9)
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Originally Posted by cvannrederode
9) While most people are saying "PC", the Wintel machine had not cemented it's dominance yet. Other options that she may have:
Commodore Amiga. The Amiga 2000 was a top model at the time, and included a lot of expansion options.
The Atari ST is also an option. Especially for someone into the Music and "Demo" scene.
An Apple Macintosh, either an SE or a Mac II if she was more upscale.
Also on the Apple side, she could have a IIgs, but a Mac would be more hipster.
As far as PCs go, IBM was still in their first generation of PS/2 systems, which had just been released in 1987. Only the highest of high end systems ran with 80386's, most folks made do with 8086/8088 machines, or might spring for an 80286.
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Upscale would be an understatement. Her father was a Fairchild engineer who founded his own company specialising in programming guidance chips for the Air Force. At the time of play, he's
loaded. Not among the 140 billonaires that Forbes identified in 1987, but certainly knocking on the door to be let in the club in the next decade or so.
Her mother's family is
old money in California, land owners from before it was part of the US. Their fortune is now dwarved by Estevez's military contractor pile, but even without any additions, would have been quite enough for limosines to school, ponies for fifth birthdays and effectively unlimited access to geek toys.
In game terms, the character has Filthy Rich in her own right, just to represent her parents constantly preemptively buying her anything they think might make her life easier, help with her studies (or that 'FBI fad') and, in her father's case, make up for never seeing her enough. If she wanted to actually
ask her parents for money or stuff, she
also has Patron.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cvannrederode
You could still make do without a hard drive for day to day use. DOS was at version 4, Windows was only at version 2. Most PC work was at the command prompt, while the other machines listed all had fully realized GUIs.
Online work was with a modem, and given the area, long distance calls. BBSs were still a very big thing, Compuserv was the biggest name in what would become online services. Quantum Link had just changed it's name to America Online in Oct or Nov 88 after launching "PC Link" in August. GEnie was around also. Dial in speeds would be 2400 bits per second at most. ARPANET was just starting to become the Internet, but Berners-Lee wouldn't start work on HTML for another couple of years. She'd be much more likely to use CompuServ or GEnie or even FidoNet for "Email".
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I know that she likely would have used ARPANET at Stanford, where I think she would have gone in ca '81, as a sixteen-year-old math prodigy with an application so heavy with academic honours and resume-adorning extra-curricular activities that the dean of admissions must have thought she was in her thirties.
What would she have used in terms of OS and 'Internet' while working summers and school breaks as a computer programming and general tech geek intern/technician (between early 1983 and 1985) for the Las Angeles office of the FBI and later as a programmer/designer at
ViCAP at Quantico (1986 to mid-1988)?
The character is meant to be one of the unsung tech geeks behind the creation of the ViCAP and the digital technology revolution at the FBI. She's an off-the-scale genius who grew up in a household that was at the forefront of early digital computer technology and she was a superstar student of Computer Science at Stanford.
In GURPS game terms, she has IQ 14* and between 4-8 points per skill in a variety of computer and related skills, including Computer Operations [skill 16], Computer Programming [skill 15], Electronics Operation (Media) [skill 14], Expert Skill (Computer Security) [skill 13], Mathematics (Computer Science) [skill 15], Mathematics (Statistics) [skill 14] and Research [skill 15]. She's not the best in the US at any one field, but she's damn good at anything to do with programming or using computers.
Granted, all of that is background, not so much relevant for this adventure. On the other hand, my three players include a software engineer, a computer scientist and a first-year student of programming and computer science.** I expect they'd welcome background and characterisation in the form of geeky equipment for her to carry and be familiar with.
And if it turns out that Special Agent Estevez can actually use her 80s computer skills and equipment to contribute materially to the adventure, well, that would be an unexpected, but nice, bonus.
*Plenty of Disadvantages that bring her effective IQ in social terms down to human average or so, but those are not relevant to her technical skills.
**Unfortunately, the player playing Special Agent Estevez, uber FBI tech geek, is the one who has a degree in Japanese and is just on his first year of computer study.