Sometimes the journey is a form of technological archeology. Other times it can branch off into technologist anthropology. My recent exploration met somewhere in the middle.
Several years ago I received some very unusual disks that were created on-and-for the Commodore 64 and 128. I think they either were part of a lot I’d saved from being sent to the dump, or I got them in a shipment of something else from either southern Washington, Oregon or Northern California. I can’t entirely remember as it has been too long and they weren’t something I was seeking. They came along for the ride and were figuratively dropped on my doorstep by a stork. However, these 5.25” disks were really hard to forget. They were bright yellow - scuba yellow - and came in handmade even-brighter yellow disk sleeves. “Whoever created these disks,” I thought, “was probably part genius and partly a tad off.” Those two traits do seem to go together sometimes.
- My small collection of Penny Farthing disks.
Every square inch of the disk sleeves were covered in what was obviously meticulously-crafted text, printed from an impressive 8-bit Commodore setup and maybe even a laser printer. You read that right.
The sleeves were seemingly hand-cut from a template with an X-acto knife (probably one sheet of paper per sleeve, too) hand-folded and actually glued together. Some of that glue is now failing. And the disk labels, as well as all of the typography, were done in a similar DIY fashion often using unnecessarily extravagant, i.e. hard to read but attractive, script fonts. In addition, the language used within the disks sometimes seemed to hold an affection towards the past and on occasion utilized English spellings, which I found strange since these were made in Oregon. It made me wonder if the author was an ex-pat from the UK or Australia. I learned later that was not the case.
- "We all live in a Yellow Submarine. A yellow submarine. A yellow submarine."
- Some excellent advice.
Next, take the title of the disk series: “Penny Farthing”. “What is a penny farthing?” I’m sure many of you are asking. I had to look it up. It’s the very early type of ludicrous bicycle you’ve likely seen in history books or at a local town parade or circus that has a very large front wheel and a small rear wheel.
Wikipedia:
The name came from the British penny and farthing coins, the penny being much larger than the farthing, so that the side view of the bicycle resembles a larger penny (the front wheel) leading a smaller farthing (the rear wheel). (A farthing was a British coin worth one quarter of a penny, or 1/960 of a pound sterling. The word "farthing" comes from the Old English word fēorðing, which means "a fourth”.)
Although the name "penny-farthing" is now the most common, it was probably not used until the [bicycle] machines had been almost superseded.
How someone actually mounts and dismounts the crazy things must be a challenge in itself. And what a curious title for a series of disks. What meaning could be behind it all?
First take:
These disks were crafted on a Commodore 8-bit machine in 2009 - well beyond a time when anyone in tech would have considered the Commodore computers of the 1980s to be relevant. And yet, here they were. Still functional, still around, possibly ridiculous to some but they worked. And in some regards they worked exceptionally well. Yet how to “mount” them and use them… a curious puzzle for many even in 2009.
I say that because popping these into a 1541 drive and trying to use them with a stock Commodore 64 wouldn’t work. It was only part of the necessary puzzle pieces one needed in order to put it all together.
It almost seemed like a subtle middle finger, or a quiet whisper of stubborn pride, aimed towards anyone that wanted to use the disks that wasn’t “in the club”. I say that because to even read the included text files you needed a significant level of Commodore devotion: niche hardware, software and very specific knowledge in order to come into the fold. This wasn’t just a velvet rope outside an exclusive club, this was a chainlink fence most couldn’t easily climb or jump. A few deft Google searches wouldn’t help, either. No, you had to be all-in.
I soon came to learn that these disks were intended to be read using one of the most modern versions of GEOS for Commodore machines available at that time: Wheels. (Berkeley Softworks ceased support for Commodore computers around 1990, but 3rd-party development continued into the 90s and beyond.) Although truth be told earlier versions would work, it’s just that Wheels provided the most luxurious and user friendly experience under the right conditions. You could still get there with CMD’s gateWay, or even a very beefed up GEOS 2.0, but Wheels was the Real Deal Holyfield.
Technically speaking, the recommended setup would include a Commodore 64 or 128, a CMD SuperCPU with RAM expansion (at least 128K but ideally a few MB if not maxed out at 16MB), some sort of storage beyond just a 1541 drive, and Wheels 64 or 128, the incredibly impressive enhancement to GEOS created by Maurice Randall out of Michigan. While not required, you also would have been encouraged to use a program called “PostPrint” which provided a much better overall reading and printing experience, if you cared to go that route.
As mentioned, I acquired these disks years ago and it was before I’d educated myself about the fascinating world of the original GEOS (2.0) world at its most fundamental levels. Thus, the files on the Penny Farthing disks were unaccessible to me at the time. Not only were they mostly created from within GEOS, they were even “Zipped” using GEOS-only 3rd-party compression tools. In other words, locked in a digital tomb of sorts for even most hard-core C64 fans. You really needed to be all-in on GEOS, which often meant CMD hardware and/or RAM expansion was likely a part of your Commodore world, too.
As such, a very small audience was being targeted here. An exclusive club.
The disks were 5.25” 1541 double-sided disks, so from a disk drive perspective the lowest on the totem pole and easiest to use, which ultimately is a good thing and almost antithetical to the overall premise. But for the rest of it? Phew! Of course, that made the disks all the more curious to me.
I stored the banana-yellow disks in a disk storage box for the day I might someday catch up to this level of impressive Commodore/GEOS nerdery.
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Over time I came to research the man who made these disks for ACUG: Anything Commodore User Group, and sometimes also called the Astoria Commodore User Group.
For those that don’t know, Astoria is a beautiful little village that is perched on the upper northwestern corner of Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River, which feeds into the Pacific Ocean. It was originally thought it might become the Manhattan of the Pacific Northwest, but that never came to be due to the violence of the river mouth it sat by. There is a massive bridge that spans the river there so folks from Washington can drive across to Astoria and vice versa. The town is also slightly famous for having been the location of a few popular movies, including The Goonies, Into the Wild, Kindergarten Cop, Short Circuit and Free Willy, among many others.
The man who created the disks was David Mohr, also known in the Commodore scene as Lord Ronin. You can find him on csdb.dk for his contributions to the disk magazine Scene World. He was credited as a Disk Mag Editor on ten issues of “Scene World” from 2003-2011, which is interesting since he died in 2009. There’s not much else out there as I think most of his communications were done via snail mail, on BBSes, and verbally or privately between members in the scene or his club.
Wikipedia:
I know he was only a young 56 when he died (born in 1953), and I believe he was a vet. I don’t know which service or how long he served but I believe he was active during the Vietnam war when he was a very young man, and based on communications with my friend Robert Bernardo, who knew Mohr and attended some of his club meetings, it is believed that Mohr was a ground soldier in that conflict. That in addition to his contributions to the Commodore scene is about all I really know.In feudal Japan (1185–1868), a rōnin was a samurai who had no lord or master and in some cases, had also severed all links with his family or clan.
Lord Ronin on the development of his ACUG newsletters in 2008:
The Penny Farthing disks were created specifically for his ACUG members, the C= club which he ran. The few disks I have are composed of the following:So our newsletter is written in GeoWrite, printed out in PostPrint 3.8. We also can make a pdf file of the newsletter. 99% of that is done on and through the Commodore. Only the pdf converting is done on the linux machine. Your groups may have different or similar rules as befits the tastes of your group.
- One side has programs. These are always GeoZipped so that Lord Ronin could fit as much as possible on a single side of a disk.
- The other side contains a chapter of a fictional story Lord Ronin was writing in two forms: an “adult” version, and a “general” version. These documents were also GeoZipped, because his writings were LONG. I’ll talk more about this later.
- I have chapters 2, 4 and 5 of "It Was My World"
The disks I have include:
August 2009ce A.C.U.G. Disk
- Side A: “Three games from the late Paul “Dunric” Panks”
- Side B: “My world story chapter #2. General & the adult versions. GeoWrite, GeoZipped.”
On the sleeve:
Side A
Read Me file: “1st in a series of disks of the games of the late Paul “Dunric” Panks. On this disk: 8kadv.zip. More to follow in future disks. Most are believed to be in .D64, but not all of them. Some may be 128 as well as other 8-bit CBM.”
(From AmigaLove: More on this in a bit.)
Side B
“Read Me file: By request, more storied from he sick mind of Lord Ronin. My World chapter 2 General and Adult. Files are in GeoWrite, and GeoZipped. Fonts in last issue. Delete the one you don’t like.”
October 2009ce C= 1541 Disk
- Side A: “Read Me file of information on the files. GeoFonts, Mac to GeoPaint digital images, AD&D PC sheets. Geobuster v4 for encryption removal.” “Locally created”
- Side B: “Chapter #4 of “It Was My World” Adult and General editions. Delete the one(s) you dislike.”
(see photo)
November 2009
- Side A: “The Wild Bunch. Released this year by Triad.” “More from dementia”
- Side B: “It Was My World Chapter 5. Adult and General versions.”
(see photo)
The extra disk I have says, “Quiz for Penny Farthing” hand-written in pencil.
David “Lord Ronin” Mohr died on December 3, 2009 at the age of 56 from a heart attack.
Based on this photo of him that my friend Robert Bernardo shared with me, he looks like the kind of guy I would have really liked to meet.
- David Mohr, aka Lord Ronin. Photo courtesy of Robert Bernardo.
And it was finding Mohr’s disks all those years ago that put me on a low-burn perpetual journey to eventually get a Wheels system running of my own. On the second day of learning and exploring the fascinating world of Wheels OS, I quickly inserted the Penny Farthing disks (the August 2009 edition) and unzipped his adult chapter. I had to know…
Each installment on each monthly disk included a complete chapter in the forms I previously described. These documents are so long that I now understood why a stock GEOS setup would be unable to even open them. And, the PostPrint application written by Maurice Randall really was a superior way to read these really long documents. It all started to make sense to me now. A little.
I know some are asking themselves, “Why would you write a long multi-chapter story on an antiquated computer virtually guaranteeing most people will never read it.” It was the computer and scene that Mr. Mohr loved, plain and simple. He never believed himself to be a good writer (and to be honest, I might agree) but he was extremely creative and obviously intelligent. And, he had friends that really enjoyed reading his writings on their own Commodore setups. It gave those old computers a new reason for being and one that felt quite important. It created a deep connection through a technology they all grew to love over many years.
By starting with the August disk, I quickly learned I was looking at Chapter 2. Looking at the other disks in my collection, it was as if I’d found parts of a book strewn in the ruins of an old abandoned library. After reading a few pages, I pulled the disk out of the drive and put it back in its sleeve. I’ll un-zip these disks later and put all of their data on a single 3.5” disk for storage. It would be fun to try and find the rest of the ACUG disks from 2009 someday even though the story will have an abrupt unfinished ending.
Hat tip to you, Lord Ronin. Some of your interesting creations still survive all these years later. And thanks for pushing me to catch up to where you were 16 years ago on a Commodore computer.
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SIDE QUEST
On one of the disks there is an entire side dedicated to three zipped up interactive fiction games created by a man named Paul Panks of Phoenix, Arizona. It’s never explicitly stated but it seems Mr. Panks suffered from mental illness - quite possibly clinical depression - and may have taken his own life two days before his 33rd birthday on July 5, 2009.
We was fairly well known in both the Interactive Fiction and C64 scenes. Although from what I’ve read, he seemed to receive quite a lot of negative energy from his efforts. To say he was a prolific creator and fan of interactive fiction would be putting it mildly.
He is credited with over 40 games on the IF Wiki, many of which seem to be lost to the sands of time.
He started learning to program soon after getting his own Commodore 128 (which he said originally upset him to receive because he wanted a C64) but over time came to appreciate the extra RAM and more modern version of BASIC. Eventually he started to write his interactive fiction on MS DOS machines and seemed to port many of his games to both platforms up until 2005. And around that time began to focus almost entirely on MS-DOS and eventually Windows machines. But he still hung out at Lemon64 and contributed posts there regularly.
What’s interesting about Mr. Panks are his games were almost universally disliked but it didn’t seem to stop him or even slow him down. He would submit his games to competitions and they generally would be placed near the end of the stack every single time. He was extremely active on USENET interactive fiction newsgroups, but wasn’t very popular. Whenever he wrote anything it would be giant walls of text, which drove a lot of folks kind of crazy. It’s just how he was wired.
As such, his games followed the same pattern and were received similarly. Usually an interactive fiction game might include a max of 60 - 70 “rooms”. In one instance, his game Westfront PC: The Trials of Guilder included 1,728 “rooms” spread across four different continents containing over 25 quests.
These weren’t stories. These were vast worlds. And at least in the IF universe this was an unspoken rule you weren’t supposed to break. On top of that, he would promote his creations constantly all over the place, which also rubbed some folks the wrong way. His verbosity could also be found and greeted on Lemon64 in a similar fashion.
In any case, he seemed to find a friend in David Mohr, who probably admired or at least appreciated Panks’ long-form escapism. So in learning of his death in June of 2009, Mohr zipped up and put three of the games he’d received over the years on one side of a bright yellow disk as a means of offering his respects. What’s funny is I don’t think Mohr ever actually played these games because on the disk jacket he states, “Most are believed to be in a D64, but not all of them. Some may be 128 as well as other 8bit CBM” whatever that means.
The three files are:
- 8kadv.zip
- alesia.zip
- bvent.zip
According to the ifwiki page, 8K Adventure was written and published in June of 2004 on MSDOS, BASIC and TADS. It was even ported to ZX81 and translated from English to French. However, there is indeed a C64 version, which according to ifdb.org is the original.
“Alesia” probably refers to Alesian Plains, which was also credited to being published in 2004 for Commodore.
“bvent” likely is referring to B-Venture, also from 2004. I found the C64 version over on CSDB.
Panks had submitted it to the 2004 MiniGame Compo in the 4K category. It was awarded 36th place out of 42 entries. (scroll down to see the results)
Some of the reviews:
“Can be finished in matter of minutes. The code could be much optimized. You could have done a lot better from 4k!" -- Csabo.
"More a parser demo than a real game." -- tjentzsch.
"Relatively simple to finish but considering that you actually have to do battle with monsters is an unusual plus. The 1st adventure in a decade I actually wanted to finish." -- Anara.
"Fair, but doesn't really grab the attention" -- love_policeman.
"Cute to have such a tiny disk image, but...eh. Frustrating that old text adventure shortcuts like "N" and "S" don't work " -- kirkjerk.
RIP David Mohr and Paul Panks, two unusual cats that were very dedicated fans of the worlds Commodore helped them create. Special thanks and appreciation to Mohr for inspiring me to build my various GEOS battle stations these past few years. I look forward to showing off my latest soon, which like the Penny Farthing includes Wheels.
