Old computers did it better

[Snowhog]

IIRC, my Leading Edge PC had an 8-Mhz CPU! And I had a 9-pin dot-matix printer and a 300-baud phone-craddle modem. And I did some programming in Basic.

[life0riley]

My first computer was an IBM Compatible 486. It had a turbo button for 66 MHz.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah yeah, another lets-drag-up-old-computers thread... I am SO glad I'm not punching cards for that IBM 360 anymore.

I have my memories - Timex Sinclar, Apple ][+, Apple ][c, IBM 8088, 286, 386, blah blah. They all were awesome in their time but they all did NOTHING better than what we are using today and it's ridiculous (troll droppings) to state otherwise. My phone is 10⁹ more powerful than all those old boxes combined.

I'm agreeing with GG, just in a more sour, sort-of-cranky way. Sorry, just my opinion.

[Qqmike]

Yeah, sometimes--not always, though--memories are a better experience than the original experience. And sometimes, it can be fun to "play" "the old days." Imagine the old dial phones, cool, huh? Yeah, nostalgic. But I sure love the capabilities of my cordless with two-handsets phone, and all it can do ... what it can do to keep me connected to all the people I need to connect to by phone, along with call waiting caller ID. Ditto for the cell unit. And computers ... with the modern fast ones, sure is nice to multi-task, doing work along with some household upkeep (family photos, budget, etc.) along with some fun things, all at the same time. And so on. Like that.

[woodsmoke]

Nickstone
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

My first computer was a Christmas present from my first wife, and also the kids! , of a Timex Sinclair, whereupon my eldest son and I produced our first programs! Oh.....where that lead us!

My next computer was a C-64 which became full bore finally, hard drive, external ram pack and the GEOS operating system! From it my boy became one of the top programmers in the U.S. today, and...

I published my first book, a family history, which I did with a "Star-Gemini" printer and with it's "near letter quality" fonts took the printed book, WITH GUTTERS properly inset to a printer and he was amazed that I knew about "gutters"...lol

My second book was ..................Laster printed from a floppy by a company in Chi-town..

And my third was DIRECTLY printed to a..........can't remember the brand, laser printer that the supt. of schools owned...

We all talk about "what" a computer is "supposed to do"....well, wordprocess, spreadsheet database...

i ran a successful business, integrated mailing lists, income tax you name it from the old C-64....

My other kids> Second son "got a feel" for programming but not huge and is now an astronomer....the old B.A.S.I.C.

And my daughter................believe it or not................. I was doing ANOVA in a self-made Basic program with.............."read and data statements"...lol............and she got a "sense" of them.....

and working in a factory later....she was doing "simple" ANOVA in her head! as parts rolled off an assembly line...........

A marvelous machine! lol

I detest it that Compute! magazine decided to KILL it in one month because the mag was bought by .............some ............"corporation".........

now yes...........it was "closed architecture"............but their CPM machine and the Amiga were portents of things to come....

BTW..............Commodore International in Canada........made the original "disk drives" for IBM as a sub contractor...............but............snicker, snicker.............theirs were "single write".............the C-64 drives were "double write"...

Ahhh yes..........thanks for the trip down memory lane!

woodgratefulsmoke

[elijathegold]

Yeah yeah, another lets-drag-up-old-computers thread... I am SO glad I'm not punching cards for that IBM 360 anymore.

I have my memories - Timex Sinclar, Apple ][+, Apple ][c, IBM 8088, 286, 386, blah blah. They all were awesome in their time but they all did NOTHING better than what we are using today and it's ridiculous (troll droppings) to state otherwise. My phone is 10⁹ more powerful than all those old boxes combined.

I'm agreeing with GG, just in a more sour, sort-of-cranky way. Sorry, just my opinion.

I genuinely had much more fun on my VIC20 and my second computer, an Atari ST, latterly STe after the "mug of tea" incident. If I am honest with myself, I would admit to enjoying the St(e) more if the VIC20 wasn't my first love.

TLR I loved my Atari ST(e) and have set myself off.

The Atari had my two favourite programming languages; Hisoft BASIC (link) and HiSoft Devpac ST (link) which was an assembler. The BASIC compiler to this day was one of the most powerful languages I have used on any platform. It produced incredibly well optimised machine code but couldn't beat hand coding in assembly for the routines that needed really intense optimisation. The BASIC had a linker or you you could load and directly call the assembled code from with BASIC. Awesome stuff.

It had the best, at the time, wysiwyg word processor called Papyrus (link). This was again from HiSoft, you may be picking up a pattern here but they produced bloody good software. Annoyingly, Papyrus did struggle with bullets! There was DTP, CAD, spreadsheets, business tools for many types of business, contact management, payroll, graphics, ray-tracing and music tools along with Internet browsers and email. If you remember CIX, it even had Ameol! You couldn't watch TOTP at the time without seeing a few Ataris doing their thing with midi sequencing for the bands playing, often running visualisations too. I'll skip over any controversy about what else might or might not have been going on at TOTP!

If you installed a replacement for the AES called Mag!x (link) you had full pre-emptive multi-tasking, I thought this was released earlier than 1992 but apparently not. You could install and use different desktop environments if the default one didn't suit you. All on a computer that had 1MB of RAM and 8Mhz processor although to brag a bit, I had upgraded mine to the full 4MB, a 28Mhz 68020 processor and 250MB SCSI hard disk!

Now to mention the games. Some of these were ground breaking. For example Star Glider II (link) which came on two floppies, gave you a full solar system to explore, fight and die in, from underground tunnel systems, across the planet surfaces and into inter-planetary space all with filled polygons and without loading screens in 198(effin)9 and who can forget the infamous Barbarian (link) which was a game so violent and graphic that it was banned in Germany. I could go on for hours just about games.

I ask myself, what can I do do now, that i couldn't do then? There isn't a lot. Graphics have gotten a lot higher in resolution, sound and video formats have improved immensely and wobbly windows. That's about it.

[Qqmike]

oshunluvr: Yeah yeah, another lets-drag-up-old-computers thread...

http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
http://www.oldcomputers.net/

There. memory Lane.

Now can we close this thread?

Just kidding.

The stories are interesting. And it's nice to share your memory lane. Me? Heck, even Windows 95/XP is better than that old DOS. My $39-Walmart-HP printer is better than that old expensive fast dot matrix. Thumb drives are wonderful, floppies not so ... Oops ... I slipped a bit here ...

http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
http://www.oldcomputers.net/

[GreyGeek]

My first PC, an Apple ][, was easy to use and BASIC was just as easy to learn. Software from Apple always ran faster than BASIC programs ... Until folks learned Apple's secret sauce: calls to assembler functions on ROM. IF you wanted to clear the screen on the CLI or in a BASIC program you used "HOME". Then we learned about "call 936", which did the same thing but a LOT faster. It was the same with graphics. Using ROM function calls we could plot graphic screens in our BASIC programs just as fast as Apple's programs did. There were, by some estimates, over 10,000 user made shareware and free software programs competing against Apple's commercial stuff. Those function calls still worked on the short-lived Lisa computer, a heavy piece of junk with a huge "cooling fins" on the back that had no thermal connection to any mobo or hardware component. Over heating and crashing was common with them. Then Apple released the Macintosh. They still used function calls but a "call 936" no longer cleared the screen, it crashed the program. To disable 10,000 user applications Apple shifted the function entry points! That move shifted the PC entry point for a lot of Apple users like me, I moved to an IBM PC. Apple cut themselves off at the knees.

[oshunluvr]

Gosh Jerry, I have no idea where my list of "peeks" and "pokes" went to!

[elijathegold]

Gosh Jerry, I have no idea where my list of "peeks" and "pokes" went to!

those peeks and pokes with
addr, saddr, for next and gosub
do not use goto


A very basic haiku.
For those feeling nostalgic http://freebasic.net/

[GreyGeek]

Gosh Jerry, I have no idea where my list of "peeks" and "pokes" went to!

They are here!!
I noticed that my memory was only partially right, I forgot the minus sign. I also forgot about peeks and pokes. Peeks were used to obtain original call settings and Pokes were used to pass new parameters to function calls before calling them.

[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Times New Roman]$FC58....64600....CALL -936......Clears TEXT screen and HOMEs the cursor (equivalent of <ESC> <@>); destroys contents of accumulator and Y register[/FONT][/COLOR]

[GreyGeek]

...
For those feeling nostalgic http://freebasic.net/

Thanks for the link! Kate works well with FreeBASIC!
BASIC is a nice language when one does not want to fuss with GUIs.