1980's computers

eureka! i thought archimedes was dead but he obviously found the secret to eternal life....

10 INPUT A$
20 IF A$ = "Which is better? Bianchi Pista or On One Langster?" GOTO 30
25 IF A$ = "My knees hurt when I skid" GOTO 40
30 PRINT "UTFS"
40 PRINT "HTFU"

I've still got an Atari 1040 STe.

archimedes weren't they rather high end slash expensive

i was amazed at how many duifferent home pc's there were back then

loads of different companies were making their own version

my brain had kind of deleted the names of all other bar spectrum / amstrad and bbc micro but one clip on the programme where he was flicking through old computer mags showed just how many there were out there

brilliant

Archimedes was the one with the RISC based architecture, clever stuff at the time I believe.

Sadly not many games though- Zarch was probably the most playable.

Yup, the Archimedes was the successor to the BBC Micro, made by Acorn Computers.

The successor to that was the RISC PC, which was incredibly awesome. You could plug other processors into it, so that it could basically have a PC inside it, running Windows, in a Window. A bit like virtual machines now, but in hardware.

I had a summer job testing it out for Acorn. It involved having to trial a whole load of software, including the game Doom, as a test of the Graphics capability. Happy days.

did anyone else think the screens that came with the bbc micro looked rather sexy

i dunno but they just looked different to most tv screens / computer screens

they also had a lovely colour to them all 256 colours that is

cyan where else in the world would you get cyan ?

The Microvitec Cub. just one of the useless bits of information that occupies the bits of my brain that might be otherwise used for being clever

I had an Amstrad CPC464. It ruled.
And a ZX81 before that.

I have a 1984 Mac 512k too. The manual has to explain the whole concept behind scroll bars. And suggests it's fine to use your mac as a nightlight. Cue thousands of burned in menu bars.

has anyone been watching 'electric dreams' on BBC4

loads of the above on there

has anyone been watching 'electric dreams' on BBC4

loads of the above on there

is that why the thread started?

ZX-81 first, then one of these (not mentioned in the thread yet), because I think it was cheaper than a Spectrum or something:

no it was about the 'Micro Men' programme on BBC4 about Acorn vs Sinclair.
Just finished watching it on iplayer - v entertaining.
made sinclair look like a complete loon though.
going to catch up with electric dreams tomorrow

ZX-81 first, then one of these (not mentioned in the thread yet), because I think it was cheaper than a Spectrum or something:

The TI 99/4A is my favourite computer of all time.

I wish I still had the tapes with all the stuff we programmed. No idea if my mate still has them. Or the old listings magazines, e.g. TI Revue.

The reason why TI weren't successful was simple--they didn't allow third parties to make software for the TI 99/4A. Commodore did.

10 INPUT A$
20 IF A$ = "Which is better? Bianchi Pista or On One Langster?" GOTO 50
30 IF A$ = "My knees hurt when I skid" GOTO 70
40 GOTO 10
50 PRINT "UTFS"
60 END
70 PRINT "HTFU"

Fixed. :)

^^^^^^
No, Mongrel's original was correct. Question 2 gives the response;

HTFU

Any other question gets the response;

UTFS
HTFU

That's as close to artificial intelligence as this forum needs. Shall we ask Velocio to add it?

I had an ORIC 1, a 6502 based attempt at a Spectrum killer

ZX-81 first, then one of these (not mentioned in the thread yet), because I think it was cheaper than a Spectrum or something:

TI99/4A wasn't cheaper than the spectrum, it was about £400.
You could buy programs for it (games & accounting software) on plug in ROM catridges. They used to sell them in Argos, I remember looking longingly at the pictures of the TI99/4A in the catalog, before turning to the shower curtains page..

10 INPUT A$; IF A$ = "Which is better? Bianchi Pista or On One Langster?" THEN PRINT "UTFS" ELSE PRINT "HTFU"

one line of code, losers!

I had a TI84(?) scientific calculator in yr11, yr12. It probably had more processing power than that thing up there ^^ :)

I think my watch/phone/speedo has more computing power than some of the old machines mentioned.

Progress ftw

Just remembered my brother and I had a computer called the LAZER (or maybe LASER), it was an American product I think.

We used to have to write the program from scratch each time we wanted to play a game as the tape thing did not work.

My favourite was a game where you flew a "Y" down a canyon made of "X".

I once programed the same game into the Archimedes and it went so fast that is was completely impossible to play- really showed you what increased processing power meant.

I had a Dragon 32 and my biggest bugbear was you couldn't mix text with "hi-res" graphics.
I then bought a BBC model B 32k with 128k sideways RAM and a solidisk Double Density (320k)floppy drive.

Got a Compaq Portable III in the States which I refuse to throw away because it still works.

Some old PC ads can be found here: http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/old-computer-ads.html

I had a TI84(?) scientific calculator in yr11, yr12. It probably had more processing power than that thing up there ^^ :)

I think my watch/phone/speedo has more computing power than some of the old machines mentioned.

Progress ftw

NASA got Apollo 8 to the moon and back with 32K of RAM. Tight, efficient coding FTW.

Got a Compaq Portable III in the States which I refuse to throw away because it still works.

Some old PC ads can be found here: http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/old-computer-ads.html

dmczone = pure style.

TI99/4A wasn't cheaper than the spectrum, it was about £400.
You could buy programs for it (games & accounting software) on plug in ROM catridges. They used to sell them in Argos, I remember looking longingly at the pictures of the TI99/4A in the catalog, before turning to the shower curtains page..

The cartridges were basically a dead end in evolution, unfortunately. They were way too expensive, there were too few of them, they were inflexible, and they often broke (either the cartridges themselves, or the cartridge slot). It was a shame, really. The TI later acquired a disk drive (we never had one and always used cassettes), but by then its time was gone.

10 INPUT A$; IF A$ = "Which is better? Bianchi Pista or On One Langster?" THEN PRINT "UTFS" ELSE PRINT "HTFU"

one line of code, losers!

That would have produced a SYNTAX ERROR in my BASIC dialect. A lot of them could only take one command per line and the separators varied. It could be ':', '::', or others. I don't think I ever saw a semicolon as a command separator, but I'm sure that there is such a dialect somewhere. Did you base this on an old computer you used?