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

 

(In this thread, old farts remember. :) )

> 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 :-)

But incredibly robust things. Mind, looking at the PCB then, there's
quite a lot of tolerance on the tracks!

> 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.

Yes - did that time and again with the Zx81. When I visited my own
father he came up with a foam strip at the back of the ZX81 which held
the rampack up in the air - making it much more stable! Not so many
listings for the Dragon.

> 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.

I'm afraid I always looked down on the Spectrums and their bouncy
keyboards...  The CPC had very good build quality and lasted me for
years and years without any problems.

> 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 :-)

Hehe. The worst job I've ever had was working for the Exeter ISP,
Zynet. I was phone support in 1996, without training or help. That was
actually one of the triggers for going off and starting to learn linux
by myself because the core geeks (Merlyn, Tim Smith and a couple of
others I forget their names) at Zynet went off and geeked and left me
to deal with very confused customers for whom the software was a
complete mystery (and it was horrible, Trumpet Winsock, anyone? KA9Q?
:) )

Anyway - the one good thing was occasionally we'd stay on after work
and use work's computers for a bit of Duke Nukem, and sometimes some
Doom2. Quality times :)

> 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 :-)

Ace!

> 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).

Hehe. Most of my geeky friends seem to have had Amigas, and still love
them and often do weird strange things in trying to keep them alive.

Si

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