![]()
Visiting guest. Why not sign in?
|
|
Reply to Message
Not registered yet?
The AI Depot has a focused community of friendly users. Rather than let anyone abuse the site at the brink of promiscuity, we prefer to let only those with an active interest participate... this simply requires registering.
Why not sign up!
Joining the site's community is completely free. You can then post messages freely, and customise your personal profile at will. Specific privileges will also be granted to you, like being able to access printer-friendly articles without restrictions. So, why not register?
Parent Message
BBC micros
Oh yes, I learned most of my programming skills on a BBC micro model B in the 1980s. In the early 1980s the number of games you could buy for such a computer you could count on one hand, so I would often type in games from magazines. Computer games are now massive projects, and the idea of someone being able to type in the code for a game in half an hour seems absurd. On the BBC micro programs were usually loaded from magnetic audio tape, which was very slow and frequently unreliable. If you were lucky you could afford to buy a 5.25" floppy disk drive which had about a 360Kb capacity (which was massive compared to the computer's 32Kb memory). There were also sockets inside the computer for EPROM expansions of various sorts. Even the humble mouse which we all now take for granted was a major novelty on a BBC computer. - Bob |
|
days of old
I remember spending hours typing in some game from a magazine into my Sharp MZ-80k (remember them?). Just as I got to the last few lines or so, there was a powercut... argh! My first taste of computers was a Research Machines 380Z. Here's a link: http://www.zoo.co.uk/~z0001275/rm380z.htm Check out the specs on that baby! |
|
Alas poor Oric...
Seeing as we're reminiscing... My first computer was an Oric-1 - it had a great Yamaha sound chip for its day (the same one used in the Atari ST) that made them a great way for a 9 year old to annoy clueless computer sales staff with a little surreptitious hacking. ;-) Soon after I upgraded to the Oric Atmos that came with a massive 48k memory and the truly wonderful innovation of a compact mechanical keyboard. The Oric computers also had the most amazing little plotter that I've ever used - it was fantastic! Although I didn't have the same amount of choice in games of my friends with Sinclair Spectrums I wouldn't have swapped my Oric for one of those more popular computers because I had so much fun learning to program the graphics, sound and plotter. (OK... maybe I'd have swapped it for a BBC Model B - Bob you were a lucky young hacker! :-) |
|
Great Link Rob
Ah sweet nostalgia. Remember this? http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=181 I can remember going down the local electrical dept every saturday morning so I (along wih a pile of other geeky kids) could annoy the hell out of the sales assistants by playing with all these really expensive computers. The Osborne1 looked like something out of a Bond movie. |
|
Z80 programming
Preceding probably all of those the first computer I ever had was a Sinclair ZX80. It was little more than a slab of plastic with a microchip embedded into it. My dad actually bought it thinking that he might be able to do his company accounts on it, but quickly found it to be totally useless. I used it a little, and managed to type in a few BASIC programs from the user manual, including one called "nibble the cheese". I eventually sold it to an electronics enthusiast friend in the late 1980s, but I wish I'd hung onto it now because I'm sure it would be a collectors item. Plenty of ZX81s were made, but hardly any ZX80s. - Bob |
|
Window for BBC
Programming on BBC reminds me of one the greatest efforts I put into it...guess for what? I tried to write Window 1.0 (mind you there's no 's') for the BBC. It was during my early days when I was learning Windows, but was quite unhappy with the fact that there's no such GUI for the BBC. So,why not write it urself. Well, what I ended up with is not a GUI, but more of a collection of programs operable from a master program. I used PRINT TAB a lot. And it even had a clock...it works, but u need to insert the time while starting it. Those were such nice days!!! Will share more of my BBC escapades someday. |
|
Pre-windoze
I wrote a similar graphical interface, based on the GEM desktop, using the AMX mouse. I did a little wordprocessor, database and graph plotting program, and would use it for writing school essays. - Bob |
|
Back to the Artificial Intelligence Depot.