Old computing and nostalgia!
Posted by: Jonathan Gorse on 28 October 2004
Stumbled across a rather nice nostalgic magazine the other day in WH Smith called 'Retro Gamer' all about old computer games of the 1970's and 80's. I ended up buying it and it certainly made for an entertaining read and reminded me of the old days of taking 20 mins to load 'Elite' on my Commodore 64 off cassette and playing it until the early hours of the morning. I must have spent countless hours hunched over my old 14 inch portable TV in the bedroom with the lights out so my parents didn't know how late I was awake on a school night!!
I seem to recall being somewhat addicted to 'Defender' in the arcades too but happilly bought a copy of Williams Arcade classics some years ago which actually runs the original arcade machine code on a Windows PC emulator. It's still a really playable game even if I chuckle to think an old pal and I used to be in awe of the 'graphics'
Interesting to read about the decline of Commodore and hard to believe they went from selling 30 million C64's (the best selling home computer of all time) to bankruptcy in only a few short years. Sadly my old 64 eventually died when I was at University but I must confess I wish I'd kept it for sentimental reasons- it seems there's quite a buoyant trade in these things nowadays.
Anyone else remember the old computing days with fondness???
Jonathan
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by rodwsmith
I've got a "Rainbow" in the loft.
First to do smooth scrolling I seem to recall, although I can't recall it being able to do much else...
A ZX81 and a BBC Micro are to blame for a lot in my family, I still get nightmares about the "tune" (-ish) from Donkey Kong.
Ah, happy days
Rod
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by BigH47
A "kid" at our Spectrum club wrote a bloody good Defender prog for the big Speccy(48kb). Well worth the massive download time plus re-attempts.
Hours in front of a TRS80 playing a green and black wire framed graphics and text adventure game (no idea what it was called).
Mind you we loved it at the time, a simpler and may be better time.
Howard
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by JonR
A small group of us at school used to discuss computers at almost every morning break time. I remember getting the original ZX Spectrum (with the light-grey plasticky keys) and was virtually laughed off the play-ground by various Commodore Vic20 buyers and other assorted 'undesirables' for doing so. Constant arguments used to be had about whether the Spectrum was better than the Vic or vice versa. Of course then the Vic-buyers would upgrade to a Commodore 64, but I wouldn't have anything to do with the '64 (on principle!) so I bought a BBC Micro instead.
Those were the days.....
jon
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by sideshowbob
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by garyi
It seems so silly today that back then you couldn't even save progress, everytime loading up r-type or head over heels and having to start from scratch!
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by jlfrs
I owned a Vic-20 and was always in awe of my mate's Spectrum as it had the better games, graphics and speed.
Amazing to think how things have progressed since the days of loading tapes, etc and playing "paddle tennis"!To go off on a slight detour, my dad's 40 year old hi-fi now looks more advanced than my current state-of-the-art system and his record deck even plays 78's!
Back in the eighties I laughed at his lumpy old valves and cumbersome boxes citing my Japanese Midi system with it's graphic and flashing lights as the future of hi-fi - how wrong I was!
I now look upon it in awe as it's contrived from all sorts of redundant British bits n' bobs and still holds it's own in a hi-fi play-off!!
The Vic-20 is in his loft - perhaps in another 10 years it'll be back at the forefront of technology if hi-fi trends are anything to go by....
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by Jonathan Gorse
IT's strange but for all the whizzy functions that modern computers have they are rather soulless compared to the likes of the Speccy, Commodore, BBC etc. I fondly remember the rivalry between BBC owners and C64 owners in particular - I'd still struggle to identify which was best. A pal of mine always fancied a Dragon 32 but goodness knows what happened to them. Sadly it seems that Acorn, Commodore, Sinclair, Dragon have all disappeared and in the case of Acorn who were very ahead of their time with RISC that's a great shame.
It's odd that none of them switched to making IBM compatibles before it was too late.
Jonathan
PS Jlfrs- does the Vic still work?
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by Rasher
I used to love Flashback, but my fave was Under A Killing Moon.
The other thing that i used to play off a floppy disc was Leisure Suit Larry, which was hilarious.
From what I can make out, its almost impossible to play DOS games on my XP machine.
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by jlfrs
Jonathan - the Vic does still work,(according to my dear old dad)!
We had a bit of rivaly at home because my dad,(who is competitive), bought an Atari and only stopped using it about 3 years ago after the magazines were no longer published and the software dried up. After I left home and he had no-one to beat at paddle tennis he used it for music publishing/arrangement before he finally went to a p.c. on which he now plays patience....
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by Tim Danaher
I used to have a Jupiter ACE (still have, in fact). Designed by Steven Vickers (who wrote most of the Sinclair Spectrum). It was odd because it used FORTH as a programming language - this was a weird, variable-less Reverse Polish Notation, Threaded-Interpretive language, but it enabled code to be written that that was 80-90% of machine code speed.
I also have a NeXTStation Color Turbo -- the fastest machine they ever produced (33 MHz 68040). It's still a work of art.
Gordon Laing has just produced 'Digital Retro', a book all about personal computers of the 70's and 80's:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904705391/qid=1098973979/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_10_1/026-1569109-7343610and:
www.digitalretro.co.ukLooks fun.
Cheers,
Tim
_____________________________
Os nid Campagnolo yw hi, dyw hi ddim yn werth ei marcho...Posted on: 28 October 2004 by justiceklopper
My formative years were spent stealing my parent's car and driving to the mall to play Xervious....
...which I can now play on my telephone.
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by Roy T
Back in the good old early to middle '80s I remember building the machines for work.
They were top of the line
Intel 8086,
Some had a maths co-processor added as an extra,
Dos 3.1,
All had an A and a B floppy disk drive,
Some had a hard disk
Most had CGA screens,
All had Lotus 123, Multimate & Sidekick (a fantastic TSR helper),
Some had PacMan, Space Invaders and the game where you knock bricks out of a COLOURED wall.
These boxes were good enough to run the European HQ of a v.big US company.
Happy days. . .
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by BigH47
Dragon 32 tried to imitate a Dragon by bursting into flame. Well 2 mates had them and they both bunt out something (no ACTUAL flames) one a PSU the other a main board.
BT ran their 192 Directory Enquiries monitoring and stats package on a Commadore PET.(not particularly successfully).
Howard
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by GML
Started with a Commodore C16 but swiftly moved on to Commodore C64.
The best machine ever IMO was the Amiga A1200. Fast load times, excellent operating system and loads of great games. To this day I still miss it.
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by Jonathan Gorse
GML,
I remember absolutely longing for an Amiga - a room-mate at University had one and it rocked - even now there's something about them I find makes me want to buy one. Apart from their enormous power (for the time) I just love the look fo them and rather like the fact you can plug them into a TV in whatever room you happen to be in. You should definately get hold of this month's retro gamer - there's about 6 pages dedicated to a big feature on the Amiga.
I suspect that part of the attraction of the whole retro movement is being able to go and buy something you lusted after in your youth. I suppose you could probably pickup an Amiga 1200 for £100 nowadays whereas as a student in 1990 £400 was 1/5 of my annual grant cheque and pretty unattainable!!
Shame it doesn't work the same way with women (ie they could become more attainable as the years go by - I fear the reverse is true!!)
Jonathan (PS Tim that book looks very appealing)
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by jayd
I still have my first-generation Macintosh and a hiney-load of games for it. It is currently languishing in the garage (in its original packaging), getting occasional use as a doorstop.
I remember it did a great job with Missile Command and Asteroids, and there was some game where you shot Daleks.
Posted on: 28 October 2004 by domfjbrown
My first computer was a PC, in 1992
My folks couldn't afford to get me one "back in the day" - things were so tight (pun intended) that mum had to choose between tights and coffee, as my brother and sister were both in Uni at the same time...
I therefore used to play on my mate's speccy
Loads of Spy Hunter - that game was ace... I DO own a BBC-B now though; working condition is currently unknown, but the last time I tested it, it worked well, barring a temperamental DFS chip. Nice to play Chuckie Egg on a 25 inch telly (RGB scart)
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Just dump me in a plastic bag and leave me on the pavement
A tribute to your modern world, your great society
I'm just another victim of your highrise fantasy!
Posted on: 30 October 2004 by John Channing
In the old days, games were written by teenage kids in their bedrooms. Elite, for example, was written by two Cambridge undergraduates,
Ian Bell and
David Braben and really pushed back the frontiers of what could be done in 22k of memory. Game development these days is done by big corporations and follows the Hollwood model of searching out Blockbuster. Innovation has therefore suffered in the name of trying to find the next big hit.
John
Posted on: 30 October 2004 by GML
quote:
Innovation has therefore suffered in the name of trying to find the next big hit.
Exactly John - graphics, not playability are the order of the day now. Used to play a very simple game (in graphic terms) 'Bomberman'. Played in a square grid with 1 - 4 players. Brilliant game, average graphics and heaps of fun.
Posted on: 30 October 2004 by Jonathan Gorse
John,
Completely agree - Elite was a work of genius - it's incredible how amazing such games were when you think how little computing power and memory there was in the machines of the day.
The great shame is that nobody has yet written Elite IV although there have been rumours for years of it. I gather Braben and Bell fell out and I suppose Eve Online is the nearest thing we have to modern day Elite - anyone actually tried it? Is it good?
Jonathan
Posted on: 31 October 2004 by garyi
I always felt the turning point was when snes whent to super snes.
Mario Kart was a work of genius on Snes, the game was simple, well laid out and playable.
Kart64 was a pile of poo.
The great news is I have snes under emulation on the mac! Yea.
Posted on: 31 October 2004 by ejl
My first computer was one of the early IBM PC clones; a Leading Edge model D with 64k ram based on the 8088. I paid $1300 for it with monitor in '87, which at the time seemed incredibly cheap; two years earlier IBMs with 8086 chips cost nearly $5000.
Coincidentally, every computer I've bought since has cost right around $1300.
The game I remember best on the Leading Edge was an ASCII-based game called Rogue. It was surprisingly addictive; as addictive as any game I've played since, frankly.
Posted on: 31 October 2004 by Mekon
I've spent too many hours playing GTA: San Andreas this weekend (on my new PSTwo, because my PS2 died); I feel like the games industry is doing ok.
I went...
ZX81
Spectrum 48K
Atari ST
386 SX25
Megadrive
SNES
486 DX66
N64
PSX
P1 120
PS2
Spectrum 128K+ (£12 from a market)
...umpteen laptops and PCs
Posted on: 01 November 2004 by Tim Jones
My first computer experience was playing the not-very-classic "reaction timer" on a ZX80. All it would do was flash a letter on the screen and tell you how many milliseconds later you have pressed the keyboard. Hours of...fun.
Then I had a pre-RAM pack ZX81, which had, er, one kilobyte of RAM. We used to buy magazines full of games programs written out, which you'd sit there and type in in the hope that you were going to get some spectacular arcade-style experience. The 16k RAM upgrade brought serious improvements, including "Scramble". My great 80s notalgia moment is playing that and listening to a Flock of Seagulls. Some of the ZX81 16k games weer really pretty involving. There was a very early Flight Simulator, which was actually pretty good.
Then there was the legendary 3D Defender. Basically an incredibly clunky black and white "space combat simulator". I only ever got it to load off the tape once. It was worth it...
Tim
Posted on: 02 November 2004 by Derek Wright
In 1964 an IBM 1620 - all input had to be via paper tape ( I think) I never did get on with it.
However my best weekend days in the early 70s were spent on an IBM 360 Model 50 - now that was a nice pocket sized device - rows of disk drives - probably each with less capacity than a 3.5 inch diskette, two rows of tape drives, two train printers (that could also play music if they were printing out the correct image) and one typewriter console to control the beast.
Such joy it was to be alive then <g>
Derek
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