i think davidr,polonus,freewheelinfrank,bob3160 who was even old then & even myself(i was 33 then)should remember this one :o
this was in the computer stone age :
Are you old enough to remember the Spectrum computer, released in 1982? The Spectrum was the first mainstream audience home computer in the UK, similar in significance to the Commodore 64 in the USA. It had a CPU running at 3.5 MHz with 16 kB of RAM.
The video output was through an RF modulator and was designed for use with contemporary portable television sets, for a simple colour graphic display. Sound output was through a beeper on the machine itself. The machine used a Z80 bus for I/O, and had an audio in/out port for the connection of a normal cassette recorder to be used for loading and saving programs and data.
Ah, those good old days. Those good old frustrating days.
Yes, frustrating days! If you’re not old enough to remember the Spectrum, here’s why many times they were frustrating days!
My brother had one- he’s actually three years younger than me- as did my best mate at the time. Both went on to work in computing. Never saw the attraction really, unless you were into learning BASIC.
I remember trying to play ‘The Hobbit’ on the Spectrum- very innovative in that you could instruct the character using English commands: go west, for example. I never got very far because it was a borrowed copy and we didn’t have a list of commands the program understood, but it did point the way gaming would go.
remember that one freewheelinfrank…fun at that time…look back at it and you say now how did we play something like that-30 years from now,people will be saying the samething about what we have now(scary thought!) :
To keep the prices down Sinclair used faulty 64K chips (internally 2 X 32K). All the chips in the 32K bank of RAM had to have the same half of the 64K chips working. A link was fitted on the pcb in order to choose the first half or the second half.
I pushed the buttons of that machine too, when I was over in the UK at the time it was popular. People never realised at that time the freedom to tinker they still had. You could take every technical thing apart, and learn during the process not having to fear copyright, drm, licences. Youngsters don’t learn the mysterious workings of engine parts that way. What are we doing to our huge potentional? As you think of it the Big Corps of to-day they are not really interested in new inventions or competition for that matter, and they are not really contributing to “a free development culture”. All that mattersto them is “control”, “consumerism”, "predicted outcome"and the Status Quo of Exponential Growth.
Where have those days gone? Are they ever to return? Or am I only dreamin’?
Are you old enough to remember the Spectrum computer, released in 1982? The Spectrum was the first mainstream audience home computer in the UK, similar in significance to the Commodore 64 in the USA. It had a CPU running at 3.5 MHz with 16 kB of RAM.
My ZX Spectrum was provided with a grand 48 kB RAM. It was the one to get if you wanted to play more advanced games with “good” graphics.
Actually it was wonder how much inventive machine coders could push out of it. One game I remember is Fairlight, a kind of 3D graphics cave castle adventure. Orcs and all. There was no HD to load graphics, all had to be contained to the 48kB, grapchics and code.
That tape loading error link brought back experiences trying to play with the tape recorder sound level settings to get the games loading
Also there was BETA BASIC 3.0 that had advanced control structures and game programming graphics. Of course making action games was difficult with Basic cause it was so slow. But a few pacman type of games was possible even with my limited abilitites. 8)
Hobbit was not such a great game IMO. I also got stuck or eaten by trolls etc., but I have the Tolkien book that came with the game that is a nice childrens book suited for adults too.
The game as others can be played as java version here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0006440
There is a LOTS of Sinclair ZX Spectrum stuff to refresh our greying memory cells.
I remember the first computer I ever saw was at my school. It was an old one donated by a bank. It consisted of several large wardrobe-sized cabinets (which filled most of a large room), a monitor and keyboard- probably a card reader too, but I don’t remember. I do remember typing out my name on the keyboard and watching it appear on the monitor. This process took ages because I had to search for each letter. I could probably carry out the functions it was capable of on my mobile phone today.
Yeah, that ZX Spectrum was not also not my first encounter to puters, only my first personal one.
It was in 1977 starting engineering studies in university. There was a frightening Fortran programming practical work that had to be made to a punch card reader, so there was not really any margin for errors.
Also at least for us was given only so called teletype interface for more advanced input than could be made by punched cards.
There was a keyboard input and mirror of what was typed was not on screen, but on printed out paper roll. But better editing for wrong keypresses
Then almost after that came cathode ray monitors. Those were on PDP mainframe machines.
It is amazing how easy and user friendly computing is made these days compared to those early times. Brings also some pride to have been there and seen all 8)
In 1961, my uncle, who was in charge of the computer department at Alcoa in Bettendorf, Iowa took me through (literally, since you could walk through it) a Univac 1 computer that they had recently installed. It had no memory and about 256K RAM if I remember right. It cost $1.6 Mil. All programs were loaded on tape, and after the “run” the machine was then set up for the next task. I remember him saying (bragging) it only took ten hours to do the payroll for a plant of 1000 people.
those good days…