What PC's Had You ?

[TZAG]

Without wishing to appear a geek again or send anyone else to sleep I remember starting computing as a spotty teenager on a black n white Sinclair ZX. The blooming thing was supposed to play Asteroids using a tape and tape player but always used to crash. The colour version that came out a little later was much better.

After that I graduated to a Acorn Electron making basic programs (IF....THEN GOTO......for anyone that can remember that far back) cos I couldn't afford the more expensive option of a BBC computer but fondly remember playing the greatest space game of that era, ELITE ! Then the company collapsed and the games dried up.
Robbie.

I'll never forget my first pc either. It was actually my father's persuasion back in 1982 to start to deal with computers. It was a ZX Spectrum 48k with rubber keys. My first and one of favorite games was the "Penetrator" or later the "Cauldron" and the "Ambu Sibel". Then came the microdrive! Remember Robbie? and later the speech synthesizer!! What a time...
Later came the COMMODORE 64 with its drive 5.1/4" diskettes (Hey Paulo that's for you! ). Best games for all time personally were IMPOSSIBLE MISSION ("Another visitor, stay a while, staaaay for EVER!"), or BEACH HEAD I & II and GI JOE or RAID OVER MOSCOW and INFILTRATOR. I remember also the GEOS programm that I used on C64. It was the first steps of "windows" type applications before windows's existence itself.
In '93 came an Intel 386 SX with 2M G card and 250M HDD and windows3.1. After that upgrade, upgrade,......,till now with an Intel P4 1.8MHz with 40G HDD and 64M G card.

IF...THEN....GOTO will never be forgotten!

[Stuart]

Oh, the spectrum days, my first 'PC' too - although I only ever used it to play Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, oh , and the famous
10 PRINT "Stuart"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
them were the days.
Nowadays, I have a P4 1.7GHz, 40Gb HD, 380something Meg RDRam, not sure about grafix card - I don't do games, flat screen monitor and its STILL TOO SLOW ! (except for then internet connection, that's 600K....)

[rob]

what about all those PEEKs and POKEs !!!

The best was the SYS routines on the commodores. I discovered one that if you ran it it would trash the cpu

I never used to go into Boots (yes they were a main source for computers once) and write programs similar to

10 CLS
20 PRINT "DO YOU WANT TO BREAK THIS MACHINE"
...
...
asks user if sure etc and then runs the SYS routine


I never did it, people had a choice they didnt have to say yes to break the machines


As for the voice synthesier progams - we never used to make crank calls with them - lol



Get this one - when I was ready to leave school the careers teacher asked what I wanted to do. I said computers, they suggested Accounting (which I tried and failed) as they said '...computers will never take off...'