[ Thanks to Joe
Barr for this link. ]
“It’s a bad itch. I’ve had it for years. For a short period,
back in 1988 and 1989, I had a fix for it. But that didn’t last.
Now, thanks to an unlikely pair (Nick Petreley and Whil Hentzen),
it’s back. Let me explain.“In the late 1980s, I used to hang out on Portal, which was sort
of a step-sister of The Well, a popular online watering hole at the
time. Remember, these were the days before easy Internet access
from anywhere to anywhere. Our rag-tag band of migrant online
addicts used a flat-rate service called PC Pursuit to connect to
Portal. It made it affordable to hang out online. In those days,
CompuServe and The Source were getting $7 or $8 an hour for connect
time. That made the Portal/PC Pursuit arrangement all the more
attractive.“We would gather each evening to chat, argue and play games. The
favorite game was Trivia. Ms_Missie would run the game and keep
score. The competition was intense. Of course, we had ringers in
the game, too, such as the woman who edited the puzzle column for
New York Magazine. It was very tough to beat her. One day, as we
chatted, a few of us discovered that we had enough bridge players
for a table or two. That was the trigger. I had to write an online
bridge game…”