Runes of Magic US / AU

I have such a long and sordid history, where to begin, and what secrets to divulge?

Unlike most of the rest of the team and many of the players, I'm pretty ancient, born during the beginning of the Eisenhower Administration. (Do the math.) I've lived my entire life in the Midwestern United States (no, I am not going to say where) and pretty much have what people refer to as "Midwestern values". Make of that what you will.

I've been fiddling with/using home/personal computers for more than 30 years and, I swear to God that I've forgotten more about them than I currently know, much less understand. I still have my first home computer, an Apple ][ Plus. If I hooked up a floppy drive and an old-style monitor to it, it would probably start right up and hum along at a speedy 1Mhz. That's one whole Megahertz, not Gigahertz. Back in the day, that was reasonably fast.

I am not, never have been, nor should be thought of as a programmer in any way, shape, or form. I survived 12 years of parochial education, and little of the math I was taught in school has stayed with me. I'm actually better at basic math now than I was in school. Imagine that!

I've played, and still do on occasion, paper-and-pencil Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for many years. Other interests outside of RoM include reading, especially Science Fiction (old- and new-school stuff, especially space combat), history (turn of the 19th century and beyond are especially interesting to me), military history (especially naval history--I have a large collection of reference books on the subject), and cars (I have a weakness for "muscle cars", but I also like to read about classic cars of all kinds.)

I've attended a fair number of SF conventions, including several WorldCons, meeting a number of authors, some of whom I consider to be friends, or at least close acquaintances. I still go to at least one SF convention per year.

I've been playing computer games for years and years (I have a copy of SSI's "Computer Bismarck" for the Apple ][, published in 1980, which was a blatant copy of Avalon Hill's "Bismarck" board war game. It's actually fairly easy to beat.), but online games, especially MMOs, are relatively new to me. I have been playing RoM for a bit more than four years, since Chapter I. No, I don't have any "end-game" characters, but I have a couple that are "near end-game". And I have all too many permanent mounts...

I've also played Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Star Trek Online, but not lately for all three of those. I did play Rift for the first 6 months or so that it was out, but gave up my subscription to it. It eventually bored me to death. And yes, I know Rift has recently gone F2P, but I no longer have any interest in it. From what I've been told by a close friend who still plays it, Rift has far more spammers and botters than RoM ever did. Take that for what it's worth and with however many grains of salt you wish.

I don't own a console or play console/FPS games. I never did have the manual dexterity needed to handle console controllers.

Back to Runes of Magic. I've been part of the volunteer staff here since some time in very late 2010, when Aquila (remember him?) approached me to join up and become part of the old Greeter program. I spent much of my time as a Greeter on Govinda (some of the remaining old Govinda hands might remember "Gasuli"), but also did some fill-in Greeting on Reni, Indigo, and Osha. After the Greeter program ended, I was asked to become a Forum Moderator (FMs are now known as Mentors), and I've been here tormenting people ever since.

I expect to be aggravating all of you for a long time to come!

Quoted from "vfwiffo"

Oooh, I got rid of my Apple ][ ages ago. Someone is being a packrat. Doesn't help that poor Apple got a little burned, and that around the time I managed to procure enough funds to upgrade to speedy ultra powerful 4.77 Mhz XT clone.

I still have an Apple ][gs, which has the upgraded 6Mhz processor and 4MB on an OctoRAM add-in card.

Quoted from "smid1401"

Eisenhower was a long long long time ago .. so you must be realy realy realy old ... So old it took you 2 years to remember to say Hi : )

Old ppl their so cute..Well hello there old timer : )

PS we are not aloud to talk about other games on here.. lets hope Kalvan don't see this and remove your very nice post ; )

Eisenhower's administration started in early 1953, if that helps. So yes, I'm well into my dotage.

You can mention other games that you've played, but you can't discuss them in our forums.

Quoted from "ruisen2000"

When I first saw this thread, I thought Kalvan was leaving us (looked from the whats new function, so didn't see that it was in the Meet the Team subforum >_>)


For 5 whole minutes that I was reading through, I was dreading the goodbye message at the end.

I heaved a big sign of relief when you finally said that you'd still be here

To quote one of my favorite authors, Howard Waldrop (look him up): "You have to watch me all the time."

Howard writes wonderful stories.

Quoted from "hellbomb"

no one cares kalvan why dont you tell everyone how tough you are when you send me private messages.

And yet you don't respond to them...

Quoted from "RoMage"

Woow, I knew Kalvan was retro-gamer, but had no idea that you have collection of retro computers as well...

My first computer that I programmed in basic was Apple ][. Remember weeks before that preparing program that I will type once we get access to computer. Still much better then use of punch cards as some other less lucky ones.



ps. Tell us the truth - are you renting that upgraded Apple][gs to GameForge for RoM server farm?

No, that ][gs is sitting quietly, minding its own business, and keeping my old Mac SE company.

Can't say that I ever played the Datasoft version of "Bismarck".

And hey, I gave some background info on myself, I'm not going to boot someone for continuing the discussion.