By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
After its founding on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company had one of the fastest rises ever for an upstart company. Their first computer was named, simply, Apple I, but in June 1977, the company changed the world with the Apple II. With an external shell for containing the components, a built-in keyboard, game paddles, cassettes for saving data, and glorious full-color graphics, the Apple II was credited for expanding the market for computers beyond experts, business professionals, and hobbyists. For the first time, consumers saw a computer that seemed like it could be used by anybody.
The Apple II made such a quick impact after only a year on the market that Apple employees reported to CBS Television City in Hollywood to help get a game show off the ground.
Tic Tac Dough had originally aired on NBC in the late 1950s. Contestants faced a tic-tac-toe grid with a category in each of the nine squares. The champion (playing X) and the challenger (playing O) took turns picking squares and answering questions, earning a square with each correct answer. For a little added suspense and strategy, the nine categories were mounted on nine spinning drums that would rotate after each round of play. A contestant looking to capture their third box for the win could suddenly find themselves stuck with a category that stumped them.
Tic Tac Dough ended in 1959. In 1978, series creators Jack Barry & Dan Enright were riding a new wave of success with The Joker’s Wild, a quiz in which a giant slot machine determined the categories. Looking for another hit show, Barry & Enright reached to a show from their past and decided to launch The New Tic Tac Dough, selling a daytime version to CBS, with a nighttime version to air on local stations across the country in syndication.
Nine Apple computers were purchased to form the game board for the new version; one Apple II for each square on the game board; a tape cassette machine was also attached to each one for data storage. A 10th computer, the Altair 8800 manufactured by MITS, served as a brain of sorts for the entire collection. All nine Apple IIs were connected to the Altair, which would “tell” each Apple computer what it should display at different points in the game.
Bob Bishop, an early Apple employee who designed many of the company’s earliest games (Space Maze and Bomber among other titles) was dispatched to CBS to bring the show to life. He shared his memories in a 2009 interview with Em Maginnis for Juiced.GS Magazine
Bishop remembered, “They needed to put up a giant ‘X’, a giant ‘O’, a dragon, the names of the categories, whatever it is they wanted—somebody had to do that. And so they elected me! It was a fun little thing. I’d never done anything in television before, so it was my first chance to actually go behind the scenes and see what goes on in a TV station. It was kind of a one-shot deal that lasted a few months. There wasn’t that much to do—it was just a matter of programming the computer to do what they wanted. But it was fun because, as you know, when you first write a program, it never quite works right the first time, and even when you think you’ve got it debugged, it doesn’t quite work. I remember we were doing the prototype and the emcee, Wink Martindale, would say, ‘Now, we’ll look at the categories,’ and nothing would happen. Who’s to blame? Everybody’s pointing the finger at somebody else. Usually, it turned out it wasn’t my fault, though!”
Bishop successfully debugged the system and The New Tic Tac Dough was a success. In time, Barry & Enright got more Apple II computers, offering them as prizes in their bonus round, with announcer Jay Stewart even making it a point to hype the computer by touting, “Just connect it to your TV set and you’re ready to program for recording family records, computer games, artwork, music, and it even helps the kids with their math…It’s the same computer that runs our Tic Tac Dough board!”
Think of what a glowing endorsement that would have been in the late 1970s. A big-time television show in Hollywood used this computer as the central nervous system for their entire production—and you can use it in your own home!
Tic Tac Dough aired for the next eight years, intriguing young viewers who became part of that first generation to live with computers in the home. Two of those fans, Stephen Wylie and Kevin Trinkle, spent the past four months on a labor of love that they finally unveiled on June 20.
Vintage Computer Festival Southwest is an annual gathering of old-school techies displaying their personal collections of classic obsolete computers and other gear. Among the attractions at this year’s event: Nintendo’s Famicom System from the 1980s, with a selection of games sold only in Japan; decommissioned equipment used by the Weather Channel in the early 1990s; Hewlett-Packard’s Pen Plotter, a printer that drew pictures with two mounted pens; Tandy hardware and software sold at RadioShack; and several computer models playing the Oregon Trail on ordinary green-hued monitors.
In the lobby of the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas, visitors were welcomed with an eye-popping array of authentic Apple IIs, strung together just like old times to form the game board for Tic Tac Dough.
Trinkle explains, “Knowing the history of Tic Tac Dough and the board being the first use of computer graphics in a TV game show, we thought it would be cool to recreate it on as close to the original hardware as we could. We’re both game show nerds.”
Surprisingly, rounding up nine 1978 computers in working condition was one of the easiest parts of the process! Trinkle says, “I own three of the Apple II machines, acquired over the past six years as part of my private collection. Stephen owns one of them.”
The other five came from local vintage tech enthusiasts. Three of the computers had been dug out of the dirt behind the former site of a computer store in Dallas.
Without any actual instructions or guidelines from the real show to work with, Wylie & Trinkle studied numerous episodes of Tic Tac Dough, and used their own knowledge and expertise to work backward, figuring out what kind of coding would have to be programmed in order to produce the numbers, words, and graphics.
Trinkle says, “Quite a bit of my first code was thrown out as it was just too slow…[It] all had to be thrown out and rewritten.”
Wylie adds, “I didn’t expect to be writing Apple II code at this point in my life! I hadn’t written anything serious on the Apple II since junior high school over 30 years ago…I had to relearn quite a bit that I had long since forgotten and learn new things in the process.”
The recreation wasn’t 100% authentic; for lack of an Altair 8800, Wylie & Trinkle used a modern Raspberry Pi to do the thinking for the Apple IIs. The Raspberry Pi also supplied theme music and sound effects. To give some context about what visitors were seeing, Wylie also displayed a Tic Tac Dough press kit from 1978, with photos and information about the show.
Visitors tended to have one of two reactions: “I remember this show!” and “There was a game show that ran on Apple IIs? That’s awesome! I never knew that!”
Dozens of games were played over the weekend, transporting people to television’s past for just a few minutes at a time, and celebrating how far their favorite technology, and our favorite genre of television, have come in the decades since. Wylie & Trinkle are not unique among the fandom either. There are fans who have built their own Showcase Showdowns and Wheels of Fortune in their workshops, fans who have wired their own Jeopardy! buzzers, printed their own giant decks of cards, constructed Match Game question machines and host lecterns. Game shows have inspired hundreds of labors of love from devoted fans.