Ready Player None

Chapter 5.1 - Alex "Electric Dreams"

Reading the output of the zone scanner was always a challenge. I could usually guess the type of new or changed objects based on their internal system naming. Figuring out where they were actually located was a much bigger problem. Combine this device with an item-level data inspector and I could have been led right where I needed to go. Unfortunately, the Anniversary Party hunt didn't wait for me to save up for another five years and get one of those.

Based on the portions of the scan output I could understand, the new development was limited to a series of ancient floppy disks, one of which was newly-coded, and the others already part of Middletown coding with a few tiny changes.

Computer users in Halliday's time kept individual floppy disks in plastic trays to keep out dust, and provide some sort of organization. It seems impossible, but computers of that era could only access a single application or game at a time, and swapping disks in and out was like completely reprogramming them, with only the base operating system remaining static between sessions. It made sense that folks would want their computer's temporary new brain to be at their fingertips, but relatively safe from damage. Well, "made sense" in the way any decision looks from the vantage point of years afterward. Physical real-world storage of data sounds like a moronic way to design a system to me, but I understood the requirement.

Winnifred's house did not have a personal computer. Although she apparently liked to play video games, the only other computerized item I could find in the house was a Selectric typewriter. Not what I was looking for.

Where to next? It was either going to be a long search of every house in this copy of the zone, which I really didn't have time for, or pushing all the chips into the center of the table on a single trip to Halliday's boyhood home itself. Although the town had been rendered in great detail, no other locations had ever really stood out enough to warrant investigation. Decision made, I raced across a short series of empty streets, practically leaping across the yard of the well-known domicile that most folks equated with Middletown itself.

I was in such a rush to keep searching, the front door was going to need to think carefully about whether it wanted to be locked, or unlocked. It was only getting one chance to make the right decision. I sailed into the living room mostly unimpeded, the door bouncing noisily off the wall behind it.

Good call, door. Live to swing another day.

Looking through the contents of his bedroom, Halliday certainly had more than his share of computers. Some of them undoubtedly used the size and format of disk that I was looking for. He also appeared to be religious about using sorted disk trays with labels. Lots of labels. Most of the labels had been machine-printed originally, and then written over in pen, marked through, and re-written again several times as the disks were reused.

I know this all seems weird; computers were so primitive that people had to overwrite what they did, losing it forever? What happened if the replacement was less desirable than the original? Pity them, or laugh at them, that's how it was. Having spent countless days researching the early days of personal computing as part of my interest in Halliday, I tended more towards pity and understanding. Maybe that was another advantage I had.

I scanned his bedroom, looking for machines that fit the scanning profile. The TRS-80 Color didn't have a disk drive, it used cassette tape. Some of the kits didn't appear to have any sort of storage at all. I was also able to quickly eliminate the stately Macintosh; a later model that used disks in the not-so-floppy 3.5" format. That left the big three; an Apple IIe, a Commodore 64, and an boxy IBM on its own military-grade desk. Each of them had a disk case to the side. Targets acquired.