Ship of Fools: '80s Computers

Thread: '80s Computers Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

There is a room in Bletchley Park museum dedicated to 1980s computers, as mentioned in the Boring thread.

I does not seem to be that long ago I was using an Atari ST, and I can't be the only one here. So did you start with an Amiga, a BBC computer, or Spectrum; or were you nearly put off computers by the Dragon 32?

Posted by Bob Two-Owls (# 9680) on :

The Dragon wasn't that bad, it was just the Sinclair fanboys who put the boot in.

I started off on a Commodore PET at school which led me to save up all my saturday job wages for a Commodore 64. Slow loading but a really nice machine for home use.

Posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :

If you'd used a PET I understand why you'd rate the Dragon.

I cut my teeth on one of these at school: http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/swtpc_6800.htm

Then we got some BBC Bs, which was cheating and had none of the charm.

I had a spectrum at home. I spent two years getting excited about when the Microdrive was going to be released but couldn't afford one anyway when they finally were.

Posted by ElaineC (# 12244) on :

I graduated in 1974 with a degree in computer science.

I worked in the industry for 5 years before having my girls. Using mainframes - oh those boxes of punched cards and piles of line printer paper.

While having my 5 years 'off' we had a BBC B computer along with TV and cassette tape drive.

Later we had an Amiga before taking the Microsoft shilling and buying a PC with Windows 3.1.

Several PC's and laptops later I've finally succumbed to the lure of the imac, ipad and only today I've ordered my first iphone.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

It was bf who had the leisure machines - first a BBC, then a Commodore 64 then quite a rare Amiga, with a PC emulator.

Meanwhile, in work, I was encountering word processors the size of cocktail cabinets, before moving on to a library system - dumb terminals and a box running the Version of Unix from Hell.

At some point we got a home PC (by which time they were fairly common in he workplace). Oh, and an awful lot of game consoles. And then it was a PC each and then broadband and smartphones and an iPad each....

Posted by Traveller (# 1943) on :

Oh my goodness, what a trip down memory lane.

I first started working with computers at university, where the lab had an Elliot 903 in its own room. 64k of memory if you ran Fortran, only 32k if you preferred Algol.

I bought a Dragon 32 when they were first available and wrote some fun stuff in Basic for it. I also won a Spectrum 64 in some competition (Mensa, I seem to remember [Hot and Hormonal]

). What a horrible keyboard those things had.

I still have an IBM PS1 up in the loft, complete with Windows 3.0, 2MB of memory and a 20MB hard disc.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
I cut my teeth on one of these at school: http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/swtpc_6800.htm

The chip used in that was the forerunner of the Motorola 68000 chip Atari used in the ST, so you would have liked it.

I had friends with early PCs, 286 and 386. They could not understand how my toy computer could out perform their higher spec real computers when running serious software such as Wordperfect.

But then DTP and music were the two areas where the ST excelled. A very good machine in its day.

[ 27. November 2012, 15:19: Message edited by: balaam ]

Posted by Heavenly Anarchist (# 13313) on :

I was never a computer buff but my older brother had a zx81 and then a spectrum. My other half apparently had a BBC B.
My husband works at a very nerdy technology consultancy (he designs smart meters and other sensory technologies) and he has a colleague who has a BBC at work which he sometimes uses to write programmes in. He also deals in BBC parts.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

Up until about a year ago I still kept my household budget on a program I wrote in GWBASIC using a Commodore 64. I just kept porting it over (along with the GWBASIC executable, as Microsoft stopped including it in new DOS/Windows releases years ago) to each new computer I bought.

The original program loaded from a cassette tape and stored data in DATA statements within the program itself. So whenever I added transactions, I had to re-save the entire program to tape. I used to start the save command and then walk out to the mailbox to post all the checks I had written for various bills to be paid. I hoped that the program would have finished saving by the time I got back from the mailbox.

I remember how thrilled I was when I added a portable floppy drive to the old Commodore 64. No more saving to tape.

Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :

I became a physics undergraduate in 1980, just as the Sinclair computing boom was starting. In my final year at school, a forward-looking physics teacher had managed to get a cobbled-together machine running off a Z80 processor, and had taught BASIC programming to interested pupils as an extracurricular thing.

All that set me up for my first computer, which was a ZX81. There were a handful of us in my year at university who really got into them, acquiring the wherewithal to program them in Z80 machine code, which sped them up immensely. Did you know you can run one-dimensional solutions to Schroedinger's wave equation on a ZX81? (I remember 30 years ago that sounded really impressive - I must admit I can't even remember what it means now! Basically, if you're of a musical frame of mind, I think it's like discovering you can play Widor's Toccata on a kazoo.)

The ZX Spectrum? Well, it was okay, but I remember me and my mate Terry shaking our heads and saying, "Well, it's no ZX81...."

Posted by Late Paul (# 37) on :

Used BBC Bs at school but most of my friends that had a computer had a Spectrum. When my dad finally decided to buy a home PC he got talked into buy an Oric Atmos by the man in the shop.

"But it's got a proper keyboard![1]" he said to my disappointed face. Of course he'd bought the line that this was the future and having a computer in the house would cause us kids to grow up and be programmers[2] rather than realising the more important truth that computers were really for games and having an "Oric what?" meant I now couldn't trade games with my friends. As I recall there was one decent game for the Oric - Two Gun Turtle - I played a lot of Two Gun Turtle.

At least the manual had a full description of 6502 assembly language which I finally got my head around after reading for the third time. And since that was the same chip as the BBC, and BBC Basic had an assembler I was all set to write my own high performance games[3] and conquer the world. Which I'm going to get around to any day now[4].

Later we got an Amstrad CPC 464 (with the built in cassette deck) - which I naturally used to play Sorcery - excellent game! I did also write an accounts program for my dad in his role as treasurer of the Angling Club.

--
[1]In fact the Atmos was pretty much just an Oric-1 with a better keyboard.
[2]which to be fair is what I now do for a living.
[3]You could only get so far using BASIC. I wrote the obligatory snake rip-off and a turn-based canon game. Oh and I also wrote a "psychic"[5] version of space invaders.
[4]Now it's going to be an Android app.
[5]I didn't at the time know how to check the keyboard for input without blocking the rest of the program. So either everything froze while you decided whether to move left, right or fire - not very exciting, or - my solution - it did so based on random numbers which you eventually would learn to influence using latent psychic powers.

Posted by Starbug (# 15917) on :

I had a ZX81, complete with the dreaded 'RAMpack wobble'. Then I moved on to the Spectrum, which had colour and sound. And those rubber keys that were rubbish for playing games on. Oh, the hours my Dad and I spent running back and forth to Dixons, trying to find a compatible cassette player! [Smile]

Posted by TurquoiseTastic (# 8978) on :

I started on a Dragon 32. It was not bad at all for its time. The only problem was the lack of software. Compared to those horrible Sinclair keyboards (I used ZX81s at school) it was bliss!

Though a couple of years later I converted to a BBC B, which was wonderful... happy days...

Posted by Kyzyl (# 374) on :

First computer I used was a Radio Shack TRS-80 with the Scripsit word processing program. The first one I owned was an IBM PS2 with two (!) floppy disc drives.

Posted by ArachnidinElmet (# 17346) on :

I had an Amstrad 464 as a child used almost exclusively to play cassette-based game. I remember trying to learn a little BASIC and managing to create some kind of moving psychedelic wave pattern thing. I do miss being able to make copies of games on a hi-fi, and that crazy high-pitched space invaders noise that it made. Ah, good times. I don't miss the 30 minute load up time though. Btw, I still have this machine gathering dust in a box [Hot and Hormonal]

In the same vein, if anyone is interested, at the National Media Museum in Bradford there is a section with 80s/90s Arcade Games for 20 pence a pop.

Posted by Twangist (# 16208) on :

we borrowed a Dragon from a friend for a weekend and then bought a Beeb B. I still love Chuckie Egg! Remember trying to program role playing games in BBC basic.
Had an ST for a bit (for music purposes)
Then the PC ....

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

Been there and played 'em.

Talking of old games there are a number of emulators (not just Atari) to be found on the Atari Age forum.

All you need now is to find the programmes to emulate, or for real emulation of the Spectrum experience, type the BASIC code from a magazine.

Posted by Twangist (# 16208) on :

It's just not the same without using cassettes tho'

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

First line was a reply to ArachnidInElmet.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Twangist:
It's just not the same without using cassettes tho'

You could always take the dog for a walk like you had to while it was loading. Bring back the waiting experience.

Posted by Lothlorien (# 4927) on :

Another one loading from cassettes. We had a Sorcerer with an enormous memory. 32 Kb, I think. I've forgotten. We also had a printer. This made us unusual among other computer owners. A big clunker of a dot matrix printer. where the paper often came off the sprockets on the side.

Eldest son, then about 8, and his dad went to monthly Sorcerer USer Group meetings where son soon outstripped many of the users in his knowledge.

We used Spellbinder as a word processor and I taught myself Basic.

Sorcerers were never easy to carry. No real Sorcerer user had the case screwed down as improvements were always being made.

I remember how thrilled we were when we bought a plug in copy of Spellbinder. Not a floppy but a plug in module about 6" square. Sure beat loading from a cassette where we had multiple copies saved because the first did not always load.

Lots of great games were available too. MY favourite was Tank Trap. There's a game which can be found by searching of the same name, but it's not the game we enjoyed.

[ 27. November 2012, 22:57: Message edited by: Lothlorien ]

Posted by Bean Sidhe (# 11823) on :

Is there any truth in the story that it was only when Commodore wanted to market the Pet in France, that they found out what it means in French? (Google Translate is your friend!)

Posted by BessHiggs (# 15176) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Kyzyl:
First computer I used was a Radio Shack TRS-80 with the Scripsit word processing program. The first one I owned was an IBM PS2 with two (!) floppy disc drives.

Ahhh, the Trash-80, my first as well. Then in college, I had an IBM (8086) with two floppy drives. Those were the days...

Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :

My mom and dad had a Trash-80, too. It always seemed to crash on them.

We had a Commodore 64 and I was thrilled with it! It had a word processor!!! Of course, you had to type in a long string of code to get the program. My ex was really quite peeved at me for doing that when he couldn't. His main use of the machine was to play 'Dino Eggs.'

Posted by piglet (# 11803) on :

First experience of a word-processor just before the end of my secretarial course (1983) - BBC Basic, which we thought was the closest thing we were ever likely to see to magic.

Posted by churchgeek (# 5557) on :

In the early 80s, when I was about in the 6th grade, my dad got a computer, made by some company called APF. (My dad always joked it was Arthritis Pain Formula - which is or was a real pain relief pill, btw.)

It was roughly the size of an electric typewriter, though deeper and flatter, and you hooked it up to your TV. It had a built-in keyboard and a built-in tape recorder (to record data), and a cartridge slot in the back. When you plugged in a cartridge, it was a computer. When you pulled the cartridge out, all you could use the thing for was to play ping-pong.

Dad also got a teletype to use with it as a printer, until he saved up for an Epson dot-matrix printer.

That's the earliest computer I have any personal experience with. I wish I knew some of its technical specifications! My sisters and I learned a little bit of BASIC programming on it, but very little. It was a momentary diversion for us.

We were really impressed a few years later, though, when my cousin got a Commodore 64. Mostly we used it to play games on. Frogger was a big favorite.

Posted by churchgeek (# 5557) on :

OMG! Here it is!

APF Imagination Machine

I didn't remember the joysticks until seeing this picture!

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

I learned BASIC on an ACORN Electron, and later my parents bought a Philips MSX VG8020.

I have a MSX BASIC emulator on my PC, and when I have to do a complex calculation, I still fire it up. Often I can do it more quickly there than in Excel/OpenOffice Calc.

Posted by WhyNotSmile (# 14126) on :

I still have my ZX Spectrum, and all the games, and the tape player. My dad bought it for my sister and I in the mid-80s - he got it second-hand from a friend in work, I think, and thought we'd like it. I think he gave it to us as an early Christmas present, because I had my tonsils out in the September that year, so it was something to do while I was recovering. I learned to program on it, and having to teach myself gave me the skills that took me through university, including a PhD, and which I still use as a web developer now.

I loved Chuckie Egg, and the Dizzy games (still do, in fact - see yolkfolk.com if you want them on your PC). My cousin had the Commodore 64, and we thought the cartridge games were brilliant, because they loaded 'instantly' (i.e. within a minute or so).

A few years later, seeing how much we enjoyed the computer, my parents and grandparents clubbed together to get us the newly-released Amiga 500+, which was also brilliant! It had a mouse and everything!

I got my first Windows PC in about 2001, and that did me until I started my own web development business 5 years ago and needed something more powerful.

This Christmas I'm buying mum and dad a tablet PC, so the thing has come full circle!

Posted by MSHB (# 9228) on :

My first computer - in 1985 - was a "MicroBee", an Australian-made CP/M computer with 64KB of RAM.

I did my thesis on it using a word processing package (WordStar) that did not have footnote support.

And I learned Basic and a little Assembly language.

But I actually began using a computer first at work, where we had an Apple 2e. That is where I first learned to program, as well as use a word processor and a spreadsheet.

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

I had already been an adult when personal computers came in. My son was very keen to have a Spectrum, and indeed I've still got emulated versions of Manic Minor and Jet Set Willy which he plays occasionally.

I got a Sinclair QL in the mid eighties and a dot matrix printer. It came with word processing, spreadsheet, database and pie-chart applications. I wrote quite a lot on it.

Commercially, the QL was not a success, but it could do things that it took several generations of Windows to catch up with. Two in particular that I remember were the ability to have more than one programme up and running at the same time, and that if you bought more memory, you could just go on adding it indefinitely and the software just took it on the chin.

You could also buy an application that would create the modern system of clicking on icons rather than typing each command into the machine, but I never grasped programming sufficiently to do that. The icons weren't pictures like now, but little buttons with words on them.

Posted by Miss Madrigal (# 15528) on :

The Dragon 32 has a special palce in my heart as it was the first computer on which I cut code. This lead to to a long and often enjoyable career in IT. I was rather taken aback to realise that this machine was first made 30 years ago.

If you're in the UK and have any interest in computing, then a visit to The National Museum Of Computing makes an excellent day out when combined with a trip to Bletchley Park itself.

Posted by chive (# 208) on :

I had a ZX81 when I was a kid but really didn't know how to do anything on it. Then we got a Speccy + which I loved. Chuckie Egg and Monty Mole and the squealing of the tape loading the games. A couple of months ago I went here where they have cottages done up to different decades. I loved the 1980's one which had a speccy in it. Was scarily how my childhood home looked.

Posted by Lord Jestocost (# 12909) on :

I had friends with many of the above, but came late to the party with an Amstrad PCW8256. Which was useful (as opposed to entertaining) for a lot longer than a ZX81 or an Amiga ...

Posted by Mudfrog (# 8116) on :

Ah, happy memories of my PCW [Smile]

Posted by The Rogue (# 2275) on :

I learned computing at school in the early 80s. We had a single terminal with a link to a computer somewhere else in the county. We had to type our programmes on this terminal off-line and create a paper tape with punched holes which could then be read in to the remote computer when we went on-line. No screen - everything was printed.

The first machine I owned was one of these which I bought in 1988. It had 512k of memory and I chose a single 5 1/4" floppy drive and colour monitor rather than a hard drive and a mono monitor for my money. I still had it five years later when I got a 3 1/2" added and only replaced it another five years after that.

It had MSDos and GEM sat on top of it which was an early GUI system. Amstrad said it was challenging Windows but it lost. I'm not really surprised. GEM's BASIC programming was fun but I usually didn't bother with it.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by The Rogue:
I learned computing at school in the early 80s. We had a single terminal with a link to a computer somewhere else in the county. We had to type our programmes on this terminal off-line and create a paper tape with punched holes which could then be read in to the remote computer when we went on-line. No screen - everything was printed.

In the '80s? I was doing this in '73. By '74 the school had become a university, the remote computer had become an air conditioned room, with an airlock to come in and out, BASIC had become Fortran and the punched tape had become punched cards.

Still didn't get to see a monitor though, typing to the punched cards and running the programmes was down to professional computer operators.

Even very simple programming was long winded. You wrote on paper in square boxes. The computer operators did the rest, you came back the next day to a print out of error messages, and had to debug, then another day's wait to see if it had worked. What's more I now have more computing power than there was in two dedicated rooms in a phone,

That's why home computers in the '80s were a big leap forwards. Waiting 20 minutes for a program to load from cassette was so much quicker than having to wait overnight for the university computer professionals to get round to your code.

Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :

I remember using those punched cards for various things. Our phone bills were on those cards.

In 1972 or '73, I saw a new electronic organ that had the regular stops, plus a slot to insert those cards to get additional voices! It was cool, cutting edge stuff back then. Then, in 1993 when I started my current church job, the organ was one of those with the computer cards. It was hopelessly old fashioned by then. (The teenagers liked to bring their parents' phone bills to put in the slot to see if it made a sound. Some of them did!)

Posted by HenryT (# 3722) on :

When I was in high school 1972-1977, I used to sneak BASIC time on a Wang packaged micro. (And APL time at U of T, mostly to play Trek shoot em ups.) This lead to a job documenting a friend's mods to an HP BASIC program for CNC machining (at a local tool and die co.) Then we got into Commodore PET, starting with the "chiclet" keyboard. I could touch-type on that. My friend wrote a serious wordprocessor for PETs, in 6502 assembler of course. I did a contract for him to port it to the small memory models (8 and 16K).

I had a couple of non-computer jobs in high school, but for at least 35 years, all the money I've ever made has come from computing.

Posted by Stercus Tauri (# 16668) on :

quote:
Originally posted by jedijudy:
I remember using those punched cards for various things. Our phone bills were on those cards.

I'd almost forgotten those phone bill punch cards! Now I remember subtly (I thought) disarranging them in the hope that it would take them longer to process and cash the cheque.

The first computer I owned was an IBM PS2 bought from my employer when it was made redundant. A lovely machine if all you needed was Word Perfect 5+ running on DOS 6.0. It was a lot like my old diesel VW Golf - built like a brick s***house and absolutely reliable. They don't make them like that any more.

Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :

I started programming in the sixties at a high school enrichment program at a nearby university. The first machine was an IBM 1620, a machine which had a base 10 multiplication table hardwired in. I wrote small programs in Fortran 2.

Later at school we got a pdp-8 with a serial cpu. You could almost watch a multiply in the flashing lights.

Posted by jbohn (# 8753) on :

Our first home computer when I was a kid was a TI-99/4A . Ah, the joys of programming BASIC!

We bought an Apple IIgs sometime later, and then the Macs I bang on now. And the Linux boxen.

I didn't get exposed to (the horror!) Windoze machines until middle school, really.

I've still got that TI in the attic, though. I ought to drag it out and goof around with it a bit.

Posted by TomOfTarsus (# 3053) on :

I (or my family) never had a computer in the 80's!

I started in high school on a Litton programmable calculator, I think it is this one. It those orange-red "Nixie" tubes to display the numbers, and a card reader that you had to punch in octal code. It wasn't used much in class (basically just introductory stuff), but you could do extra credit or "private" work on it - I was motorizing model rocket design functions.

In college I learned FORTRAN IV on mainframe/keypunch machines and then teletype as well, but no CRT's of any kind. Then I got an advanced degree in "stupid" and dropped out for school for 10 years. When I returned (my wife was carrying our 5th child, and I was permanently out of work) I was able to pick up a research job programming in FORTRAN. So I got to the computer lab (here's all these VAX terminals) and I ask where the keypunch machines are. Talk about blank stares! I may as well have asked for a cuneiform tables and stylus, or an abacus!

My first home machine was a Windows based 386. due to work, I stay with Windows machines. Now that the kids are grown, I treated myself last year to a pretty ferocious machine for flight simulation - 16 GB of RAM, an overclocked I2600K processor, crazy video card, static hard drive, etc. It beats anything in the office by a minimum of 2x on execution.

I am one of two people in our office that retains the keyboard from a bunch of Tandy 486's we bought when the world was young (1993 or thereabouts...)

And when I first started here (May, 1990) they were still using Commodore 64's and TV's, with BASIC, Wordwriter, and EasyScript - and doing better engineering than my previous firm did with all the latest toys...

[ 29. November 2012, 17:57: Message edited by: TomOfTarsus ]

Posted by que sais-je (# 17185) on :

quote:
Originally posted by balaam:
So did you start with an Amiga, a BBC computer, or Spectrum; or were you nearly put off computers by the Dragon 32?

I feel so old - I was taught EMA (Extended Mercury
Autocode - don't ask) in school in 1967. First real working program in Fortran II in 1969. First in depth computer experience an ICL 1905E ....

And I'm typing this with a desktop from about 2004 - Linux is viagra for old computers, Microsoft is euthanasia.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

I think my first introduction to computers was something like the IBM Displaywriter, which had no hard disk, just a twin floppy disk drive. One drive was for the disk with the startup program, the other was for the disk with your own files. The Displaywriter was the size of a fruit machine and the disks were enormous, great square dinner-plate size things.

I saved up because I was really, really keen to have my very own notebook/laptop and managed to get a secondhand one with Windows 3.1 and 2MB of Ram. I was so proud of it.

As for programs, I tried Wordstar which at the time was running about even with WordPerfect for Dos, but even then it was clear that WP for Dos was much more user-friendly.

It was a revelation when we first got colour screens. My laptop had been black and white, and at work I had an IBM pc with a monochrome green screen.

I also tried out an Apple Mac and hated it. The screen was really tiny and you couldn't get behind the cute little icons. I liked Dos: I was quite comfortable with running command lines and even editing batch files.

[ 02. December 2012, 17:40: Message edited by: Ariel ]

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

I remember downloading my first web browser - Netscape 1.0 probably. I had a work PC running Windows 3 or thereabouts and a modem - 'cos I was the library sysadmin, and got to live in a cupboard behind the book stacks with The Box and a stack of comms and the system printer - checking everything was working was a matter of staring at a particular configuration of little green lights on things. It took something like 3 hours to download the browser (and probably no more than several dozen websites to look at...)

Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :

I learned to program in Extended BASIC Plus in college in the late '70s. There were terminals all over campus for student use (the computer was a DEC mainframe). In my senior year the first personal computers were showing up with some of the more tech-oriented freshmen. Most of us couldn't see why anyone would want to spend $3500 to have a slow computer in their room when they could have access to a much faster one just a few minutes away. I bought my first computer, a 286 running DOS 3.3, in 1989. It had a black-and-green monochrome monitor, until I upgraded to a CGA monitor a year later. I mostly used it for word processing (I was working as a freelance writer at the time). I do remember some fun games, including a mostly text-based LOTR game.

Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :

I started using the Cambridge Titan Computer in the late 60s for doing statistical analysis. First punchcards and then paper tape. Fortran. Remember Hollerith statements for formatting. I hardly can.

The I used focal for statistical analysis on Melbourne Kodak's PDP-11, or was it PDP-16?

Played around with a Dick Smith Sorcerer, cassette tape and the Forth language, which laughingly imagined itself to be a Fourth generation computing language.

In 1985 used an IBM PC with DOS at work to do process and data analysis. It had an expansion card to take it from 64k to 640k, a 5Mbyte hard disk and a 10 Mybyte tape drive for backup. We were lucky to have it as the (Telcom) GM IT said that there would be no place for Personal Computers in business. Our programming was done on Honeywell and IBM/Fujitsu/Amdahl mainframes in COBOL80 (maintenance of COBOL74), Pascal, MVS, VM, and NATURAL ADABAS.

Posted by JB (# 1776) on :

Memories.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

You could afford one of those? Or did you work for a very rich company or government?

Posted by Chapelhead (# 21) on :

I started computing at school using punch cards that were processed at the local technical college. The first computer our school had was a Research Machines 380Z. Happy days.

Posted by Lothlorien (# 4927) on :

quote:
Originally posted by JB:
Memories.

Thanks for that link, JB. I found a reference page for the Exidy
Sorceror which we had.

It was a very versatile compute and I totally edited on it a large supplement to the hymnbook our Brethren Assembly used.

After that we had a copy of an Apple IIe. Those were the days when Apple would not sell anything unless you had a genuine Apple machine. Not even a power supply.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

Fast forward to the 21st Century. Fast PCs now have the operating system on SSD drives, no need for any moving parts to load or run the operating system. So much quicker.

Which takes me right back to the ready loaded on EPROM (or was it EEPROM?) operating system on the old ST. I'm surprised it took so long for such a good idea to make a comeback.

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

My first data analysis at university was on a Tops-20 operating system on a mainframe that ran at 300 bps, that's 0.3 of a KB. Memory was committed to a tape which you had to buy and hand to the computer operator. It was possible to use punch cards, but better to use a tape. I wrote my Master's these in RUNOFF, which apparently was the first word processing program ever invented. I typed it up in Emacs which was the first computer windowing environment created as far as I know. No, windows was not a Microsoft invention! (Nor Apple)

By the time I did my PhD, I recall a couple of early adopters. One bought a TRS-80 (Tandy Radio Shack) computer that ran the TRS-DOS operating system. The other had a Compaq running VAL-DOS (I didn't find a wikipedia link for it, maybe I have it wrong?). This must have been about 1982. The university department bought 2 IBM-PC Junior machines for us to type papers on. You ran your program off one 5½" floppy and stored your data on another. Everyone used Word Perfect, except a few of us who used Word*Star. 64Kb memory running at 4.77Mhz.

About 1986 I bought my own PC, a put together by a local company. I remember it being pretty cool. I had 8Mhz processor and 128Kb memory. It cost nearly $2000, which was a lot of money.

I did an internship (what might be called a post-doc now) in a neighbouring province the next year, and got a phone modem. You dialed up the number and put the handset in the phone cradle. I could link via Netnorth (BITNET), at up to 300 baud. This meant I could get datafiles from my home university mainframe. I fooled around a lot on rec.arts.startrek, which was part of Usenet. In those days, we also had serious discussion, akin to what goes on, on the ship on alt.religion.christian.episcopal.

[Surplus // in Bitnet url tidied up.]

[ 04. December 2012, 05:01: Message edited by: Ariel ]

Posted by jbohn (# 8753) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
No, windows was not a Microsoft invention! (Nor Apple)

Not at all- Steve Jobs got the idea from a trip to Xerox PARC in the late '70s.

Xerox Alto

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