Does anybody remember the Dark Ages of computing...

Lt. Dan · Post by **Lt. Dan** » 2004-03-10 11:53pm

lazerus wrote:Commodore 64, which is pretty good considering how I'm not even 20.

--

It's like watching a documentarey about the stone age.

I love it. I, too, am not even 20. Some guy gave us two when I lived in Mexico with like 50 5 inch floppies. I still hook it up and do some old-school gaming every now and then.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2004-03-11 05:50am

Remembers friend who ran a BBS on an ungodly number of Diasy chained floppies because he was too cheap to buy a HDD.

Slartibartfast · Post by **Slartibartfast** » 2004-03-11 12:33pm

Bad thing about the C64 was its tendency to get really really hot (I mean, the vents were UNDER it, so no fresh air for you!). Even so, a lot of people that I knew ran their BBS on a C64. Even my brother programmed the best BBS ever on a Commodore: the FENIX BBS!

Eventually he got another guy to host it tho. But it ran on 1 5 1/4 floppy (one side was the program, the other was the data).

Frank LLoyd Wright · Post by **Frank LLoyd Wright** » 2004-03-11 10:40pm

I remember way in the past when I used my first Apple ][ Computer in school. I remember in middle school programming my first BASIC list sequence. My how things have changed. In that BASIC class we thought the two 15 inch color monitors were heaven sent. At home the oldest comuter we had was an ATARI 800XE DOS 3 Computer with big floppy drives and some great old scool games our favorite was a flight simulator with keybord commands. We had lost the manual and thus had lost all the keyboard shortcuts, but it was sitill fun to play untill you ran out of fuel and weapons(we did not remember how to land or refuel). We still have it and it still runs. The next in our museum is an 8088 PC with a 250 MB hard drive that has died only last year. I own a Packhard Bell Pentuim 150 from 1995 with 25MB of RAM (seems like forever ago with the present pace of technology) which is not upgradable and it still runs alright today (It plays my old games that no other computer will run). I use whopping more powerful computers at College now and this old Pentium is getting left out to pasture soon. But nothin Beats the clasic game of MYST1.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-03-11 11:07pm

apple II's in computer lab during elementary school. Math and word games. Un identified green screen dos-box from about same time first home computer. Followed by and IBM multi media with, get this, windows 3.1, a 3 1/2 floppy, a 5 floppy and a cdrom drive. No internet. Had that till 1999 when the moniter died and my mom insisted upon throwing out the whole thing 'cause she didn't wan't it burning down the house or sumptin. Had that till, let's se, 1999. ALso had a 1996 ibm thinpad 365 ed that worked part of the time and was pretty much usless and just recentely gave to a friend. Then in 2001 i got my current box (pent 4 1.6 gigahertz windoze xp 40 gig hdd 256 megs sdram) which i've upgraded considerably. I've just bought my own system. Rather nice box actually.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2004-03-12 08:38am

i started my gaming career at the age of 4. that was 1984 on the computers of the company my dad used to work for. it was a bunch of ascii games such as worm and snake and the computers used 8`` floppy disks.
in 85 my cousin got one of these schneider machines with datasettes and games like gate crasher and watz.
in 87 i got my first own computer, a commodore 128 and spent whole days in front of bubble bobble, boulder dash and in the end turricane. the islands of dr. distructo was cool too. and the dr. creeps series. oh, and of course ultima IV.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-03-12 08:19pm

Darth_Zod wrote:interesting trivia: microsoft originally tried getting the term 8086 patented/copyright protected/etc. with the US government, but were thrown out of court after the judge ruled that they couldn't patent a number.

Wasn't that Intel, 586, and trademarked, not patented/copyrighted?

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2004-03-12 08:39pm

Darth_Zod wrote:interesting trivia: microsoft originally tried getting the term 8086 patented/copyright protected/etc. with the US government, but were thrown out of court after the judge ruled that they couldn't patent a number.

Er, shouldn't that be Intel?

Lt. Dan · Post by **Lt. Dan** » 2004-03-14 01:33pm

darthdavid wrote:apple II's in computer lab during elementary school. Math and word games. Un identified green screen dos-box from about same time first home computer. Followed by and IBM multi media with, get this, windows 3.1, a 3 1/2 floppy, a 5 floppy and a cdrom drive. No internet. Had that till 1999 when the moniter died and my mom insisted upon throwing out the whole thing 'cause she didn't wan't it burning down the house or sumptin. Had that till, let's se, 1999. ALso had a 1996 ibm thinpad 365 ed that worked part of the time and was pretty much usless and just recentely gave to a friend. Then in 2001 i got my current box (pent 4 1.6 gigahertz windoze xp 40 gig hdd 256 megs sdram) which i've upgraded considerably. I've just bought my own system. Rather nice box actually.

Your windows 3.1 sounds alot like the first one we had. Same drives and everything.

Oni Koneko Damien · Post by **Oni Koneko Damien** » 2004-03-14 05:01pm

Hmm, the first computer I ever used was a Commodore 64. I'd while away the hours playing the original Lode Runner, Thexdor, and a couple others. After that we got an Amiga. I still get nostalgic about Gauntlet, Dungeon Master, Time Bandit, and Xenon. After that, it was the Pentium 1, with Doom! Sadly, things have gone downhill since then, or perhaps I'm just not as easily entertained as I used to be.

The Third Man · Post by **The Third Man** » 2004-03-14 05:53pm

I've used lots of strange computers. Owned a ZX80, VIC20 C64 and Apple IIe. A few weeks ago I picked up an 89 MicroVAX, which is now running NetBSD, but the strangest I ever used has got to be this piece of equipment:

It's a manual 80-column card punch. Many, many years ago when I was a kid playing with my ZX80 a programmer friend of my father helped me use this device to write a Hello World program in Cobol. (The 80-column cards are the reason for Cobol's 80 character/line limit). You had to stack the cards up in a sort of hopper on an ICL machine (something called a 2903 IIRC, anyway it was orange and big). The machine pictured above is now part of my dads computing 'museum'.

Post by **LadyTevar** » 2004-03-15 12:52am

Third Man Wins!!

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2004-03-15 01:00am

I don't know while I don't possess a card punch I do remember programming with one.

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2004-03-15 03:44pm

Sinclair ZX Spectrum, complete with green monochrome monitor and tape drive.