VOGONS

Anyone remember Uptime?

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First post, by jmrydholm

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My dad once subscribed to a monthly floppy disk a long time ago with all kinds of cool stuff on it. it was called "Uptime." I still have a decent number of the original floppies, which amazingly load just fine. Does anyone know where to come across a full set of them or some kind of archive? (Not asking for any warez here, of course!) I've even tried ebay, though they seem to be esoteric and hard to come by. I'd love to find them all one day. Another similar subscription we had was "Big Blue Disk." Got a bunch of those as well.

One of John Romero's early games, Pyramids of Egypt was on Uptime and BBD. You could set cobras on fire with gas cans and run around collecting diamonds.

http://romero.smugmug.com/Video-Games/Pyramid … 956_y8SwT-L.jpg

"The height of strategy, is to attack your opponent’s strategy” -Sun Tzu
“Make your fighting stance, your everyday stance and make your everyday stance, your fighting stance.” - Musashi
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Reply 1 of 3, by BigBodZod

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By the summary of this thread I was first thinking the *nix command for how long a server had been running without rebooting 😉

Maybe they grabbed the name for the same reason ?

I can't say I really remmeber this series of PD/Shareware Releases as I was still mainly into my C64 and Amiga at the time.

No matter where you go, there you are...

Reply 2 of 3, by jmrydholm

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Yep, I think I remember my dad hypothesizing about that when we first got the disks. I asked him, "Why do they call it 'UpTime?'" and his best guess was exactly that- how long the computer was running.

They had some pretty sweet games and articles to read. Even as a kid I remember reading a Teach-me-Lotus text file, way beyond me. There was also this test where you could see if your CRT monitor had "snow." It had this CGA image of a badly drawn captain Kirk beaming in and out with a shower of blue pixels. I should get some screencaps of it somehow, but the only working floppy drive I have left is in my native Dos machine. If my floppy on the XP tower was good, I'd load it up in Dosbox.

Wikipedia has a really short article on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UpTime_%28disk_magazine%29

"The height of strategy, is to attack your opponent’s strategy” -Sun Tzu
“Make your fighting stance, your everyday stance and make your everyday stance, your fighting stance.” - Musashi
SET BLASTER = A220 I5 D1 T3 P330 E620 OMG WTF BBQ

Reply 3 of 3, by Jorpho

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jmrydholm wrote:

Another similar subscription we had was "Big Blue Disk." Got a bunch of those as well.

Oh, sure. I never had a subscription or knew anyone with a subscription, but Softdisk is famous. Lots of big-name stuff was released that way, like Catacomb 3-D and Keen Dreams.

I think you might even still be able to buy some of their oldest stuff for outrageous prices at downloadstore.com if you dig deeply enough.

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