Old computers from the 70s and 80s

We don't seem to have a thread about computers from that period. I was just reminded of it by this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/oct/24/how-one-engineer-beat-the-ban-on-home-computers-in-socialist-yugoslavia

So, 70s and 80s, early 90s at a pinch. No games consoles in this thread, please. :)

We've discussed some of this in the video games thread and elsewhere. You can emulate most of them nowadays, but of course anyone who handled them back then will also have memories of the hardware.

I had a TI 99/4A, which I shared with a friend, and he then got an Amstrad (Schneider in Germany) 6128. Needless to say, we also had friends with Commodore 64s.

What did you have?

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/156920/

last post 15 years ago

Amstrad (Schneider in Germany) 6128

Snap

We also had one of the early ‘lugable’ PCs that could just about do DTP and CAD. And Dangerous Dave, from the studio that ultimately produced Doom and Quake.

had a zx spectrum 48k at home, used mostly for playing games. plus dad used to bring home computers, from the school he taught at, during the holidays so had a bbc micro, early macintosh to mess about on as well. sadly never did anything useful with them just wasted endless hours on manic miner / elite / zalaga / defender etc. but it kept me away from the glue sniffers and heroin addicts in the local town so there is a small positive !

I had 386 and 486 PC's and remember windows 3.1, proper floppy disks and the normal floppy disks.

I'm 40 years old but my Dad worked in IT so we always had PC's and old school printers etc.

I remember my Dad teaching me coding in visual basic probably in Microsoft access when I was around 8 years old.

Game wise I remember playing commander keen, destruction derby, original GTA, Wolfenstein 3d all played on the PC all pirated probably.

I was so jealous of all my friends who had consoles!

Plug for this fella. He makes excellent YouTube videos.

https://youtube.com/@usagielectric

I had an Amstrad 464+ in the 80s, I only played games on it.
Came with a user manual and a printed code to type out to make your own games (breakout was the only one I finished, did not teach me to code, sadly)

Then in the early 90s I got a 286 PC, then I upgraded though 386 + 486

We had a Tandy TRS-80 😩

Did fuck-all on it. Bought a few crap games to load on the tape drive, I seem to recall one side-scrolling karate game that was okay, also had versions of Centipede and Whirlybird that were fun. Spent hours typing in programs out of magazines only to get syntax errors and whatever.

My bro got right into using the green-screen Apple IIe machines in the library, and amassed a collection of games on 5-1/2" floppies. I mucked around a bit with the BBC Micros at school, they were interesting. About five years after it would've been the best thing ever, my uncle gave us his Commodore 64. Had a fair bit of fun with that until loading up games on the tape drive became too unreliable.

Sorry, I'd forgotten about that one, and didn't find it when searching! If only we had a Mergatron ...

Spent hours typing in programs out of magazines only to get syntax errors and whatever.

My mate and I got rather good at typing in 20+ pages of machine code DATAs without errors. Checksums rule OK. :)

This was my favourite bit from the article I linked to above:

One person who really helped to boost the profile of the Galaksija in the early days was Zoran Modli. He hosted a show called Ventilator 202 on Radio Belgrade, and he was approached by the Racunari editor, Jova Regasek, with the idea of broadcasting programs for the Galaksija and other home computers, like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Programs could be loaded on to the Galaksija via an audio cassette tape, so the idea was that Modli could play the beeps and squawks of a program on his show, then listeners could tape the broadcast and load the transmitted program into their machine. It was essentially a kind of wireless downloading long before the advent of wifi, or even the internet as we know it.

last post 15 years ago

Last post a few seconds ago. :)

My dad had various strange old computers stowed away in the loft, a spectrum where the connection to a tape drive had broken so you could only boot it into basic, and a circuit board thing based around a 6502 chip with what looked like a calculator in the corner that you had to programme in hexadecimal. Apparently he spent a day with it once and got it to sum two single digit numbers and that was that.

The earliest machine I remember using was an Amstrad, can't remember the model name but it had two 5.5in floppy drives and no hard disk. There was a very early graphical OS that you could boot from a floppy (maybe the first version of Windows?) and we played various games that came with magazines like Jason Jr and Spongs. When I was 7 we got a 486 (the Pentium had just come out but had the floating point issue so Dad decided to stick with something proven), with Windows 3.1 and 8mb RAM and that was when my interest really started. Never really got into coding but became the authority on using it and wrote various boot discs allowing increased memory allocations for playing games like Desert Strike and Worms. With Win 95 coming along shortly after we bought it, the machine was obsolete pretty much immediately but we kept it until near the turn of the millenium.

The earliest machine I remember using was an Amstrad, can't remember the model name but it had two 5.5in floppy drives and no hard disk. There was a very early graphical OS that you could boot from a floppy (maybe the first version of Windows?) and we played various games that came with magazines like Jason Jr and Spongs.

PC1512 with GEM?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager

When I was 7 we got a 486 (the Pentium had just come out but had the floating point issue so Dad decided to stick with something proven), with Windows 3.1 and 8mb RAM and that was when my interest really started. Never really got into coding but became the authority on using it and wrote various boot discs allowing increased memory allocations for playing games like Desert Strike and Worms. With Win 95 coming along shortly after we bought it, the machine was obsolete pretty much immediately but we kept it until near the turn of the millenium.

I don't know about obsolete; sure, 16bit vs. 32bit, but Windows 95 was famously crap. I still prefer Windows 3.1 over it. Windows 3.1 also still has a life and can be run in various ways. I've forgotten what to look for, but people have made somewhat souped-up versions and Wine will run it, too.

It might well have been the PC1512, both the mouse and the look and feel of the OS are ringing some very distant bells...

Yes that's a good point on Windows 3.1 vs 95, "obsolete" was very much my game-obsessed child's view on it as 95 had DirectX and pretty quickly games migrated away from DOS to needing Win 95 or above. That said I took copies of the six Win 3.1 floppies on the last machine I had that came with a floppy drive and now have an installation running on DosBOX for when the urge to play Sim Tower or Dr Drago's Madcap Chase strikes...

I have a ZX81, two Spectrums (one 16k and one 48k) in the loft along with one of these:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_SLT

DosBOX

I kind of want whatever the highest spec machine is that still had those VESA drivers that Quake used for the weird resolutions with the horizontally-stretched pixels, on a big flat CRT cranking 120Hz.

It's not enough to just have the proper DOS music in Doom, I figure... Hm, I actually have a flat 21" CRT wrapped in cling film, up in the attic...

That sounds entirely reasonable to me… I’d hope there’s still enough of that era hardware out there that a tower unit could be picked up pretty cheap and they’ve not become collectors items yet