Great deal on an OS (joke) or A trip to Hardware Hell.

[groover km]

Checkout... http://www.tvradiobits.co.uk/eightieszone/eighties5.htm about 1/3 of the way down the page.

THE COMPUTER PROGRAMME (BBC1 1981)

YOU ROCK!!! Ian MacNaught-Davis, I hardly knew ye...

[nitrogen_widget]

I was thinking it was "Bits & Bytes" or something like that.

Did no-one have a TI99/4A? I got one when brandnames went out of business. It had a cartridge slot for programs & the cassette deck for saving things to tape.
Though, the tapes only worked on other Ti's if I brought my tape player in.
My school had TI's in the classrooms.

Jeez that was 4th & 5th grade. The wireing was so bad in the school that the image from the classroom over would get picked up by your TV if the TI wasn't on.

Back then the holy grail of commands was the Call Key & Call Joy? commands.
With them you could make a sprite move around the screen.

They had these choose your own adventure books out & I wrote a computer version on the TI & brought it into class to show a friend.
The teacher loved it & asked if I could make a program to do the same thing only the person playing it would be a historical figure & the only way a student could win is if they remembered what that figure did.

She said I could do it during class & not have to participate in the history lessons.

Hmm let me think about that. I can go to school & play with the computer?

Then I got the C-128 which had c-64 mode with it's pokes & peeks & got this game maker program.
Wasted a lot of time playing Ultima 3 & undeleteing my dead characters & making them better with a sector editor.

And then came my commodore Amiga 500. 1 Meg of ram. built in disk drive & later I added a 40 mb HD. It blew away my friends $2,000 286 he bought for college (computer Science major)
I think I paid $500 for it.
The Games were as good as you could get anywhere even console systems at the time.

We both had Eye Of the Beholder & it looked so much better on my system.

Yep my little Amiga was a technological wonder.
Then the stupid company went out of business & I had to buy a 486 with windows 3.1 on it & it didn't get any better until '98 SE.

[mobiusnz]

Used to play a text based adventure game, that was compiled from Pascal...forget the name of it though...had phrases like "You are in a long dark tunnel...and, You are going downstream".

There was a whole series of these for the Apple put out by Infotext or something like that. I remember one based on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Then things got really high-tech and you got a static Picture at each "location". Some of these you had to think really laterally to get through.

I tried MS-DOS, IBMDOS and DR-DOS (and played with a replacement command interpreter that was shareware that I can't remember the name of but it was good!). I definately had "grass is greener" syndrome, if there was something different - it must be better. OS/2 truely rocked - I ran my first BBS on it for a company I worked for - it really multitasked well.

[ubu]

For a stroll down memory lane check out this link which has all the episodes of "Computer Chronicles" (great PBS TV computer show) going back to 1983 as downloadable mpeg2 and mpeg4 and streaming mpeg4. Great titles like "Apple II Forever", "Amiga versus Atari" and "Intel 386 - The Fast Lane".

[ubu]

In the beginning was CP/M (used by all "serious" micro-computer users - the Osborne "luggables" ran it, for instance) but IBM wanted a proprietary OS for their new micro - the IBM Personal Computer - so Microsoft ripped off CP/M from Gary Kildall, called it MS-DOS, and sold it to IBM. But IBM wanted it to be proprietary so they changed it just enough to annoy just about everybody and called it IBM PC-DOS. But soon, they were losing so much market share to IBM-PC clones (IBM execs didn't quite "get" what was happening down in Boca Raton - "Where do I attach the punch card reader?") that MS-DOS was outselling PC-DOS and becoming the de-facto standard.

IBM and MS worked together on a multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS to replace DOS but soon they fell out and split the project, IBM to develop OS2 and Microsoft to continue with NT. The best engineers must have gone to IBM because OS2 was light years ahead of NT, providing a true multi-tasking OS when NT would fall over if you tried to run two copies of "Hello World!". But Microsoft had figured out how to market this stuff and the IBM execs were still wondering if "multi-tasking" meant they could plug in two punch card-readers. The rest is history.

If technical excellence actually drove the market, we'd probably all be running GBPVR under Be-OS right now. Or maybe "CP/M 2006".

[ddrawley]

TRS-80 Model I, first computer in the school lab.
Model IIIs later.
Atari 800, first one I owned.
All with tape drives at first.
Ah, memories.

[reboot]

In the beginning was CP/M (used by all "serious" micro-computer users - the Osborne "luggables" ran it, for instance)

I still have one of these in perfect working condition, with the "upgraded" SSDD (vs the original SSSD) floppy drives. I also have a 12" amber Zenith external monitor for it, and 2 boxes full of software.
For sale, cheap!

[gEd]

ah yes CP/M - we had 386 multi-user servers running CP/M built by LSI.

I never did get the hang of PIP..

why do you guys still have this stuff lying around!!! - I feel like I am a hoarder when I hang onto PC100 memory and 56k modems...

[ubu]

You may need to add that there was MP/M (multitasking CP/M) and GEM (Graphical CP/M) long before Mr. Gates had Windows running.

I'd forgotten about MP/M. Mr. Kildall was really ahead of the game but could not compete with slickly marketed mediocrity. GEM was cool (I didn't know it was CP/M based). Its GUI was very similar to the original Xerox PARC original which Steve Jobs ripped off (sorry, "popularized") with the Mac. I ran GEM for a while (since Windows 3.0 was pathetically buggy and virtually unusable) but the lack of apps for GEM forced me to switch to Windows 3.1 when it was released.

I used to feed in the CBIOS using front panel switches on my home-made machine, until I was sure I had the code 'right' AND I found someone who could burn an Eprom, must have entered the code by hand daily for 3 months or so.

Did you wear a white coat and carry a clipboard with the switch settings on it?

I still have one of these in perfect working condition

That's a keeper! A little bit of history. Adam Osborne was typical of that era's techie pioneers - a flashy, fast-talking Brit visionary wild man with no idea how to play in the corporate shark pool.

why do you guys still have this stuff lying around!!! - I feel like I am a hoarder when I hang onto PC100 memory and 56k modems...

A sense of history? Laziness? Stupidity? Obsessive/compulsive disorder? Maybe because my dad bought a 1927 Aston Martin LeMans (outside exhaust pipe, cycle mudguards, wire stone guards on the headlamps, the works! ) for 100 quid when I was a kid and then sold it a few months later because it needed new piston rings. Last time I looked there were only 3 of them left in existence. I hate to think how much they are worth! Memories like that leave scars......

[bgowland]

I like this thread - the only favourite memory I really have is building my first computer from component parts...a ZX80.

I can't remember how many chips there were - 16 or 18 plus some resistors, caps, a voltage reg, and the UHF modulator. I'd got home from school and the box was there (a couple of months late because they were snowed under with orders).

My desk (supposedly meant for schoolwork) was junked up with various half built circuit boards so I set to work using my bed as a workbench. A couple of hours later and a few holes burned into my duvet cover with the soldering iron, it was just about ready to go when my Mum called me downstairs for the evening meal - the fastest meal I've ever eaten.

Back upstairs, put my TV back together again (it was quite normal for it to be in pieces) and I was in business....

Three months later I sold it for a tenner more than it cost me (possibly the only capitalist deed I've ever done in my life). I used the money to buy a Microtan65 made by a Cambridge based company called Tangerine. That was a REAL computer - no namby-pamby attempt at a QWERTY keyboard, no BASIC interpreter - this was 6502 machine code and a hex keypad. That was when I really started to learn about computers.

Cheers,
Brian