Typing in vic20 programs from the back of compute magazine.

[Twioz]

Does anyone else have fond memories of this? Or how about when you upgraded to that fancy commadore 64 but couldnt afford the way expensive 1571 floppy drive so you would type in one of those programs all night just to find out you screwed up one little character somewhere! Please post your ancient computer stories.

 

[Dale]

so you bought the tape drive, even though you couldnt afford it either


and while the 4k program that you have laboriously typed in the day
before loaded, you went to the nearest StopNRob to get cigs and beer
and when you got back it was still loading....

(or while you were gone your wife(who hates computers) stopped it and plugged a cartridge in so she could play while you were gone and wouldnt know she was using it)

...next

Dale

 

[nukefarmer]

heh, i got an MSX when i was 6 or so (16 years ago) ...
It had a enormous amount of memory (a whole 64 kb ) and cassette tapes for storage.
I also typed in those program listings from magazines, typing away the whole day and then try it to run it before saving (and ofcourse i made an error which made it reboot :Q)

 

[RaySun2Be]

Ok, for the oldtimer mainframers, did you ever type up a program on punch cards, then drop them before you could have it loaded? And didn't bother to use sequence numbers? :Q

Or how about the first "PC" you were exposed to was a circuit board from Radio Shack you connected to your TV, had 16K, and you had to program using binary? (1 & 0) :Q

 

[JonB]

When RUN magazine started putting the Commodore 64 program coding with a checksum at the end of each line, that was GREAT!

Tape Drive, not so great.

1541 Floppy drive, modified so it could be daisy-chained to get FOUR drives (eight, nine, ten and eleven). Loved it. The original USB/SCSI.

 

[Dale]

>>then drop them

he he ... all the time..

did you repunch 2 or 3 cards of your bosses job, carefully maintaining the sequence number and checksum

or repunch your 'buddies' payroll card(moving the decimal one place to the left in the rate field)

>>checksum at the end of each line
amen

1541 Floppy drive modified so it can copy 'protected' disks straight to drive 9 [without] the 64 being used??


Dale
n on n on n on...

 

[JWMiddleton]

Ah...memories

I had a TRS-80 w/16k and extended Basic which used the cass. player. I hated the cass., so I bought an Exatron Stringy-floppy. It had very small 16k tapes that were called wafers. You could actually have 8-char file names, instead of the 1-char allowed with the cass. My first HD was 5MB and cost $1,195. I partitioned it into 4 - 1.25MB partitions. One for Games, DB, etc. Those were the days...

 

[redwing]

Ancient stories ??? I still have got both my Vic20 and C64 running, and still use them (too bad ther's no rc5 client for them )

 

[JHutch]

Ah, the old C64 ...

An example of a great little machine that was KILLED by an inept marketing department... How else could the Apple II have sold more units? The C64 had FOUR sound voices. I had a game on the C64 with DIGITIZED speech! That game totally blew me away! (The rest of the game sucked, but hey ... DIGITIZED SPEECH!)

I also remember laboriously typing in SpeedScript 3.0 (a pretty good word processor) in machine language code, by hand, spending three days straight after school. Then going to my Grandfather's that weekend and he had the program on a floppy from his local user's group! AARRGGHH! (And yes, my grandpa was the hippest 70 year old I've ever met!)

Ah, memories...

JHutch

 

[mechBgon]

First "computer" I had was the tiny Sinclair ZX81, featuring built-in BASIC and 1k of RAM (woooo). Saved programs to a conventional tape recorder, when it felt like it. Still, I had fun with it!

 

[cory]

i had a couple of those zx81's. used to hook them up to things.
you can still buy kits to build a zx81.
i got a wopping 16k module for my zx81 and ran an external keyboard.

did the same thing to my apple 2+ and burnt a few chips on the motherboard. didnt tell my mother. instead got out the schematic
and traced the chips i had blown and replaced them.

i hated the audio tape backup. i did get a
floppy. i bought the apple when i was 16 with
money i made from consulting.

i used trash-80's and vic20 and the c64.
i even had a basic cart. for my atari 2600.

all the old stuff is long gone except
i still have my amiga 1000.

 

[MGallik]

I LOVED copying page after page of basic programs from Compute to C64's,
Vic20's and Apples and most always having to spend a day or two debugging
if not for my typing errors, for the misprints that where so common in
the magazine. Really, I liked pouring through the code and discovering
that I had to add a few lines here and there to get the program to run.

I also programmed 8 bit assembly for the 6502, 6510, and Z80's as well
as 8008, 8088, and 8086. With the early architectures evolving as fast
as they did. I found I no longer had the time to keep up and the move to
16 bit heralded the end of my programming days. Still down in my personal
history as one of the all time great mistakes of my life. I was in it while
Gates was still working on DOS...

 

[Dale]

did you laugh when your best friend said "that wardial program will get you in trouble, delete it now!"

JonB I always thought you were a young guy..

MGallik .. I know exactly what you mean.. when I first got a PC, I swore I would never make an effort to learn how it works, so far after almost 14 years I have kept that promise..(although I did peek at some of Carmacks FPU memory move stuff once, but just a little and I didnt understand it)

Dale

 

[Twioz]

Whats really funny is that I worked on those card punch readers in the early 90's while I was in the military. Along with tape drives and Removable media hard drives ( the 5 platter ones that were huge).

 

[JonB]

Dale, I think Ray and I probably bought canes the same year. My third C64 was still in the attic until about a month ago. It probably still worked, but I threw it away

In its place is an 8-port switch linking the four house computers together into their new ADSL powered surfin' machine. Life goes on and just gets better.

 

[Yo Ma Ma]

Ah yes, the c64...memories My early entry into the telephonic computing world, remember the c-net bbs's? And how you had to run VIP-term to get 80 columns? Gosh those zone calls really could add up

 

[Dale]

JonB ..he he my first C64 is right beside this keyboard
it hasnt been on in a 'few' years, a bunch of us used to turn them on during the christmas holidays as a 'memorial' tribute but I think '98 was the last time.. I have seen 64 web browsers, but never tried one.

I was thinking on the way home, about people reading this thread and thinking 'what are those idiots talking about' and I know they are right.. I am an idiot .. I was old enough to know better when I got my C64

now the same people are doing the same things with faster more expensive equipment (same people = same attitude )
only now they can get caught a lot easier and the punishment is a lot more severe

Dale
my 9 year old grandson still has the Plus64 I gave him when he was 2 and he lets his little sister use it sometimes..

 

[Ken g6]

My favorite old computer had to be the Commodore 128. Basically it was a C64 with twice the ram, and twice the Basic commands (though it could emulate a C64 perfectly, and that was its downfall.) I've never since found a way to do three (not, four) sound voices at once, or to make sprites that moved without any CPU intervention. My PII may finally be fast enough to emulate that kind of sprite in Visual Basic (but I doubt it!) I even dabbled in assembly language a little, and got the fastest (smoothly) moving sprites you've ever seen with it! Edit: Did I mention the dual-monitor capability?

Of course, not everything was fast about the C64/128. Drawing a 50x50 Mandelbrot set took 15 minutes at the "fast" 2MHz speed. Most of the programs on that machine either I wrote, or I got from old issues of a British magazine, Commodore Disk User (on disk, of course. ) But I do remember typing in part this planetarium program, probably the only program I ever manually entered, during President Clinton's inaguration (hey, I was 11 or so and I got bored.) It took like 8 minutes to plot a simple patch of sky. :Q

My parents still have the C128, BTW. I hear there are C64 emulators available for PCs, but everything I'd want to run now I wrote for the 128.

 

[Twioz]

The one that truely stunned me was when I got my Commadore Amiga 500. I dont think it ever crashed. Wish the hard drives werent so expensive back then (or was I just really poor?). I remember salivating over the Bodega bay expansion. That was a work of art.

 

[JonB]

You escaped a lot of this with the Amiga 500, but I remember having to change out the Agnes chips all too often. The co-processors weren't flashable, so you actually replaced the whole chip. Went from Agnes to Fat Agnes to Really Fat Agnes to Obese Agnes, etc. The Amiga had the wierdest names for everthing. Toasters and Sinks. Even the floppy drive names were odd.

But, you're right, it rarely crashed.

We had to "double-boot" one computer. It wouldn't pick up the SCSI bus hard drives on the first boot. The POST was too quick and the SCSI controller wasn't ready.

Memories.

 

[Dale]

it hasnt been that long ago, that I switched to the cable guide only to see
'Guru meditation ....'

did you pay more for your C64 C-compiler than you paid for the 64??

..Dale

 

[NT4Mike]

I need to go over to my mother's house and see if I can find my old C128. That thing was the greatest. I can remember typing in sample programs out of the back of the manual into that thing and being amazed while it drew circles

The best was playing Gunship by Microprose while turning up the Top Gun soundtrack on the turntable. I had the 1571 drive and we used to blow up one of those Gunship disks about every 2 months. They had some kind of "attempt" at copy protection that did more harm than good.

A while after we got our 128, they came out with the 128D??? I think it was the D. It was more like a PC style with the separate keyboard and a built in 1.44MB floppy. Gosh what would you need all that space on one floppy for?????

I also remember drooling in magazines over the Amiga 500.....man 1024 colors

-Mike

 

[Poof]

Add to all this the Trash-80 microcolor computer, complete with 4K RAM and chicklet keyboard. Yeah, I had my Radio Smack tape recorder hooked to it and Radio Smack tapes for good 'ole BASIC program recording... hee hee. Tough thing was trying to find your program on that tape if you accidently reset the counter... LOL



My Tandy 1000TL 286/8, 768K RAM is still working though... Wish it had a FPU. Then I could take a couple years to run a SETI WU and go for the record. It does have DOS... maybe some RC5 crackage might do... hee hee. I still have my old Tandy 1000 magazines too...

 

[Ken g6]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the color graphics on the C128. You could do 2 colors at 320x200 or 4 colors at 160x200 :Q. The really weird part, though, was the two or four colors could be different for every 8x8 pixel region.

Guess what computer my dad got next after the C128? A Tandy 1000 with an 8088 processor. And yes, we've still got it, too. He added a 10mb SCSI HD, a VGA card (as opposed to CGA onboard) and it was almost decent! (Until the HD crashed and the VGA card started burning out black and white monitors, but that's another story.)

 

[Possessed Freak]

i never 'owned' one of these old computers (except when I purchased an IBM 8088 at a chinese auction for $.25 4 years ago). I did however use an 8086 televideo, it was the original imac, one unit that held the 13 inch green monochrome monitor and dual 180k floppy drives (flip them to get 360k ). The first hard drive we had was an external mfm 20 meg drive, used to play such classic games as decathlon, frogger, and digger. Later I was into BBSing and set up our own (me and a friend) off of 2 20 meg seagate ST-225 mfm hard drives running in a 386 with 8 count them 8 megs of ram. At the same time of the glorious time of the televideo, we also had an apple 2... c I think. Used a TV for a monitor and played excellent games like Winnie the Pooh's blustery day, and the wishstone, and the best ever: math blaster.