jinnantonnixx Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 (edited) You're a b*****d. There goes an hour and half of my life, and no doubt more to come! Happy to oblige. Though time spent on a Spectrum is never wasted. Chuckie Egg is empirical evidence of this. Edited March 13, 2012 by jinnantonnixx
PiqueABoo Posted March 13, 2012 Posted March 13, 2012 (edited) Anyone remember free dial-up Internet from NTL? Yeah. Free for life wasn't it? Until it was suddenly a tenner or something.. that life didn't even last as long as NTLs. -- I used to dial the work BBS (free NTL->NTL evening call) which I'd configured so I could flip it into SLIP gateway mode and then get out to the net via the 64Kb leased line. Was the days of Gopher, Cello, or reading Usenet (a *full* usenet feed from Pipex fit down that 64Kb line for a while, then MP3 happened) etc. Remember going to Cern with a web browser once, because there just weren't that many places to go that weren't RFCs or some student mug-shot plus text about their course + hobbies. Arcade: Ready Player 1; have small scars on the third knuckle of the middle finger of my Joystick hand (mostly Defender's fault); folk allegedly being able to jam fingers in the coin reject hole/slot and flick a penny up it so it would fall down the other 'valid 10 pence' way and give you a credit; hours of playing then lots of suiciding in Asteroids to get the max score before it wrapped round to zero; Tempest sucking me in and scrambling my brain; BattleZone always beating me in no time at all. Spectrum: Manic Miner, Jet Set.., Knight Lore, Underwurlde for which I very prettily drew a big complete map (still have it) for some mag competition I didn't win; hacking the silly s/w protection double speed loader thingies without the aid of gadgets so I could make a normal tape that would load more reliably as opposed to pirate it; Forth; Z80 assembly and fun with those alternate registers. Lemmings is installed on my home PC now and is one of Sprogette's favourites (gets my vote given it's brain engaging 'puzzly' nature). Edited March 13, 2012 by PiqueABoo
SpuffMonkey Posted March 14, 2012 Posted March 14, 2012 Joining the programming club at school and having to fill in circles on cards with a 2B pencil to represent each byte and then cycling down the local "tech" to have them run and pick up the results the following week - and usually finding you'd made a mistake on a card and the whole job failed - arggghh Also - pre mobile days when I used to have to carry a pager and when it went off, hunting for a non vandalised BT phone booth to call the office secretary to find out what the problem was.
sjatkn Posted March 14, 2012 Posted March 14, 2012 I used to have a ZX81 and then a ZX Spectrum at home. These set me on my way to the career I now have. In my first job in a Undergraduate Physics department we used BBC Model B & Archimedes for teaching programming, control and data logging. It was so easy to get them to do all those things. We then started to move to PC's, initially we had a serial link to a Gandalf packet switch. Eventually they installed a 10BASE5 and 10BASE2 Ethernet network. That gave me access to Gopher predating, then I discovered Mosaic and all that the web could bring.
sidewinder Posted March 14, 2012 Posted March 14, 2012 I had an unusual IT upbringing...born too late for the home computer craze, yet around 1990 when everyone else was getting a NES, my parents decided to give me their old BBC Model B instead. Annoying at the time, but at least I got to understand things a bit more, and learn a bit of basic, even if it was after everyone else! Acorns at school but never knew much about them, wish I had understood more at the time because they were great machines. At home I had a 486 until about 1998 then an original Pentium 100Mhz until about 2001 when I finally had enough money to buy myself a modern PC! But those old computers were the ones that got me interested in hardware, taking them apart, praying they still worked so I didnt get into trouble with my dad, upgrading bits and being amazed that you could make them go faster!
Earthling Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 Becoming "Elite". You have to be old enough to understand... I made it as far as 'Dangerous' before something else took over, can't remember what it was now.
Dos_Box Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 I made it as far as 'Dangerous' before something else took over, can't remember what it was now. Girls? 1
Earthling Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 Anyone remember free dial-up Internet from NTL? Yep, saved me a fortune, but I couldn't play Air Attack anymore....so I changed to Delta Force Land Warrior.
Davit2005 Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 I used to have a ZX81 and then a ZX Spectrum at home. These set me on my way to the career I now have. In my first job in a Undergraduate Physics department we used BBC Model B & Archimedes for teaching programming, control and data logging. It was so easy to get them to do all those things. We then started to move to PC's, initially we had a serial link to a Gandalf packet switch. Eventually they installed a 10BASE5 and 10BASE2 Ethernet network. That gave me access to Gopher predating, then I discovered Mosaic and all that the web could bring. Commodore VIC20 > Commodore 64 > Amiga > 1st PC (33MHz SX486) At school had BBC Micro's then extra year with ZX Spectrums with Speech synthesizers (allways a competition in the class room to get the most convincing swear words from th speech boxes, boys will be boys).
Flatpackhamster Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 Since this is the old gits thread, I expect that someone here might be able to help me work out what computer my school had. This was in the early 1990s. One room had RM Nimboids, the other had a computer that I can't identify. The keyboard was built in to the computer, BBC B style. It was a black solid metal case with black typewriter keys. I remember thinking what a bag-o-shite it was even then because it could do almost nothing. I've not got much more to go on than that at the moment. Any suggestions what it might have been?
Flatpackhamster Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 Just had a quick browse on the intertubes, and this looks vaguely familiar, except it wasn't this: Commodore Educator 64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It had the same style keyboard and case, including that ridge and the peculiar grey function keys down the right hand side. The screen was not built-in.
Earthling Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 Girls? God, no, I was married, in my 30's and a dad by then. I can't believe no one's mentioned 'All your base are belong to us' yet.
shenley Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 Girls? There was an operating system GIRLS (Generalized Information Retrieval Language System). I worked for 9 years on it's successor, the Pick operating system. Now there WAS an operating system. We used to run 48 users on a McDonald Douglas Sequal machine, 128K memory. Ah happy days! There was a 7" single released of the Pick song too, which if I can find, I'll link here. I know Ed Doolan has played it on Brum radio.
Garacesh Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 I can't believe no one's mentioned 'All your base are belong to us' yet. Take off every 'Zig'!
jinnantonnixx Posted March 15, 2012 Posted March 15, 2012 (edited) Since this is the old gits thread, I expect that someone here might be able to help me work out what computer my school had. This was in the early 1990s. One room had RM Nimboids, the other had a computer that I can't identify. The keyboard was built in to the computer, BBC B style. It was a black solid metal case with black typewriter keys. I remember thinking what a bag-o-shite it was even then because it could do almost nothing. I've not got much more to go on than that at the moment. Any suggestions what it might have been? Hmm Texas TI 99 4/a? Texas Instruments TI-99/4A - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Memotech MTX? Memotech MTX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Perhaps one of the MSX range? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX Edited March 15, 2012 by jinnantonnixx
Flatpackhamster Posted March 16, 2012 Posted March 16, 2012 Hmm Texas TI 99 4/a? Texas Instruments TI-99/4A - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Memotech MTX? Memotech MTX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Perhaps one of the MSX range? MSX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nice try, but it's none of those. The case definitely looks more like this: Commodore Educator 64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The case was black metal, the key styles and locations, including the four grey function keys, were the same, but it had a separate colour screen.
Oaktech Posted March 16, 2012 Posted March 16, 2012 My ex boss still uses one of the yamaha msx cx5m music computers in his home studio, for times when only the finest 8bit plink plonky synth will do!
sted Posted March 16, 2012 Posted March 16, 2012 My ex boss still uses one of the yamaha msx cx5m music computers in his home studio, for times when only the finest 8bit plink plonky synth will do! actually some old 8 bit music still works turrican 2's soundtrack still sounds good now
Oaktech Posted March 16, 2012 Posted March 16, 2012 never said it was a bad thing! I still hear things that i can recognise as being played on a Casio VL Tone, in the right hands anything can sound good!
paulellam Posted March 28, 2012 Posted March 28, 2012 Writing a .bat file in college, so the annoying lads pc next to me would shutdown whenever he hit a certain key!! Was hilarious at the time, even the techie couldnt figure out why, they presumed it was a mobo problem!!
cpjitservices Posted March 28, 2012 Posted March 28, 2012 I remember working in my old school, We had Windows NT Servers - When I started it just so happened that one of the servers went down and the network manager handed me 15 floppy disks and his words where "Crack on with that", I also remember getting to disk 8 or something and the server quite happily said "NO"! So I had to start all over again!!!!! That took me all day to get up & running again, that was an old RM BaseAX Server running NT 4, the server was a BDC so it wasn't critical or anything Then about 6 weeks later we upgraded to Windows 2000 Server...... More joyous events!
Pete10141748 Posted March 28, 2012 Posted March 28, 2012 Ahhh, sweet ICT-based nostalgia! Furthest back I can rememeber was being about 3 years old when my parents bought me a Spectrum ZX+. Playing games off of tapes which took longer to load than I'd spend playing, watching the graphics brought in line-by-line. 8-inch floppy disks being used while I was at primary school to load simple games onto the 1 Acorn machine that we had per year group! Being given a 3.5" floppy disk to save all my ICT work to during my GCSE years! Work-related, when I started here 5 years ago there were only 2 servers; one for the upper school (y3 to Y6) and one for lower (foundation stage to Y2). Both were nothing more than DNS's allowing the lookup zones to allow the proxy settings to work; every piece of IT kit was on a static IP address, there were two stand-alone PC's in the staffroom that everyone had to use to print to the 1 printer the school had. Clearing out the ICT suite cupboards on my first day and finding a couple of old dot-matrix printers, some "Control" devices that were never unboxed, 30-odd Windows XP Home edition disks and 20-odd wireless cards that were never installed (or needed).
Sirbendy Posted March 28, 2012 Posted March 28, 2012 Laserdisc Players and the Domesday Project..'86ish? Memory of being ushered in to see this tech marvel, watching teachers handle these space-age looking disks with cotton gloves, lots of nerves and "now, how did this work again?", and the highest level of care I think I've ever seen of any equipment...which, given it's then cost, I can now understand..heh. I remember thinking at age 9, "that'll never catch on...". Oh look, it didn't. Mind you, we had a BetaMax toploader at home that you had to weigh down with tapes to use, as it was in a state of continual eject. BetaMax/VHS wars..haha! SP/LP recording duration extension on VHS machines...again, magic at the time..PLUScodes for setting recordings..oh dear, oh dear me...
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