A nostalgia hit from the 1990's

[Dartz]

Amiga, amigos

Chiptune website replicates the Workbench of the old Amiga OS.

I had one when I was four! Nobody knew what to do with it in the house - it'd been bought to be part of the 'future' - so it was used solely to play pirated games until 1999 when the graphics finally fizzled.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Pyeknu]

Whoa!  That IS antiquated!

[Star Ranger4]

whippper snappers. My first (owned) computer was its predecessor, the Commodore 64.

and I'd learned basic programing on TRS 80's and occasionally the school's mainframe, which I think i've mentioned in the past used like a 300 baud Accoustic coupler. thats right, not a modem per sey, but an actual accoustic coupler you'd manually dial and then plug the handset into when the other end picked up and started the handshake protocol!

Oh yeah, and the fortran punchcards. Can't forget those; much as I'd like to.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[Stephen Mann]

Star Ranger4 wrote:

---

whippper snappers. My first (owned) computer was its predecessor, the Commodore 64.

and I'd learned basic programing on TRS 80's and occasionally the school's mainframe, which I think i've mentioned in the past used like a 300 baud Accoustic coupler. thats right, not a modem per sey, but an actual accoustic coupler you'd manually dial and then plug the handset into when the other end picked up and started the handshake protocol!

The first computer I touched was the local community college's timeshare set-up (for a class on computer graphics). It used dumb terminals hooked to the college mainframe. I learned Basic on the TRS-80 my Junior year in college, after which I bought a Commodore 64 (w/ 300 baud modem). My college computer lab had Apple II and II+, Commodore 64, and IBM Jr. machines. All of which used 5" floppies....and yes, they really were floppy.
Fortunately, I never had to deal with punchcards, though many college friends did.

[ECSNorway]

I learned BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20. With 1 kilobyte of RAM and a cassette tape drive.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Dartz]

I have dealt with punchcards..... or at least, the legacy of them. In a piece of commercial software written in FORTRAN that basically dated to the 1980's and took its inputs in the form of specially formatted text files that were, quite literally, punch cards but not on actual card anymore. They were even called 'punch files'.

The amazing thing is, that software still ran on Windows 7. And it did an analysis in 30 seconds on a Dell Laptop, that took a day on an NT4 machine we had lying around, and would've taken a week in the 80's when the software was first written.

It was a piece of software that rewarded wizardry, and did not tolerate fools, or Windows character encoding.
________________________________
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[robkelk]

Star Ranger4 wrote:whippper snappers. My first (owned) computer was its predecessor, the Commodore 64.

and I'd learned basic programing on TRS 80's and occasionally the school's mainframe, which I think i've mentioned in the past used like a 300 baud Accoustic coupler. thats right, not a modem per sey, but an actual accoustic coupler you'd manually dial and then plug the handset into when the other end picked up and started the handshake protocol!

The first computer I touched was the local community college's timeshare set-up (for a class on computer graphics). It used dumb terminals hooked to the college mainframe. I learned Basic on the TRS-80 my Junior year in college, after which I bought a Commodore 64 (w/ 300 baud modem). My college computer lab had Apple II and II+, Commodore 64, and IBM Jr. machines. All of which used 5" floppies....and yes, they really were floppy.

Fortunately, I never had to deal with punchcards, though many college friends did.

Okay, you're older than I am.

I only ever had one box of punch cards, and I never used them all. I had more than a few lengths of paper tape, though.

Do you remember an old Canadian SF series called Starlost? Do you remember the computer terminals in the show? We had one of those at home for a couple of months, when I was young - the speed of the characters appearing on the screen was accurate for data being transmitted over a 110 baud (not 110k, just 110) acoustic coupler.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Mark Skarr]

I grew up on a ranch, in Elizabeth, Colorado. I was 12 before we got our first computer, a TI-99/4a.

We'd had a pong tv game player (don't even remember what that was named). Ran off of four D-cells and lasted about 20 minutes with that.

[Bob Schroeck]

Do you remember an old Canadian SF series called Starlost?

You mean, http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/The_Starlost]one of the worst shows ever to be broadcast? I was such a fan when I was ten, I wrote NBC (who broadcast it in the States) a couple of times, and they sent me a few pages xeroxed from the show's bible (which was written by Ben Bova).

And yeah, of course the terminals were like that. Starlost was made on a budget of spit and baling wire, and sometimes the baling wire was too expensive -- they pretty much made do with whatever was handy. (It made the early Doctor Who stuff look like Oscar-winning design by comparison.)

Me? My first computing experiences were with TRS-80 Is back in the late 1970s, along with a timeshared dialup terminal to a mainframe somewhere in NJ. (Funny story, there -- the mainframe system was shared by many high schools, and they ran a programming contest every month. I won the contest one month by writing a very simple dungeon-crawl game in BASIC. Thirty-five years later, my brother-in-law handed me a yellowed printout of the program code -- which had my name in the comments -- and asked if that was me. He'd apparently really liked the game and saved it for his own use once he got his own computer.)

My first personal computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer, which I acquired because a friend in college demonstrated that you could run a version of UNIX (OS-9) on it, and timeshare it -- which he did for himself and his girlfriend. It was always a bit of a laugh to realize that the terminal he ran off the Coco's serial port cost several times as much as the Coco itself. I didn't get my own PC (what they called an IBM-compatible back in those days) until the late 1980s.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Ebony]

Bob Schroeck wrote:

---

Do you remember an old Canadian SF series called Starlost?

You mean, one of the worst shows ever to be broadcast? I was such a fan when I was ten, I wrote NBC (who broadcast it in the States) a couple of times, and they sent me a few pages xeroxed from the show's bible (which was written by Ben Bova). 

Harlan Ellison has a rather acidic, acerbic, and vitriol-filled essay (shocking, I know) about "Starlost" and how it was the first act of  "Why I'll Never Work In Television Again (And This Time I Really Mean It)." (The second act features an awesome episode of the second incarnation of "The Twilight Zone" that was killed by executive meddling literally on the first day of filming and never made it into the can.) It's an interesting read, and something of an education in how Hollywood is a festering pit of idiocy.
My first computer was a TI-99/4a, which my then-stepfather owned as an employee of Texas Instruments. I found it a bit limiting, compared to my friends' C-64s and Macintoshes. My father had a Mac, but since I didn't live with him, I only used it when I was over there, and not really. When I graduated from high school in '89, he bought me a PC with an 8086 and a 30 Mb hard drive. (He told me that it was "all the memory I would ever need." If only he had known.) I had a friend who had an Amiga; I thought it was a decent machine for games, but the text display (instrumental for research papers and such) was a bit muddy in my opinion.
  
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

[Bob Schroeck]

Heh. Ellison has an entire book about the Starlost experience, and it's very much worth the read.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

Do you remember an old Canadian SF series called Starlost?

You mean, http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/The_Starlost]one of the worst shows ever to be broadcast? I was such a fan when I was ten, I wrote NBC (who broadcast it in the States) a couple of times, and they sent me a few pages xeroxed from the show's bible (which was written by Ben Bova).

And yeah, of course the terminals were like that. Starlost was made on a budget of spit and baling wire, and sometimes the baling wire was too expensive -- they pretty much made do with whatever was handy. (It made the early Doctor Who stuff look like Oscar-winning design by comparison.)

Yeah, that one. (For a Canadian series of the time, it had a pretty big budget. To compare, Canadian game shows of the time gave away toasters where US game shows gave away cars.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Stephen Mann]

Mark Skarr wrote:

---

We'd had a pong tv game player (don't even remember what that was named). Ran off of four D-cells and lasted about 20 minutes with that.

Oh my god, yes. We got Pong when I was 12, years before I touched a computer. Wow, the memories that brings back. Ours plugged into a wall socket, so we didn't have to worry about batteries.
When I got my C64, a Commodore user's magazine that I bought at the same time had a Basic version of Donkey Kong Junior. I didn't have a hard drive initially, and the tape deck loaded programs so slowly, that my brother and I typed that program in manually, all 220 lines, every time we wanted to play. That, specifically, was the reason I spent money on a hard drive.

[classicdrogn]

We had a Timex Sinclair and a TI-99/4a as well (Light grey, named it Arthur because the fist one was "Sinclair" in conversation) but I didn't really get "into" the computer thing until the Atari 520ST, on which I pretty much used four programs: Sundog (to this day, I call any broken gizmo or one that's useless without parts I don't have a "Jjunk Module," pronounced "je-junk") in which I completely missed the whole plot of the game and just became a gun runner between one planet where I could buy them cleap and another where they sold dear. It meant pirates never attacked in space, and I was the baddest muthafucka in the street when gangs tried it. Missing the plot meant there wasn't much to keep me there beyond slowly building up credits, though, so over all it was what I put the least time into.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy
http://www.sundogresurrectionproject.com/

By increasing order of use, there was another one that was a collection of various classic arcade games with the serial numbers filed off and a world map you could run the hero character around on to go between them, an art program I can't remember the name of that also had animation capabilities, in color-cycle, sprite based, and full-frame varieties, and Music Shop, a composition program where you could use a MIDI keyboard for input, or manually set notes on a staff with the mouse. I spent so damn much time producing semi-random tunes on that last one, and still never learned to read music

I suppose it doesn't really count, but I also bought a ColecoVision years later at a yard sale, because the Super Action Controller was so freakin' awesome looking. I mean, it was like a basket-style sword hilt with buttons for all for fingers on the grip, plus a scroll wheel and number pad on top with a joystick that looked like the emitter ball for a Tesla sword. Pity the games were kind of crap, and I might be misremembering that it was programmable at all, but that controller was awesome.

http://www.colecovisionzone.com/page/ac ... oller.html
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... CF0353.JPG

There was an IBM PC (as in the actual model named "PC") and AT, Apple III (yes, three) Mac Plus (with a huge, 20 megabyte hard drive that it sat on top of!) and Apple IIGS (Wozniak signature edition) around at various points as well, the latter with a 1MB RAM expansion card so it could use Claris Works and not just Will Harvey's Zany Golf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zany_Golf
http://www.myabandonware.com/game/will- ... ny-golf-kg

Internet didn't become a factor until the PowerMac 8100, by which time 28.8k modems were about even if my phone connection never made it above 14.4, and usually more like 9600 baud. All told, I was a latecomer to the scene.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Dartz]

All told, I was a latecomer to the scene.

I didn't have diallup until 2005
After I started college.

Before that, we had an Amiga 500 from about 91,92..... then a Windows 98 Gateway with an original Athlon in it from 99 that didn't finally die until 2009. It just about ran Firefox and Flash. But was beyond hopeless for anything else. If anything, the Amiga soured the house on computers. I loved it, but it was never actually used for anything beyond games. Even the PC was just gamed and printed on for a long time. Nobody really saw the benefit of having it....

That said, in school whe had Acorns (I think). With LOGO. I made an actual animated short movie with LOGO.
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[Mark Skarr]

I think it was 1984 when we got our first, real computer (by modern terms). It was a PC clone. 4.77mhz 8088 processor with 640kb of RAM, dual 5¼" floppy disks and a gigantic 10 mb hard drive. Oh, and CGA graphics.

[Foxboy]

Yup my first "modern" computer was a PC/XT clone and we abused the heck out of the CGA games, like Test Drive, Hardball, and I Hacked the crap out of Bard's Tale.

Prior to that we had a second-hand VIC-20 with a Cassette drive, and a 2600... I actually had more fun typing in music programs in Basic and letting them play.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll