by hippikon 23 Replies latest social humour
I'm with Farkel on this one.
My first computer was a TRS-80 model one with 16k and a cassette drive. My standard test for ancient geek knowledge is if you know what the "Kansas City Standard" was.
My first commercial gig was on the Commodore 64. So proud to have a computer with a floppy.
Then my first IBM with a hard drive for cross compiling, I couldn't imagine ever filling that massive 20 meg drive.
I still have a stash of the IBM keypunch cards that I used in college and high school. They make excellent bookmarks now.
Tammy
Hey, a fellow TRaSh 80 user !! I had one of those (my first PC)
I found a site about it a while ago which had the history of it ('cause it was a real 'surprise success' for Tandy) and where it fit in the PC timeline / family tree.
Also, you can get an emulator for it !
I learnt so much on that PC ... even Zilog Z80 machine code.
I learned Z80 on my TRS-80 Model 1 too! It was the only way you could speed up BASIC to a point where it was faster than a snail's pace!
Tammy
Yep, z-80 was my first assembly too!!
Did you ever use the fm radio trick for debugging? The old trash80's broadcast like a SOB, and if you tuned off a signal on an FM radio, you could tell where the program was at, particuarly if it was stuck in a loop.
Served me well when I jumped over to doing 8 bit nintendo.
Ahh, those were the days, why when I was first programming, we had to code uphill, both ways. And we were lucky to be able to lick gravel off the road for pay.
Tell that to kids these days, they won't believe you.
omg my last job I worked off a 'wang' compture, no hard drive, no anything it's just a big rolodex with a bad green and black screen. the company didn't even have a website and the company email was @aol.com. This was a 30+ yr old international company and they were soo electronically challenged.
I think it's a bad sign when your working on a computer that is older then you are!!!!!
Ven
I didn't do the radio thing (damn, never knew that!) but I rmember you could make it output signals to the tape device and by varying the frequency, change the tone etc... to make it play tunes (I don't think it had any inbuilt sound) but you had to record it to a tape and then play it back!
You must have had ... Scramble - that was *the* game (can't remember the name of the guy who wrote it) and there were a few other quite good games ("Attack Force" I think was another)
I remember lusting after the Color Genie model ...
Ahh, classic trash games
star trek: The real reason I spent all that time landscaping for a summer to afford this sucker. One of the guys in my high school physics class had this, and I had to have it. Little asterisk photon torpedoes, and a ship made out of =_0 battle of midway: whole lot of fun. Temple of Ashphi?: Not sure if this was the name, the brain cell that remembered this bravely sacrificed itself to an alcohol molecule. However, it was basically a graphic dungeon crawl Various adventures. I think I first played the infocomm adventure games on this machine, but a text adventure on any computer tends to blur together. After I got my first real job out of school I immediately bought a Atari 800, just for "Star Raiders".
Gollum wrote:
I think I first played the infocomm adventure games on this machine
Me too. Originally Zork was written on a huge mainframe in the late 60's. Now I have Zork on my Palm Pilot!
Tammy
Yessirree,
I remember way back when, when floppies were 8 inches, at my first computer graphics job we had large storage bins to file away the floppies. I was one of the first fools to accidently delete about 50 files on one disk. I thought I would die right there. My manager made me sit and recreate everyone of them. I also worked on $500,000 - 1 million dollar mainframe computers which prices depreciated to only worth around $10,000 within a five year period. Needless to say the company went bankrupt in 1992.
