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ms-dos story time

so way back in 1990, my family still hadn't made the jump to a PC yet. all we had was a TRS-80 Color Computer, and a Mattel Intellivision.

but we had just moved to an acreage in another province, and i found out that one of the neighbours' dads had a computer: a Zenith AT/XT

my friend's dad would come home with random diskettes, probably copied from someone at his chemical engineering job. we'd pop them in and usually find something decent to play.

we played a lot of cga two-player SOPWITH.COM and a moon patrol clone that was honestly pretty good, even in eyeball-piercing magenta.

but one day he came home with a disk that just said 'JOLT' on it. we ran the exe, and i was instantly blown away. it was a jolt can, perfectly digitized in VGA, spinning around in circles faster and faster, until it was barely recognizable. i watched the animation a dozen times before my friends got bored and wanted to play something else.

the next day, i told my best friends at school about the animation. no one believed me, and the diskette "mysteriously" disappeared the next time i visited my buddy's house.

i was haunted by the jolt cola can animation for decades. that is, until a while ago i ended up finding it buried in an ms-dos demoscene site.

here it is, over 30 years later, with an original file date of February 22, 1990. ❤️

#msdos #demoscene #bbs