1980's computers

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

Exactly. DIE FATWARE!

Exactly. DIE FATWARE!

Fattist.

how does one go about inventing a programming language
boggles the mind it really does

It's not as hard as you might think. You have define your I/O statements to read and write from the keyboard/disk/screen/etc. You then define your manipulation statements (arithmetic & boolean), then your branching statements (If, case), then your looping/jumping (for/next, goto) and finally some kind of procedure/function structure.

Once you've done this, you work out which machine instructions map to your defined statements. It's also worth having a memory handling strategy otherwise it gets messy.

Next you write your compiler which will turn your statements into machine instructions. You'll need to compile your compiler by hand, but this is a useful check that you haven't forgotten anything. Once you've done that you use your hand compiled compiler, to recompile your compiler. This is a final sense check that everything is covered.

If anyone is interested in programming in WILLANG I have a compiler listing and hand compilation in the loft somewhere. The executables were lost in the great "wife-puts-disks-in-damp-basement-disaster" in the 1990's. WILLANG only has 20 instructions, the memory handling is awful and there is no optimization.

Exactly. DIE FATWARE!

Indeed. I'm minded to raise a defect with Oracle along the lines of; I would like to open a socket on a server and send a 30 byte SQL string to it, and receive a 30 byte response. The Oracle install is saying that I need 500Mbytes of libraries to do this, when I reckon that this can only be 100 lines of code.

NASA got Apollo 8 to the moon and back with 32K of RAM. Massive, i mean fucking massive budgets FTW.

Impressive, I know.

^^^^^^
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?

One does wonder at times whether this forum would pass the Turing test.

And Willski you're right - my programming is even more elegant than i meant it to be!

And Willski you're right - my programming is even more elegant than i meant it to be!

See, I knew you didn't mean to get those results. :)

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..

There's no way my dad spent £400 on a computer back then. I think it may have been bought on the verge of obsolescence, on some kind of reduced to clear deal.

I found something saying they were only $150 in the US by 1983, and we didn't get ours till then at least.

We got ours secondhand (more like fourthhand), and it was definitely a lot cheaper than all the alternatives.

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?

You're right. It should have been a colon.
Locomotive Basic 1.0

My First Memories of a Computer was a Tatung Einstein which my grandfather owned. He bought it because he wished to learn howto use the computers that were being used in the factory for automating manufacturing processes.

Which I remember having it own version of Basic, CP/M or Xtal OS and BBC Basic. It had some office stuff such as a word processor etc. Everything was on 3.5inch floppy discs which were double sided.

Microcomputers back then were absolutely awesome. Loved them ... would love to have an atari ST or Amiga as I missed out on those. Ideally though I would love to have an IRIX worstation but those aren't really OT.

more to the point, when will be able to sell my nes (with zapper in box) and retire early. these things need to go up in value.

heh, Elite rocked. I may have to go and find an emulator and an image.

Matt, I have an emulator on my PC with Elite-The New Kind, The Great Escape and Football Manager if you want the exe files etc.

As for me, I started off with a ZX80 but with a 16K RAM pack. Oooh, get me. Then moved onto a Commode VIC20 (God knows why, I sold it for a fiver), then a Speccy 48K (the later version with a heat sink on the side), then went all upmarket and got a Speccy 128 +3 with built in disc drive.

After that I discovered the pub near the church in my village didn't mind selling lager to 15 year olds, as long as they say in the corner and didn't say anything. From this point onwards my life was mapped out for me.

Classic post Sam, I too feel that the discovery of alcohol ruined my life plan of being an olympic athlete. Oh well.

Don't worry about the emulator - I've got a feeling that I wouldn't really spend much time playing them so would rather not waste anyone else's time. I'm sure I can hunt them down on my own!

Early code-writin', Horace goes skiing playing ZX Spectrum user here too. Upgraded to the Plus2 with built in cassette player later. I wrote my dissertation (in 1999!) on one of these:

By the the time i'd finished I was convinced I was going blind and was frantically buying reading glasses from boots just to finish the essay.

Turns out it was a chronic case of "crappy blurry sceen" and my eyes were fine.

I had a Mac Classic for a while. It was a very nice, neat thing, but could have done with greyscale. I still have a Mac Plus too. I had a Powerbook 180 (16 greys and an active matrix LCD) which I absolutely loved and used all through university. Then I got a IIci, which was great but very retro by then, and then a Powermac 6400. That was a slow, bloated heap of shit. The only macs I have nowadays are my Plus, the 512k and an old Dell with OSX on it
I had a couple of the modern ones at work for a while, but they just don't hold the same appeal now. At the time the Powerbook 180, running System 7.1, was streets ahead of any available PC in every way. Modern Macs are just PCs with a slightly different OS.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=282

Oh how I lusted after those colour-screened wonder machines that the other kids had..

I remember my computing teacher demonstrating the internet (in the mid/late 80s) with a BBC master

and a modem that looked like an early push button phone with the receiver removed.
He dialled the number, various whooshy sounds (from him) and then, of course, it didn't work..
Much like Vista today....

My high school in Florida had the Apple IIE, and I learnt BASIC (a version of) on that.

When we finally got some computers in school (around 1989 - two years after they stopped making them) we got these

I remember happily reprogramming the worms program via quickbasic on dos 5.5. I couldnt do GCSE computers studies because the teacher had a nervous breakdown and left, so I had to content myself with helping the business studies teacher run the computer club after school on Tuesdays. Happy days.

My first PC was a hand me down from my dad's work

loved it, I had GEM working on it (precursor of windows) and spent a lot of time mucking around with cover disks from PC Plus magazine.
By the time I left school and went to do my BTEC in computer studies, my dad decided to buy me my own computer - I was pretty excited. It was 1990-91 I specced it out myself.
It was made by a company called Multiplex - sort of like a precursor of dell.
15 inch SVGA screen
4Mb Ram
110Mb HD
486SX Processor 20Mhz
Twin 3.5 and 5.25 drives (so I could use my media from the Amstrad)
Epson Colour dot matrix printer - fuck it was loud
It cost £1800, I remember my dad taking me to pick it up from Multiplex in Battersea and him counting it out in 20's in front of the young salesman. I'd never seen that much money in my life. I don't think he had either.
I think I sold it for about 40 quid 6 years later.

I had Spectrum +2 (128k with the tape drive). It came bundled with a light gun and Bullseye game (based on the gameshow). Dizzy and Operation Wolf were likely my favourites on that thing.

Then came the Atari 520 STe which was upgraded to 1Mb RAM!!! Panzer Kickboxer was class. With the added 512Mb the guy went down when you battered him! Awesome.

I think the OS that ran on the Atari ST systems had a classic name:

Haha! TOS.

Bumpety bump. I accidentally started a closely similar thread again.

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/17561625/