Your first computer

House said:
ZX Spectrum and then the Commodore.

Remember back in the day if you wanted to play games, bought the magazine (which generally had 30+ pages of code for a single game in every edition), which took hours to type and then you could play. Once the system was shut down, you needed to type the code again to play again.... Learnt a lot about coding for games back in the day....
Click to expand...

Lol. Yes, I remember doing that.

All those peeks and pokes :)
 
House said:
ZX Spectrum and then the Commodore.

Remember back in the day if you wanted to play games, bought the magazine (which generally had 30+ pages of code for a single game in every edition), which took hours to type and then you could play. Once the system was shut down, you needed to type the code again to play again.... Learnt a lot about coding for games back in the day....
Click to expand...

Ah many a weekend coding on my zx, I would then stuff around to try and change the game a little... the I would save it on a cassette (writing down the counter numbers haha) only for my sister to record some music over it... hahaha

Many fond memories!
 
gregmcc said:
Lol. Yes, I remember doing that.

All those peeks and pokes :)
Click to expand...

herbertk said:
Ah many a weekend coding on my zx, I would then stuff around to try and change the game a little... the I would save it on a cassette (writing down the counter numbers haha) only for my sister to record some music over it... hahaha

Many fond memories!
Click to expand...

Lol, Yeah :)

.... and after 5-6 hours of typing the game would not run.... typing error somewhere in the code.... yes, and those cassettes.....
 
Electron1 said:
Then I bought a 286 clone with 20MB drive and I think it had 16MB RAM
Click to expand...
No, it would have had 640kB, it could go up to 1MB, but you had to have serious memory extenders to use it - more often than not, you'd use that extra 360kB as a RAM disk.
 
BigAl-sa said:
No, it would have had 640kB, it could go up to 1MB, but you had to have serious memory extenders to use it - more often than not, you'd use that extra 360kB as a RAM disk.
Click to expand...

Ah, the good only days of tweaking the autoexec.bat and config.sys (if I recall correctly) files. Every K counted.
 
BigAl-sa said:
No, it would have had 640kB, it could go up to 1MB, but you had to have serious memory extenders to use it - more often than not, you'd use that extra 360kB as a RAM disk.
Click to expand...

One of these bad boys: :D

m_44316_1.jpg
 
Back in the day, you could buy a book with programming in BASIC to write games to your Vic, how often we would spend hours on end typing code, only to have a power dip waste it all...


book_the_vic20_gamesbook_01.jpg
 
Kosmik said:
Fond? Tape Drives? Pain in the butt.
Click to expand...

Loved "speeding up" the tape drives by the slightest increments using a small screwdriver on the motor speed adjuster, so the Speccy could load the games a bit quicker.
Ended up with a finely tuned tape deck that could load the average game in 2 minutes instead of 2.5 minutes! :p
 
gregmcc said:
The craziest thing about the early PC's is the turbo switch. Who wants to run in slow mode??!
Click to expand...

Best of all was my ignorance as to the use of the Turbo switch. We thought it would wear out the hardware faster so only used it sparingly as we wanted our 20MB harddrive to last at least a decade :)

Never even filled it up in the 5 years I had that XT
 
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