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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Jun 24, 2020 8:42 pm

I can't believe my good fortune finding this.
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Never opened, sitting in a garage for over 30 years amongst ~20 boxes that had been hoarded by the seller's father.

The TAC-2 is my favorite joystick, and now I have an impossibly new one. I opened the box for the very first time tonight petrified I might tear the top flap. And there she was, with 80's air rushing up my nostrils.
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Poor thing has been cooped up in here for-ev-vah.

What's even more remarkable is, from a nerdist historical perspective, is the Suncom brochure I don't recall ever seeing before. It was at the very bottom of the box.
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Suncom was based out of the Chicago area in Illinois. In 1989 they acquired Wico, which was also based in the Chicago area..

I own a few of these items today (at least four different peripherals, and a new really interesting 5th one on the way I'll talk more about later) and have owned even more of these various things in the past. But there are several peripherals I've never even seen nor heard of before in my life - until now.
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Exhibit A: The Easy Stick.


Check this crazy bad dude out! You use this weird contraption to put it over the cursor keys on your [PC] keyboard to move around! I would have loved trying this out with a dungeon crawler like Black Crypt - holy smokes! Crazy, but cool idea.
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This would have made dancing around the 2-headed ogre a bit more interesting, right?


Exhibit B: Mother Ship

They even made stuff for the NES? I had no idea. This bizarre "upgrade" let you put the NES joypad inside what looks like a more typical flight stick joystick. Wat!!?
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I also didn't know Suncom made all those computer enhancement gadgets, disk storage solutions and even things as mundane as printer stands. TIL!

Suncom would later became a division of the massive and historic RCA Corp.





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