Recent find makes for a nostalgic Christmas

Gamemoose · December 22, 2019

Back on Christmas of 1984, before my family moved back to our home state, my Dad gave me a CoCo present. It was a tape, covered with Tandy data cassette labels, titled "Merry Christmas 1984". I was pretty excited. When I ran CLOAD on the tape, the first program was called "Type Run". The program started up playing "Deck the Halls" and it contained a list of games my Dad typed in from "The Rainbow" and "Hot CoCo" magazines along with a couple art programs he wrote. Titles like "Pipeline", "Guppy's Revenge", "Submarine Simulator" and "Hindu Towers" awaited me to load and play them.

That tape survived a 2,000 mile journey and several housing moves (about 9). On move number 8, after my divorce, my Dad passed away. By move 9, when I remarried and moved into my new wife's house, the tape disappeared. I searched all my boxes, bags and such but no tape. At almost 4 years, I gave up looking for that tape.

Recently I had the urge to program. I did some DOS batch file writing at work (as I was old enough to know WHAT they were and knew how to write them) and that got me going. When I went home, I wanted to type in a Santa game I saw in the December 1986 issue of The Rainbow. I paged through that mag a couple weeks ago and left it on one of my boxes in the basement. When I went to get it, I couldn't find it. Looking at the paper grocery bags I had my CoCo mags in, I spotted something rectangular on top of one of the bags. It was not there before. I picked it up and looked at the label:

"Merry Christmas 1984"

Where did this come from? I looked about and saw no logical place it woukd have came from. Apparantly, after excitedly telling my wife about my find (which, like anything computer or video game related, didn't get much interest) she said something fell out of or off of the Christmas ornament bin. I have no clue how it got there but needless to say I am very happy.

I'll be doing a tribute video for my Dad soon using captured emulated footage.

As the holidays between work and home life get stressful and sometimes disappointing, something like this comes along to make one's spirit brighter.