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Hey Everyone!
When I was younger, I worked for Tandy Corporation as a computer specialist. You would probably know this better as The parent company of “Radio Shack”.
Being a computer specialist, you had the ability to obtain almost anything to run or demo on the computer systems in your store. I was a hard core Sierra On-Line Fan, and Sierra On-Line had offerings for us to order from headquarters as well.
I was recently looking through my collection, and I found two disks, (1 – 3.5” 720K and 1 – 5.25” 360K) which I had ordered from headquarters to demo in our store.
Low and behold, they are Demo Disks from Sierra On-Line. Made by Sierra On-Line in the late 80’s and made exclusively for Tandy Corporation.
The demo disks showcase the latest and greatest software from Sierra On-Line back in 1987. Games like Space Quest 1, Police Quest 1, King’s Quest 1 and 2 and 3 and so on. They were designed to run continuously on our Tandy Machines. They are not playable games (Oh god, they are on a single disk for gods sakes!!!) but I’m sure these disks have not seen the light of day for almost 20 years now.
Check out a piece of nostalgia if you like. I think these two disks make for great additions to ANY Sierra On-Line Collection.
I was completely amazed that they are still on the original disks, and still in working condition. We are talking about almost 20 years here!!! And you would have to understand WHY I am surprised.
Back in the Days we sold the Tandy 1000 line. The Tandy 1000 line came with a 3.5” 720K Floppy or a 5.25” 360K Floppy. The max memory you could put into these machines was 1MB. They were sold with 256K, 512K, or 768K and you could expand that to 1MB of memory. And I can’t forget the fact that they were a whopping 80286 (Or Tandy’s version of dual 8088 processors) 8mhz or 12mhz depending on if you wanted to spend the extra $299.00 to get the 12Mhz edition.. Hard Drives were for the wealthier of the bunch, and if memory serves me correctly, it would cost you around $499.00 for a 40MB Hard Drive. Yes, I didn’t type that wrong, the MAX you could get was a 40 MEGABYTE hard drive.
Our demo machines NEVER had hard drives in them. That came later when they bumped up the price and included a 20MB hard drive for around $199.00 more. So since our machines didn’t have hard drives, these demo disks were run in the stores for days, weeks, months all from one single floppy disk. I can not even tell you how they would look after months of use and reading. All I can guess is that I ordered duplicates and some how obtained them when I quit the company back in the early 90’s
So my great find is your great find. They are True MS-DOS programs, and I think only make use of the PC speaker for sound.
You can find them here:
http://rapidshare.de/files/11689125/Sierra_Demo_1_1987.zip
http://rapidshare.de/files/11689138/Sierra_Demo_2_1987.zip
They will probably be up for around 30 days on this host. But once my subscription expires, I’ll try to move them to a new host so let me know if they have gone the way of the Dodo bird.
This is a rare find for any Sierra On-Line Fan.
Enjoy!!!
Take Care, Tom.
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Wow, sorry for that BIG delay in responding. (Over a year)
I’ll try to find them again. In the past year I purchased a new home and moved in. So everything was boxed up and shipped to the new place. Now I have the fun of unpacking a lifetime of items. I’m finding new things every day (Oh so THATS where that was) I’m sure you understand.
Once I find them, I’ll upload pictures of the disks. They didn’t come in anything since they were disks ordered through our headquarters so I think when we got them, it was a floppy in a clear plastic baggy. I know, thrilling.
And I’ll also try to upload the actual demos to a new server so they are able to be downloaded once again.
Take Care, Tom.
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Hey Tom,
If you would actually scan the disks themselves with their labels at 300 DPI and save as PSD or TIF, that would be great for the continuing archival efforts.
As for the disk contents, the demos, if you want to email them to me at klassen at hotmail dot com I’ll upload them here at SierraGamers in a permanent location, and provide a mirror as well at another permanent location.
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