Presentation: Everex Carrier SL/25

Everex Carrier? That is exactly the type of software you probably would not even notice until someone tells you it exists. This obscure piece from the early nineties is more a tool than a game — software for managing an Everex notebook, a predecessor of today's laptop “control panels”.

It is a utility for managing hardware and power in old Everex portable computers. Such things were a necessity in an era when a notebook running DOS with a seven-hour battery life was the peak of luxury. Carrier was meant to keep watch over the processor's operation, power consumption, something to do with the modem, and to let you browse settings in a menu. When you have a three-thousand-dollar computer, you do not want it needlessly eating up power.

Don't look for gameplay here — it is not a game in the sense you know. It is a menu with lots of text fields and settings, where you click with the mouse or navigate between options with the keyboard. A terminal with a graphical touch, which in MS-DOS looks like a jumble of little rectangles. Efficient? Maybe. Fun? Not really. It is simply the kind of thing you always ignored while waiting for it to finish.

Today you can fire it up more as an amateur historian of computer culture. It is an authentic testimony of what hardware management looked like in the nineties — no fancy icons, no nicely designed UI, just bare functionality. Everex as a brand has vanished, and with it the reason why this should exist.

If you are interested in how people worked on portable computers in the early nineties, or you collect old software from that era, it is a curiosity. To everyone else I would recommend picking a game that actually tried to entertain people instead.