spock. Sadly, Leonard Nimoy, the man behind the ears (so they say), had not the foggiest idea how to run something as high-tech as a Commodore 64. In our new age of "Honesty In Advertising", the software company needed to quickly educate the actor in computer use before Mr. Spock could claim on the air how delightful it was to use. Enter COMPUCAT. Late in evening, the home telephone rang. It was the author of the HESMODEM instruction book. He was at the Nimoy residence, dutifully honing Mr. Spock's computer skills, and he needed a BBS for the Science Officer to practice on. We obliged and made sure the line stayed open for the transmission. "helo this is leonard can you see this" With trembling fingers, my wife sat at the Atari 800 console and slowly typed in, "It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Nimoy. My name is Carolyn." Slowly, across the screen, at first stumbling, then becoming smoother, the words appeared: "Thnk you for takin the time to help. Live long and prosper, Carolyn." To this day, Carolyn and I gaze at our autographed picture of Leonard Nimoy with much fondness... and we have all of the Star Trek movies on laserdisc or tape and we NEVER NEVER NEVER miss an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. The word was out: SPOCK CALLS COMPUCAT! The flood of BBS callers was overwhelming. We collected, printed and mailed the hundreds of letters to Mr. Spock, to his offices at Paramount. He called COMPUCAT again, with thanks, and the calls continued to mount. More parcels went off from COMPUCAT to Paramount. What were people saying? Well, if you were a Compucat Caller in those days, you probably would have determined that the mail was pretty evenly divided between the FAN letters and the letters that said "Please ask Mr. Spock to call my BBS." We don't know if he ever did, but we can safely bet that Mr. Nimoy has become much more proficient at computering. |
I am the retired Family Park
Supervisor for the City of San Jose's (California) Happy
Hollow Park and Baby Zoo while Carolyn, whom I met and
married in the Puppet Theater thereof, is a graduate of
San Jose State University with a degree in Theater
Arts. 
and remember that "Laserbreath
was not always thus." As with the old Infocom
text adventures, the "HELP" system in
this adventure seems designed to be particularly
annoying. For instance, pressing HELP in the
elevator because you are hopelessly lost between floors
of the Computer Emporium, rewards you with a lecture on
elevator operation (i.e.: it goes up and down). Remember
that there is a solution to the puzzle but you will
probably need to visit most of the Laserbreath environs
(over 155 rooms illustrated by over 128 original gif
drawings) to figure it out. 