In the 1980's, did you own a personal computer? If so, what kind was it?
Some of us had IBM's. I only know this because I saw my uncle's receipt for an 8088 with 2 360k floppies and no HD in 1984 for $4,000.
Many of the rest of my friends had Commedore 64's. I didn't know much about them, and still to this day I don't :)
I had a TI/99-4a "home computer". It was a 333Khz (!!) model with a vaguely EGA display (256x192x16 color). Like the Atari, Apple ][e and C64, you could not set each pixel to a color individually, so graphic designers for games had to be pretty creative. :)
I programmed in TI-Basic. I wrote my first Basic app when I was 4. It counted by twos indefinately (hail Goto, lol). By the time I was 6 I had made a crude computer game: "Find the Adverb". Sure it always showed you the same three words in the same order, but the title alone cemented my mantle as übergeek permenente :)
TI games were rad. I had Car Wars, Tombstone City, Parsec, A-Maze-ing, Munch-man, etc etc etc. Some of them, like Parsec, worked well with a speech synthesizer module you could add to the console so that the games could output semi-canned speech.. which is of course impressive for that hardware.
Some interesting drawbacks were that to get a simple disk-drive costed hundreds of dollars, so I never had one. You could even get an audio tape drive to store saved games or basic programs, but I never had a working one of those either. So instead, if I wrote a program I left the unit on until I wasn't interested in the app anymore. During the nine years that I owned it, I'd estimate it was powered on for cumulatively 6 years. When it finally failed, we openned it up and most of the circuitboards looked like bacon.
So what kind of computers did you have in the 80's, and what experiences did you have with them? :)
Posted by jesse at May 12, 2004 02:01 AMMy family's first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. This was pre C64 days and the computer could either run programs of a cartridge (kinda Atari 2600 like) or could use a tape drive. This was just like a regular audio cassette and you could save or read from the tape. Large programs could take up to 20 minutes or so to load. You could write programs that usually came in the Commodore magazine (argh-what was it's name?). These were all is machine language code so it was line after line of obscure code that meant nothing to me while typing it in, but in the end, walla, you had a game (what else were computers supposed to do back then?).
Posted by: monkeyinabox at May 12, 2004 11:41 AMThe TI was cartrage-baed as well, and the audio tapes took just as long to load. They sounded neuvo to boot :)
All the books for the TI had games in Basic, but some of them were very very long (unnessessarily long, I eventually figured out) and thus difficult to figure out.
In order to enter machine language stuff, you had to get their editor/assembler and a memory add-on dealy that costed as much as 4 TI's. I eventually got one in High School (for my second TI) and dabbled a bit in TMS-9900 assembly.
Now adays I have a TI-99/4a emulator and I can't get it to make peace with my sound card :)
Commodore 64 all the way, baby! The C-64 (IMHO) totally blew away the rest simply because it had the built-in colors, graphics, sounds, and 64KB of RAM. Plus, you could daisy-chain up to 4 floppy disk drives to it :)
I even have a bunch of old Commodore stuff I've collected lying around. These include several C-64's, a C-64C, 2 Plus 4s, 2 C-16s, several disk drives, a couple of printers, and a crapload of software. And some other miscellaneous.
Man, those were the days.
Posted by: Jon at May 12, 2004 04:00 PMAww, c'mon the TI had colors, graphics and sound too. Y'know, technically neither system does: it's the TV that has all of these nifty things :) My TI wasn't very colorful when I had it hooked to a black n' white TV
Posted by: Jesse Thompson at May 12, 2004 04:28 PMMy first own computer (I had an Apple 2 at work)was our Pravetz-8D. :)
Something like Atari, I guess.
It uses a regular color TV set as a monitor (320x200 resolution, 8 colors only), and a regular cassette recorder for program and data storage. 64k RAM 1MHZ 8bit processor + 4 channel sound processor. BASIC language included.
The first program I created for it was a "piano".
Sounded awfully, but I was very proud of it. :)))
Next was of course a graphic editor, then some little games...
Ah, really these were nice times... :)
You know, I really have nothing to contribute other than it's been a long time since I've heard the word "rad". ;)
Carry on...
Posted by: Jake at May 12, 2004 05:29 PMYes Jake, but here, in this place, all things from the 80's are acceptable. "Radical", skateboards, mullets, whatev. Just no Chandler haircuts and we'll be alright :)
Owl: Hey, I knew that no true computer geek could be so without a couple of decades under their belt, glad to have ya :)
Jessie- yah, okay, you got me there. The TV has the color. Sheesh.... :)
My cousin had the $4000 IBM PC, and I remember thinking how much it sucked compared to the C-64-- monochrome green monitor, no sound, very very basic graphic capabilities, no advantages that I could see. The only saving grace for that machine was that you could play Hack on it.
Okay, now I'm reminiscing, so I have to go totally geek and list some of my top games for the Commodore. D'oh!
- Jumpman (and Jumpman Jr.)
- Raid on Bungeling Bay
- The Bard's Tale series
- Defender of the Crown
- Racing Destruction Set
- Hmm... most Electronic Arts games, now that I think about it... :)
I had:
- Car Wars
- Number Magic
- Tombstone City
- A-Maze-ing
- Munch Man
- Parsec
- Blast-o
- Beginning Grammar
- Hopper
- Alpiner
- Jawbreaker IV
- Shamus
- Defender
- Chisolm Trail
And they allll rooled! Except maybe the edutainment ones :)
Posted by: Jesse Thompson at May 12, 2004 11:18 PM