Commodore 64 and modern day kids!

Bah you Americans!

My first computer was the good old British Spectrum.

Fond memories of games taking 20-30 minutes to load with screeching sounds from cassette tapes.

We also had the Commadore Plus/4 which was the business version of the Commadore 16.

See back then what the local council use to do was every 2-3 years they'd dump all their old computers in a skip out back (even if they were working) and upgrade to the latest hotness in computing, my Dad, working for the council at the time just took one of the ones he knew worked out of the skip and brought it home.

Popular games:
Fire Ant.
Treasure Island (which was completed and one deeply peeved mother about only getting a 'congraturations' type screen..in her words, "Not even a picture of boat! Come on!")
Thrust (with simulated gravity fields...oooh!).
One game about a Rhino in a space suit in a mine...god knows what that one was called...been so long.
Jet Set Willy.
Skool Daze.

Now I think we had Elite on there but that may have been a later computer.

I started college in 1980. Our first CS project required us to do it on punch cards so we would appreciate that we could us terminals and DECwritters for the rest of our projects. At the end of the semester the overachievers would pay to get a dump of all of their class projects on punch cards for archive purposes, I guess in case they need to demonstrate that they could write a text processor in FORTRAN (yes, that was the last project for our 2nd semester CS class).

After that year the only thing punch cards were used for was for structural engineering contests during our school election week "party" just before finals (build a tower using only punch cards and white glue that's at least two feet tall, no more than 1 sq ft at the base and see which could hold the most weight). What can I say, it was an Engineering/Science college.

I wish I still had my family's Atari 2600, but our basement flooded when I was about 7 or 8 and ruined the box we had the system and games stored in, so my mom threw everything out. Every once in a while, in my preteen years, I'd see one when my mom took me to garage sales, but she never let me get one.

But to be fair, I have like 90 NES games, safe and sound to this day. (If only I had a working console...) And of course, I've still got a working SNES, N64, Playstation, Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, and every iteration of Nintendo handheld save the Virtual Boy... I guess I can't complain too much about my stash of games.

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Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

I believe my family's first computer was the IBM 5150. I seem to remember them getting it several years after 1981 but considering I was a single digit number throughout the 80s I'm not entirely certain.

I was recently talking to my mom about programming, and she told the story about how she used to take computer classes back in the day of college when punch cards were the norm. Someone ran into the room and yelled, "We hooked up a TV monitor to the mainframe!" She couldn't figure out why anyone would want to do something like that that and didn't even bother to go look at what the fuss was about. At least she has a good sense of humor about it now

Went from Apple IIc+ to a Commodore Amiga 500.

The Amiga 500 blew me away - there was nothing even close to it when it came out.

My family had a TRS-80 as a first computer with a tape drive for storage, but the next one we got was a PC that was advertised as "an XT running at AT speed". I forget now what MHz that was, but I think it was 4 or 8? It was all decked out for a home system, too! We had 2 5.25" floppy drives (so much faster than the tapes!), a CGA graphics card, 640KB of RAM and a whole 10MB for the internal hard drive!

Things have changed a little since then. For starters, 1 MB used to be a power of 2 and not 10.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

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Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

Started off with an Atari 800 here, then moved on to a C64 and then several Atari 1040 ST/e computers. Pulled out the 1040's and all their software from the basement just last week. Tried out a couple programs before the monitor died.

The rest of the hardware and software seemed to be working. If anyone's interested, I'm selling

My dad was head of the computing center at Colorado School of Mines, sometimes he'd bring home a terminal and let me play games. (Was not amused to wake up one morning and find I used a whole roll of paper playing Star Trek.) In High school, was in the computer club and we got to use accounts on the county computer, writing software, games, even multiplayer games.

Dad got interested in microcomputers, he got a Kim-1 board with a whopping 1K of RAM. We built a case for it, wrote programs using the 16 digit hex pad. The summer before I left for college in 1977, he got one of the early Apple II computers and had me set it up. I was hooked.

Did grounds crew work for Mines in the summer of 1978 and earned enough for my own Apple II. Splurged and got 16K of RAM. Over time, expanded it with a Applesoft BASIC card and floppy drives. I've owned an Apple computer ever since.

You folks are old!


(I wasn't born until '82.)


But seriously, I had some experience with some (even at that time) old Apple IIe computers in the 4th grade that one of the Math teachers kept around to entertain kids with during free time. We had some form of Atari console to play games on when I was like 8 or 9 (and that was the only video game console we ever owned in my house)... played lots of golf and some space-invader-like game.

And then our first real computer. I have no clue what it was, but it had a modem whose speed was measured in baud and it ran DOS (at some point Windows 3.1 was in our house, but I am not sure if it was the same system or not). I recall vaguely searching BBS for stuff and playing lame games through CompuServe.

I also remember fondly how excited my dad was when we got a photocopied hint book for Wolfenstein with all the maps and secrets in it... he had gotten it from some friend at work.

One of my best online moments also goes back to BBSes.

I'd written a free game series for the Apple II, "The Wonderful World of Eamon". It was free, people could make copies as they wanted, they started to spread.

Got the address of a new BBS dedicated to fantasy gaming. Logged in, it asked my name, gave it as Donald Brown, started to look around.

Interruption from the sysop. Slowly came the question: "Are you THE Donald Brown"?

There's something kinda cool about being asked that question, particularly when it's completely out of the blue.

I learned how to program on Commodore PET computers at school. The first computer I owned was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (the US version of the ZX-80, I think). I don't think I ever successfully loaded anything off the tape drive for it. For Christmas I got the 16K RAM upgrade pack and I was STOKED.

Eventually, my paper route got me enough money for a Commodore 64 & Floppy drive. A ton of my formative years were spent gaming and programming (which mostly involved copying line for line programs out of magazines). I think the stuff I played the most was Lode Runner (making levels) and Adventure Construction Set/Bards Tale Construction Set (making RPGs).

My dad then bought an IBM PC (even though I begged him to buy an Amiga). For Christmas the next year I got an Amiga 500.

The first video game console I ever owned was called "Video Pinball" from Atari. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Pinball. I played the crap out of that before we got an Atari VCS (eventually renamed 2600). By the time the 5200 came out, I was well into PC gaming. I did own a TurboGrafx-16 and a Sega Genesis, but since those were the #2 and #3 consoles, I missed out on a lot of games. I owned an Atari Lynx, and not a Gameboy... again missing out on games.

I think that the lesson I learned from always owning the "second tier" systems, computers, etc. was that if I wanted to be at the forefront, I had to adopt what was popular, even if it was technically inferior. I think this is why I bought into the Apple ecosystem today. Apps are generally released for iOS first, accessories are way easier to find, etc.