Taper #8

Taper #8 isn’t just for games! It’s a fully functioning home computer that will make you more productive and help your kids learn. But it has great games, too, such as an arthropod arcade shooter and an addictive slot machine, in addition to one that lets you chomp out a poem. There are amazing graphics, with a great deal of character and the ability to rain vibrant colors. In different modes, Taper #8 will also shower expandable symbols and cascade a poetic phrase. Of course the BASIC programming language is available right when you power the system up. You might not expect this from an eight-bit machine, but Taper #8 even supports the web!

Underlying Taper #8 are bytes, which are made of bits, and you can see how these represent your own text, or find they encode a story that you can reveal, or get a feel for the way they manifest themselves materially on paper tape. Sometimes those bytes get too far out of their comfort zone. Sometimes they wake up and change.

Your cutting-edge CPU will be able to run radially arranged poems that update meditatively and engage phases of the moon and concerns about the earth. And there is support for weaving! A trio of works entwine instructional language as well as two types of patterns inspired by Anni Albers: phrases from her writing and visual threads of characters. Extending into the next dimension is a recursive, fractal weave of words. A radiant story of an early computing encounter shuttles out a line at a time. And while Taper #8 doesn’t have a built-in four-year lifespan, it is still programmed to terminally soliloquize.