I feel a bit dirty doing this, but I guess I really shouldn't, as this was found through google in about 5 minutes and consists of publicly available information that appears to have been freely shared by the person/people it is about.

I suspect this might be him: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-roberds-51b51711

The area matches (Raleigh vs Durham in North Carolina).

He works/worked for IT companies.

He graduated from college in 1986.

See also https://www.mobygames.com/person/1153983/robe … erds/companies/ , which indicates he goes by Bob (based on ?).

There is also a Facebook profile that matches the professional history on that LinkedIn account.

None of this proves conclusively this is the person you are looking for, of course.

You could have easily googled this yourself or searched linkedin/facebook. Very weird request and I'm not sure why it's being entertained. This reads a bit like a scam email and scammers will often do this as now they can cite vogons as a source.

kingcake wrote on Today, 02:48:

You could have easily googled this yourself or searched linkedin/facebook. Very weird request and I'm not sure why it's being entertained. This reads a bit like a scam email and scammers will often do this as now they can cite vogons as a source.

How does the type of scam you suspect work ? What kind of "source" is a speculative post that references only publicly available information ?

If mods disapprove of anything here, they can certainly remove the thread, but I would still like to understand the potential scam angle to both avoid falling for it and avoid haplessly contributing to it.

EDIT:
Also, for the benefit of OP, assuming they are sincere, I suspect the answer to [1] is probably a shareware CD that got distributed in Europe or through dial-up/BBSing .

[1]

I would simply love to thank him for this little piece of my childhood and ask him how his games managed to travel all the way from North Carolina to France in those pre-Internet days.

Thank you so much, Darry, for your message and your detailed explanations.

I feel a little embarrassed because, indeed, he does have a LinkedIn profile. I simply hadn't realized that Bob was short for Robert! In Europe, we're really not used to seeing nicknames used on official professional profiles such as LinkedIn. Besides, I'm not registered on LinkedIn myself.

He's also on Facebook, and again, I hadn't realized that the person in Durham and the one in Raleigh were probably the same man. Those cities are completely unfamiliar to me, and I would never have made the connection.

I'm going to write to him sometime today!

I also sincerely want to apologize to anyone who may have been annoyed by my post. No, this is not a scam!

I actually find the whole situation rather ironic. Here we are on a forum dedicated to old software from the pre-Internet era, and yet globalization and the ease of international communication have made a message from a faraway stranger seem so ordinary that it can even be mistaken for a scam. There was perhaps a certain charm to those unexpected connections that we've somehow lost along the way.

No, I'm simply a pharmacist living in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France. Computers aren't necessarily "my thing", but sometimes we carry the nostalgia of little, silly things with us throughout our entire lives.

And last night, at around 11 p.m., this memory suddenly resurfaced from the very depths of my childhood.

Back then, it would never have occurred to me to try to contact the programmer of this tiny 50 KB piece of software. But now I find myself thinking that perhaps he, too, might be pleased to know that something he created, possibly just for a laugh some 35 years ago, brought so much laughter and amusement to a little French boy and his friends, secretly playing on his friend's parents' computer!

(For context, having a computer at home was still quite unusual in France around 1990–1991. I certainly didn't have one myself, and I had never even used a computer before.)

Anyway, I wish you all a wonderful week, and thank you once again for your kindness and for taking me by the hand, so to speak, and helping me track down this gentleman!

I'm genuinely grateful.

alexpharmamars wrote on Today, 06:41:

Thank you so much, Darry, for your message and your detailed explanations. […]
Show full quote

Thank you so much, Darry, for your message and your detailed explanations.

I feel a little embarrassed because, indeed, he does have a LinkedIn profile. I simply hadn't realized that Bob was short for Robert! In Europe, we're really not used to seeing nicknames used on official professional profiles such as LinkedIn. Besides, I'm not registered on LinkedIn myself.

He's also on Facebook, and again, I hadn't realized that the person in Durham and the one in Raleigh were probably the same man. Those cities are completely unfamiliar to me, and I would never have made the connection.

I'm going to write to him sometime today!

I also sincerely want to apologize to anyone who may have been annoyed by my post. No, this is not a scam!

I actually find the whole situation rather ironic. Here we are on a forum dedicated to old software from the pre-Internet era, and yet globalization and the ease of international communication have made a message from a faraway stranger seem so ordinary that it can even be mistaken for a scam. There was perhaps a certain charm to those unexpected connections that we've somehow lost along the way.

No, I'm simply a pharmacist living in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France. Computers aren't necessarily "my thing", but sometimes we carry the nostalgia of little, silly things with us throughout our entire lives.

And last night, at around 11 p.m., this memory suddenly resurfaced from the very depths of my childhood.

Back then, it would never have occurred to me to try to contact the programmer of this tiny 50 KB piece of software. But now I find myself thinking that perhaps he, too, might be pleased to know that something he created, possibly just for a laugh some 35 years ago, brought so much laughter and amusement to a little French boy and his friends, secretly playing on his friend's parents' computer!

(For context, having a computer at home was still quite unusual in France around 1990–1991. I certainly didn't have one myself, and I had never even used a computer before.)

Anyway, I wish you all a wonderful week, and thank you once again for your kindness and for taking me by the hand, so to speak, and helping me track down this gentleman!

I'm genuinely grateful.

Je n'ai rien contre les émois nostalgiques d'un apothicaire du Sud, bien au contraire. Je lève ma coupe de gros rouge à la mémoire de nos jeunesses évanouies, de nos découvertes parfois prématurées et des souvenirs épars qui subsistent.

Improperly abbreviated translation : Cheers to our memories, mate!

A votre bonne santé ! Cheers, Gesundheit, Salute ! Merci encore 😉