Pre- pc computers you have owned and loved (or hated)?

[beanzontoast]

My list would be -

Sinclair ZX81 (with a massive 16kb expansion pack)
Sinclair Spectrum (£28 second hand off the market in Derby - I saved for a month to afford it)
Commodore 64 (I wish I could remember the sideways scrolling game where little spacemen walked about shooting things and then dematerialising and reappearing elsewhere... not that I spent that many hours /days/ weeks playing it of course...)
BBC B (with the big square colour monitor that went with it - first time I had a monitor that wasn't a tv doubling as one - ah, Elite... you never looked so good!)
Amiga A600 hd (Superfrog!)
Amiga A1200 hd - Fast (then), great graphics (then) - good for work and play!

Nary a one of them still resides at the Beanz house - all got sold on; I never broke any of them and enjoyed them all. They were pretty amazing each in their own way - e.g. the BBC B had an external gadget where you could freeze the game at any point - but if I had to choose just one, it would be the A1200 hd.

 

[Shaun]

Commodore 64 (I wish I could remember the sideways scrolling game where little spacemen walked about shooting things and then dematerialising and reappearing elsewhere... not that I spent that many hours /days/ weeks playing it of course...)

Defender!!!!

 

[beanzontoast]

Defender!!!!

 

[Shaun]

Many a young lad wasted hours of his life trying to save those little dudes from being space-napped.

 

[dan_bo]

Bombjack on the speccy soaked up many months of my youth. And commando- I once 'clocked' it using my big toe for the grenade button. Mint.

 

[slowmotion]

I learned Basic on a Hewlett Packard 85 in about 1980. It was a fabulous machine with everything built in: CRT screen, mini printer and tape drive. I had hours of fun on it.

http://oldcomputers.net/hp85.html

 

[Inertia]

Things I miss from yesteryear

Sinclair ZX81, Mazogs, great game, and Monster Maze was on the ZX81 i think, the forerunner to Wolfenstein, Doom ---> Call of Duty

Sinclair Spectrum, amazong little machine, wasted many house playing the School daze game, and never beat it

It amuses me that we would wait for ages staring at Hexadecimal numbers ticking up or scrolling lines flashing up and down the screen and now we scream at a game if it keeps us waiting for more than couple of seconds loading.

I think Louis CK illustrates it well here
http://www.gizmodo.c...ld-is-a-miracle
Warning, NSFW

 

[ColinJ]

I used to love my BBC B. I used it for 3 years at university and then managed to get half my money back when I sold it to the company I went to work for! (They were using them in their test department.)

I'm still waiting for a PC that boots in a couple of seconds like the BBC B!

 

[Smokin Joe]

ZX81
Spectrum
Vic 20
Commodore 64
Amstrad 664
Amstrad C128
Amstrad PCW
Amiga

 

[beanzontoast]

Things I miss from yesteryear

Sinclair ZX81, Mazogs, great game, and Monster Maze was on the ZX81 i think, the forerunner to Wolfenstein, Doom ---> Call of Duty

We used to call this Rex - spent days on it. Atmospheric or what?!

 

[mark barker]

Ahh, the joys of "vintage" computing! I had a ZX81, which was dire! I don't think I ever got it to play a game, always screwed up after turning the tape over! After much pestering my folks agreed to buy me a new computer (it had to be a C64, everyone at school had one). Obviously this wasn't a good reason in my folks books, so they got me "Plus 4" instead. Great! After a year or so the Amiga was the computer of choice, so my parents went out and got me an Atari ST!

Slightly OT, but does anyone remember the Philips CDi games consoles, circa 1993? I've still got one somewhere, with a couple of films on CD (2 discs per movie!).

 

[Fnaar]

Just an Amstrad summat or other. I wasn'tr interested back then, at all. Somweone tried to impress me with their Commodore or whatever, but it just made silly noises, and I didn't get it!

 

[ColinJ]

Ahh, the joys of "vintage" computing!  I had a ZX81, which was dire!  I don't think I ever got it to play a game, always screwed up after turning the tape over! 

Oh, I'd forgotten the joy of loading from cassette tape - over 20 minutes to load 'Castle of Riddles'!   

 

[martint235]

ZX Spectrum was were I cut my programming teeth...

Also made the top 10 UK at Jetpac but largely cos I figured out there was one screen and one place where you could earn points and not die by not doing anything

 

[Hacienda71]

ZX81 followed by a BBC B the games were the dogs dangley bits.