So the Internet Archive, a great source of digital history and embarrassment, has put more than 2,000 old-school MS-DOS games up and made them playable in a browser.

Like most young geeks of the 1980s, I died many horrible deaths on The Oregon Trail. I even helped beta test Seven Cities of Gold when it first came out, and I wasted away night upon night on Starflight — a game so outside of the box and enormous for its time that it’s hard to explain its revolutionary aspects in today’s terms. OK, I’ll try: Imagine you are playing with a hoop and a stick and someone suddenly hands you an XBox Live. That’s the kind of leap we are talking about here.

The Post has a good bit of reporting on this. Careful, though: Once you dive into the archive — especially if you are of A Certain Age And Mindset — it’s hard to get out.

(I also note the archive has a whole section on the Timex Sinclair 1000 — the first computer I ever owned. It was an awful thing even then, but it was the only computer-like product I could afford on my $12K/year salary. Imagine trying to build a brick from grains of sand, and you’ll get an idea of what it was like to try to do anything useful with the TS 1000. But I did indeed build a few bricks.)