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On 07/01/13 16:32, Simon Avery wrote:
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.
Ahh now you're getting to my sort of era :-)I started with a ZX81 too, although I really didn't understand the whole concept of programming at the time or that the 16K Ram had to be plugged in when the machine was turned off. Still I made some pretty pattens on it :-)
Dragon 32. Basic, not much coding. "Horace Goes ...."
After my ZX81 met a watery demise I went on to the Atari 65XE, mainly for games but I started to dabble in basic programming typing in listings from an Atari magazine or the manuals. I remember my dad spending hours typing in a program and entering the wrong command and clearing the memory. I gather the air was blue that night.
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)
I had a CPC464 too. I really started to do some basic programming on the 464. I thought the manual was brilliant. I did briefly have a Speccy +3 for a week too but that was mainly used for games.
Later on we upgraded to a CPC664 with a disk drive, it was amazing, although having a Green screen monitor on that and the 464 prior to that meant games weren't that great, but I loved Logo on the CPC which helped when it came to lessons in Maths on logo, while everyone else was drawing boxes I was well away.
From there my dad and I had our own computers, we went to a Computer Shopper Show (about 1990 I think) and my dad picked up a Schneider Euro PC (8088 I think with 512k ram and 3.5" floppy drive and Hercules compatible amber monitor). I also upgraded to an Atari 520STFM and we sold the CPC :-(
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.
Ahh I remember those days, wasn't it an earthquake or something that made the prices go through the roof?
I remember Doom well, it was around the time I was finishing school and a friend got a PC with 4MB Ram, a year later I used to take my PC to my old school after college and play Duke Nukem 3D death matches :-)
I was also a big fan of the demo scene, I remember some great ones on the PC, one being Panic which I recently fired up in Dosbox :-)
No c64s, no Amiga or STs.
I had both the ST and an Amiga. At the time I had the ST my friends all had Amigas. Then one day I killed the keyboard chip on my ST by trying to attach a Super NES joypad to it (well I say attach, it was randomly sticking wires from an old joystick into the connector on the SNES control pad which unsurprisingly didn't work).
I managed to sell that ST for spare parts for £100 (this was sometime around 1992 ish) then I bought an Amiga 500, and around that time I lost touch with my Amiga owning friends :-/
I had a soft spot for both Gem on the ST and AmigaDOS/Workbench on the Amiga and can still remember playing around with the AmigaDOS CLI, it just seemed so powerful, kind of a little bit unix like.
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!
I wish I'd hung on to my old machines, I had a few various games consoles and sold them along with the Amiga and bought my first PC, and kept upgrading from there. A few years later I bought a couple of more consoles (Saturn, Playstation, Neo Geo) and sadly they got lost in moves (I'm gutted about losing the Neo Geo, and even moreso about having an Apple Pippin and losing that, they go for around £700 on eBay now and I got one given to me... it was a kind of curiosity).
I now try and collect old machines, I have a VIC20 in the garage, an Acorn Electron and a dead 48k Speccy. Last year for my birthday I also treated myself to a Keyrah... it's a keyboard interface for 8-Bit Commodore machines (and they do an Amiga one too) which converts the original retro keyboard into a USB keyboard for use on a PC/Mac etc or with emulators. Even works with my PS3... kinda useless for day to day use but still interesting :-)
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq