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Re: [LUG] Operating Systems We Have Known And Loved (And Hated)

 

> 30!)). Loved our BBC with green screen, growing up. Chuckle Egg, anyone?

Chuckie Egg, not Chuckle Egg!

Me: 1981, aged ten, a ZX81, basic. 16k wobbly rampack followed.

Dragon 32. Basic, not much coding.  "Horace Goes ...."

Amstrad CPC464 (with 64k expansion and 3" disk drive  (178k per side),
later a 3.5" drive that stored a massive 800k.)  Rombo ROM box with
Adlan and TADS. Wrote many text adventure games with that, GAC and
Quill through the 80s and early 90s.  Also dabbled with CP/M 2.2 (I
found CPM+ was too unstable on this combination hardware)

An 8088 XT (640k, one 5.25" hdd, green screen). Enough to kindle my
interest in PCs around 1990. Dos 3.3

Then spent two week's wages (£500) for a second hand Elonex 386sx25
and colour monitor with 1MB of ram. (Later expanded to 4MB after
driving through the night to north devon to find somebody with
affordable (£60 a mb) 30 pin simms for sale from a printer). This
thing would later run Doom (albiet with the screen sized down to
postage stamp size)!  Also at that time, demos were a big thing - hand
rolled highly optimised ASM. Never skilled enough to write one, but an
avid consumer. Impressive what they got out of the hardware.  Wrote a
few more text adventures, some still usable on my website.

Alongside those, two Apple ][e's, one with a Symbiosis hard drive unit
as big as the Apple itself. (Had a 10MB RLL full height 5.25" hdd.
It's party trick was to perform a butterfly seek test on it, which
after a few minutes would actually "walk" the entire ~15kg unit across
the desk and off, if you weren't careful).

No c64s, no Amiga or STs.

I still have the 81, Dragon32 and CPC in my loft. I have some vague
idea that if I hold onto them long enough they'll be worth selling.
Two years ago I got rid of  a lot of old, mostly PC, hardware - which
amounted to a full transit load. The second time I'd had a monster
clear out!  Nowadays I try not to collect quite so much crap!

Si

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