VIC 20

[Albereth]

The ZX Spectrum thread got me thinking.

I bought one of these at a show for about R350 which was pretty much a month's salary. That wasn't a worry at the time as the SADF was going to double my pay anyway. Salaries for students sure suxxored but if we did a camp we got to keep the extra loot. That changed later when we got paid the difference - but the difference on a private's pay. Woot for having done OTC. But that is a digression.

Anyhow. A friend had a Tandy Radio Shack and it had the coolest game - Santa Paravia. You were a feudal lord and made decisions about how much grain to grow, how much tax etc. And then rats ate everything. Well, I wanted that game.

I had him printout the Basic code and that's when I found out that Basic wasn't really Basic. I had to make a few changes and dealt with Peeks and Pokes to get some sort of rudimentary graphics and sounds going. I also needed the casette recording thing because that was the only way to keep the game. And I got it working.

A lot more successful than my attempt to computerise Squad Leader using Fortran

[ponder]

I have fonder memories of the C64, was a great machine followed by the Amiga. The rest and everything up to today is just bleh.

[Albereth]

I have fonder memories of the C64, was a great machine followed by the Amiga. The rest and everything up to today is just bleh.

That was big brother - to the VIC that is.

Shortly after the VIC 20 came out IBM brought out its first PCs with dual floppies. I eventually got one of them (many years later) and installed a massive hard drive (10 MB).

The PC to have at the time was the Olivetti - I think the IBM had the 8086 chip and the Olivetti the 8088. Anyway, spent far too many hours wiping out keyboards playing Pentathlon.

[Sinbad]

That was big brother - to the VIC that is.

Shortly after the VIC 20 came out IBM brought out its first PCs with dual floppies. I eventually got one of them (many years later) and installed a massive hard drive (10 MB).

The PC to have at the time was the Olivetti - I think the IBM had the 8086 chip and the Olivetti the 8088. Anyway, spent far too many hours wiping out keyboards playing Pentathlon.

omf lol

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I had a vic20... really envied my buds with C64s... My dad had an Olivetti M21 for work that he used to bring home... a portable computer... weighed about 20kg!
Internal 20MB hard drive, built in screen...

[unskinnybob]

I went spectrum 16k -> commodore 64. Skipped Amiga and went IBM 8086.

Dubbed many a game cassette.

[ponder]

The PC to have at the time was the Olivetti - I think the IBM had the 8086 chip and the Olivetti the 8088. Anyway, spent far too many hours wiping out keyboards playing Pentathlon.

Was actually the other way round. The 8088 had a 8-bit data bus while the 8086 had a 16-bit multiplexed data bus. The 8086 was the better chip and the 8088 design was based on it but stripped down in some respects.

[TirNaNog]

That was big brother - to the VIC that is.

Shortly after the VIC 20 came out IBM brought out its first PCs with dual floppies. I eventually got one of them (many years later) and installed a massive hard drive (10 MB).

The PC to have at the time was the Olivetti - I think the IBM had the 8086 chip and the Olivetti the 8088. Anyway, spent far too many hours wiping out keyboards playing Pentathlon.

The Vic20 wasn't a bad machine hardware wise - if only they'd given the speccy 64k and stuck it in the Vic20's shell, that would have been a serious machine.
LOL @ keyboards and pentathlon! The Speccy keyboard destroyer was Daly Thompson's Decathlon. Those membranes were not designed for that kind of beating!

[TirNaNog]

omf lol

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I had a vic20... really envied my buds with C64s... My dad had an Olivetti M21 for work that he used to bring home... a portable computer... weighed about 20kg!
Internal 20MB hard drive, built in screen...

Reminds me of the IBM 'Luggable'