Jazz Jackrabbit and Commander Keen on a gravis gamepad are second in nostalgia only to playing the original Test Drive [1] and Stunts [2] on a crappy old joystick...

crap. Also playing Jet [3] on the same joystick.

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Drive_(video_game)
  [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game)
  [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_(video_game)

Joystick, feh! I played Stunts with a keyboard and I liked it. :D

Also, you forgot Scorched Earth [1].

[1] http://www.whicken.com/scorch/

Holy crap. How could I forget scorched earth?

That was one of the first games I remember playing with friends until all hours of the night.

Actually took a road trip with my friend and his fifty pound laptop, and played it along the way.

We spend long nights with my friends trying to reproduce the weird high-resolution Scorched Earth was using, and then playing it.

This game and Heroes of Might and Magic are the games I like to play with other people in the same room. So much fun!

Yeah, I used to play "Test Drive" but then "Stunts" came out and it completely blew my mind what was possible with computers back then. I wasn't even 10.

Wikipedia says Don Mattrick, CEO of Zynga, was original designer of those two games? Consider me surprised.

Weird. Didn't know the CEO bit.

And yeah, the amount of time I spent editing tracks was unhealthy.

I also remember having a religious devotion to getting a certain physics bug to happen. I don't remember how we did it, but you'd end up launching the car and it would fall up into eternity.

In college my friends and I got so into Stunts that we developed an entirely new way of playing the game. We would make a simple track in the corner, but that wasn't the "real" track. The real track was off to the side, and we would race it for speed, but the difference was we used broken and illogical track pieces. So you might be sideways in a tunnel and have it directly transition into a banked ramp, so you would need to plan for that.

We also utilized bugs as part of the required strategy. There were a LOT of bugs, and eventually you bump into some of them, like when you hit a corner and the car careens into the sky for 500 feet (sometimes even landing safely). I made one track that used every bug we knew - you start off driving over water (which you can do at an angle if you are facing the map border fence) then launch off a ramp that is impossible to reach the other side - although if you hit the broken edge of the bridge you MIGHT warp through to the other side. It was awesome.

Stunts?! Every now and again I try to figure out the name of that game. So many late nights making tracks.

There was a special key combination that allowed you to edit the terrain, too. Alas, I only found out as an adult.

My dad still uses Norton Commander or some variation of it to this day. Never forget.

Your dad isn't alone in using "some variation" of Norton Commander:

https://www.midnight-commander.org/ Midnight Commander: A NC clone for Linux/Unix/etc.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/Sunrise_Commander Sunrise commander: NC clone for GNU Emacs.

And http://farmanager.com, the same for Windows. Much faster than having to use a mouse to navigate the file system. And a decent editor with syntax highlighting and plugin support included as well.

Far Manager is the only thing I miss after switching to OSX 6 years ago. Tried Midnight Commander and other alternatives, but not nearly as good imo. File search is the killer feature, so much better than any other alternative.

It runs fine under Wine on Ubuntu; maybe that's an option on OS X, too.

I would be so happy to see many of these games transition to tablets, are there good equivalents and/or have some actually been ported?

I have played PC strategy games ported to the iPad along with arcade classics from Atari, just missing some early games like Keen, Empire, and the like.