Electric dreams BBC Four

[Downward]

At school on the Acorn BBC thing we had some kind of strange clear turtle thing which when you typed in stuff to the computer made it move. We also had to create the ceefax type pages. On Thursday lunch we got to play games which was a bit crap as most of us all had Amigas at home which were way better.

 

[ChrisKH]

You lot must be pretty young that's all I can say. Basic programming on a remote mainframe using punchcards. One wrong card and the lot was rejected. I spent months writing a programme to give me the exact change for an item input as 'cost'.

 

[Tim Bennet.]

One wrong card and the lot was rejected.

Yes I used the mainframe at Lancaster to run the data for my thesis. It took most of the winter to chaise the bugs out of those punch cards and get it to run. The data entry alone took hours (hundreds of hours!).

About 15 years ago I redid the computations using a Mac Classic and Filemaker Pro after the Met Office made their historical data available on CD. Had the whole thing scripted, loaded and run in an evening. ( A 1x SCCI CD machine, 4Mb RAM and 40Mb Hard disk - vroom vroom!)

 

[Mr Pig]

We've still got my wife's spectrum somewhere. My brother has loads of these old computers, he buys them at boots sales. No idea why...

 

[beanzontoast]

We've still got my wife's spectrum somewhere. My brother has loads of these old computers, he buys them at boots sales. No idea why...

Nostalgia? Wish I still had my Amiga 1200 hd. And Elite on the BBC B was a legend...

Funny, but I've never felt the same about junking any of my pc base units. Glad to see the back of 'em.

 

[Mr Pig]

Data mining?

No. More likely because he's a sad moron! ;0)

 

[Garz]

About 15 years ago I redid the computations using a Mac Classic and Filemaker Pro after the Met Office made their historical data available on CD. Had the whole thing scripted, loaded and run in an evening. ( A 1x SCCI CD machine, 4Mb RAM and 40Mb Hard disk - vroom vroom!)

Awesome!

What did this program do btw?

 

[Garz]

My brother was a computer geek that was seven years older. He had a Ti994a texas instruments machine which I eventually got as hand-me-downs. He had pretty much all the best computers growing up so I got a nice exposure to games.

The most profound memories were of the dungeon master series (chaos strikes back etc) and agree with elite from post earlier.

 

[Tim Bennet.]

What did this program do btw?

It took wind speed, direction and duration and converted them into energy transfers against hard and soft sea defences along the coast.

 

[Garz]

It took wind speed, direction and duration and converted them into energy transfers against hard and soft sea defences along the coast.

Would be nice to see average temperatures and wind speeds as an indication of when to start digging the winter/summer clothing out.

 

[twowheelsgood]

To me the interesting thing wasn't the retro technology, there have been Tv programs covering this before. For me it was the relationship the children of the family had with the technology. They expected things to just work and had no concept of programming the machine. As a kid, nearly everyone knew a few lines of basic or C, knew their bits and bytes etc. This is of course progress; the machine interacts with you on your level rather than you its.

It was however fascinating to see how the lad took to programming the BBC micro the way he did. I remember being just the same. Oh and the arguments with dad over the computer and monopolising the TV.

Now I have a z10 to play with (err, no that's "work"), none of your mickey-mouse PCs or Macs for me.

I don't remember TVs and VCRs being that unreliable though. Our GEC colour lasted from 1971 to 1985 and we only ever had 2 VCRs in 2 decades (first one wore out).

 

[rh100]

I've just watched 70's and 80's episodes.

You can see from the mid 80's onwards everyone getting wrapped up in gadgets. Surely though kid's always stayed in their bedroom, with LP's and 45's etc. Do you think they were trying to make a point? He picked up on the fact of the benefit of owning an LP rather than a download.

I was really surprised that they picked the BBC over the speccy though. I suspect in the day it was a choice through both cost and what machine your mates had, which gave access to 'borrowing' plenty of games. And the Micro Men program pointed out that the shelves of Smiths were full of games for the speccy, but very few for the BBC.

 

[Downward]

I dug out my Amiga last night - 15 years in a box and it all works ok.
Still can't get past Div 3 on Stunt Car Racer though !

 

[johnnyh]

I found my old Binatone tele plug in bat/ball games console, haven't tried it out yet though.

I have got the record deck out of the loft along with a selection of top tunes though, so will be playing with those later.

 

[alecstilleyedye]

when they were consigning the turntable to the garage i had to laugh; our turntable is stil connected to the hifi while the cd player has become redundant as the laptop holds all the music, streams it wirelessly to the hifi and can record the records to digital format. oh, and play cds…