Electric dreams BBC Four

[Downward]

It's the 80's today
The BBC Acorn which was 3 times as much as the spectrum was put in every school by the goverment.

I did wonder how these ever made it into school because it was pretty horrible.

 

[alecstilleyedye]

saw that last night. the bit where they were choosing the computers took me back to a computer showroom that, as a lad, i would always visit after school and lust after one. we ended up with a dragon 32, a capable machine not supported adequately by marketing or 3rd party software. missing from that list last night was the absolute jewel in the crown at that computer shop - an apple macintosh 128.

 

[Downward]

Basic programming was brilliant. I remember spending ages programming my Amstrad CPC 464.
The games were £1 from our local 2nd hand shop too (1 weeks pocket money) !!

 

[alecstilleyedye]

i got put in the cse computer studies group because i used the basic installed on the dragon which the teacher had never heard of. some company by name of microsoft, wonder what happened to them?

 

[Mr Pig]

I remember a group of us sitting for hours typing a tank battle game in basic into a Research Machines 380Z (I think it was called), and spending twice as long again trying to figure out why it didn't work when we'd finished! Never did get it to work :0(

 

[rh100]

Missed it, will have to look for a repeat

Managed a bit of Basic on the Speccy, managed to make a simple database and a couple of disk utilities (just a menu really to select common disk options) Used to copy some listings from Your Sinclair, and the Speccy +3 came with a brilliant book to teach you.

The +3 was very underrated I think, wish I still had it sometimes.

Anyone ever been to the computer museum at Bletchley Park?

 

[beanzontoast]

I was fortunate enough to have used computers in school in the mid 1970's - well not in the school, but accessed remotely over a teletype and a phone-cradle modem. We also got to write programs, create the punched tape on a tapereader (we carried them round in Sellotape tins in our schoolbags), then send them off to be run at the nearest uni. There was great excitement when the printout came back and we got to see whose programs had run properly and whose had crashed. (One of mine to add up the first million integers famously failed because the mainframe timed out at 20 seconds elapsed!).

We had Commodore Pets at uni, but getting time on them was a real competition.

I loved the Z81 we got in the early 80's - my first 'pc'. I remember reprogramming the flying game so that the headwind was so strong, you could virtually stand still over the runway (nothing more than a pattern of dots) at 300mph.

We went through the Z81, Speccy, Commodore 64, BBC B, Amiga (600 and 1200)... it was an exciting time!

And those 5 1/4 floppy disks with the BBC B. The disc drives weighed a tonne!

 

[Garz]

Anyone ever been to the computer museum at Bletchley Park?

I did but this was when I was working on the site and either the equipment was being stored temporarily elsewhere or they bluffed me good and didnt show me all of it. That was about 11 years ago.

 

[rh100]

We had a ZX81 too, with a 16K ram pack I'll have you know That one had the tape drive, with games like Flight Sim which I was too young for then, although I can now fly in FSX. Although me and my brother could play a mean game of Snowflake . Does anyone remember the tapes that had multiple games on, when trying to find the right part of the tape, there was someones voice which said the name of the game at that part of the tape, in between all the squeeling noises

The +3 also had a tape drive plugged into the side, so I could play the games 'lent' to me by my mates, but I also got a plug in thing on the back (multiface?) which when you press the red button it froze the game and let you poke new values in to the games for ammo, lives etc, it also allowed me to save the whole game at that point to the disk drive, so was a good way of transferring from tape to disk. I was endlessly hacking Elite with that, great fun.

From that I progressed to an Atari ST, which I got cheap when they were going out of fashion. Then only started on PC's when I bought a 386 SX16 base unit from a car boot sale for £15. Me and my Dad then had to buy a new hard disk, £50 for 40 megabyte (not giga) 1MB of RAM and a monitor, then had to buy the disks with DOS 6 and Win 3.1. A good introduction to PC's I think, as learning the DOS stuff makes you understand things a bit better IMO.

Never been much of a programmer, although I did do an OU course which included machine code, which was interesting. Anyone recommend a good programming language to try to learn?

 

[rh100]

I loved the Z81 we got in the early 80's - my first 'pc'. I remember reprogramming the flying game so that the headwind was so strong, you could virtually stand still over the runway (nothing more than a pattern of dots) at 300mph.

I remember the picture of the cockpit at night on the front cover of the cassette box, talk about disillusioned

 

[I am Spartacus]

next to the mike and listen to it squeal at it for 20 minutes. Then do it again when it didn't work.

I still have that pleasure...
Polar CS200 with 'sonic' uplink to Polar Weblink

 

[rh100]

I did but this was when I was working on the site and either the equipment was being stored temporarily elsewhere or they bluffed me good and didnt show me all of it. That was about 11 years ago.

I went this year, the museum is OK, they have rebuilt a Colossus ( I think it was called) and have a few retro bits and bobs. But a lot of it is old office mainframe type stuff - great if that's your thing I suppose. Although the actual old office gear like early word processors and huge calculators was interesting.

The museum combined with the Enigma tour and museum is highly recommended. They've just got a bit more funding I think, so hopefully they can do more of it up.

 

[andrew-the-tortoise]

Speccy 48k's were the machines of the working class.
C64's were the machines for the slightly better off.
Posh kids whose parents were teachers had the BBC model 'b'.

They were all great, kept us out of bother - no time for mischief as all your spare time was devoted to getting the games to load!

 

[cisamcgu]

C64 *smiles happily* Those were the days ....

 

[beanzontoast]

Speccy 48k's were the machines of the working class.
C64's were the machines for the slightly better off.
Posh kids whose parents were teachers had the BBC model 'b'.

That is so true! My first sight of one was in exactly that situation. You needed a fat wallet to spend £399 on a BBC B when they first came out.

I got mine second-hand a couple of years later!