I saw it, I wept

[ZenStalinist]

The good old days.
Remeber?


http://custurd.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

 

[ninebob]

Just fabulous!

My first computer was a Spectrum, I remember it well. I felt mightily superior because mine was the 128k version and most of my friends had the 48k!

 

[ZenStalinist]

Ah, the speccy.

I bought a +2 in 1998 for £5. Good times. I grew up on an Amstrad CPC 6128. I've never met anyone else who had one. Marvalous machine, and with a monitor, better than with the TV. That said, I got that in the early 90s from my uncle who was going to get an amiga (never did). I knew a lot of others at school who had Commodore 64s. Why did its screenshots always look better? Better skill on the side of the C64 programmers, or the amstrad tendency to go for 4 colours and good resolution, rather than 16 colours and crumby resolution. So I did feel a bit left out. But I knew I had the better machine. Only one guy who had an Atari ST, and somebody with an Acorn 4000 that i was jealous of really. That and people with printers. Especially that girl with a colour printer on her C64.

I used to have endless arguments with my brother when I was about 8, saying that the CPC was really better than the Megadrive, even though the megadrive was 16 bit, and the CPC 8 bit. I mean, you can't code a Megadrive. What's the point in that?

Oh, and you know in the USSR the speccy was more or less like the PC is here. It was the de facto generic standard for computing, they even had a GUI, multitasking (I think) OS, called TR-DOS. They also made one with a 'turbo' button to take it over 3.51Mhz, and with 1024K of RAM!

 

[2scoops0406]

Just fabulous!

My first computer was a Spectrum, I remember it well. I felt mightily superior because mine was the 128k version and most of my friends had the 48k!

Not an original speccy then, then the old 16k'ers were jealous of the 48k'ers. Mon dieu, not 48 * 1024 of bytes. Ahhhhhhh the old days ........... Rubbish weren't they !

 

[securespark]

SPECTRUM?

You don't know you were born!!

My first "home computer" was a ZX80/81 with 1K. Yes, folks, 1K!

It was fun writing games in Basic that would fit - about 10 lines of commands.

Basic is very frustrating though, and limited in terms of graphics and speed.

Much better was the challenge of using machine code to execute a better, faster game and still beat the memory restrictions!

I had a 16K memory add-on that plugged into the pcb on the back. Problem was, Clive didn't design it very well, one wobble on the membrane k/b and the connection was broken and you lost everything.

Still, it prepared me well for all the frustrations of the blue screens Mr Gates invented......

I actually started on Apple II at school. They were great - huge floppys (the proper floppys) which if you were careful you could make double sided by cutting a notch in the other side....b/w monitor - great!

 

[ninebob]

My spectrum memories are fond indeed. I don't recall the thing crashing once, oh how I wish that could be said of PCs these days.

When the time came to move on, I decided on an Atari ST. From all sides I was advised against it, told to get an Amiga, but being a strong-minded child I stood my ground. To this day, I beleive it was the better machine, but although it had it's own GUI (with the Amiga you had to load a disk to get a desktop), and excellent midi capacity, it wasn't supported as well as it could have been by software developers and sadly became the underdog.

In 1995 I begrudgingly replaced it with my first PC, a 486 which was top-of-the-range at the time: I remember boasting to my friends about how advanced my (4x) CD-rom drive was!

My current 'puter is a 3.06Ghz, 256mb ram, 80mb HDD. Already considered under-specced by some, and I myself am already complaining that it doesn't have a DVD re-writer. I wonder how long before we'll talk about it in the same way we are doing the humble spectrum now?

 

[AdamW]

SPECTRUM?

You don't know you were born!!

My first "home computer" was a ZX80/81 with 1K. Yes, folks, 1K!

A ZX80? You mean, a computer with a 3.5MHz processor? Pure luxury.

My first real computer was a Commodore Vic-20, a 6502 processor at 1MHz. Although it did have 5k RAM as standard, and was advertised by William Schatner.

Me and bro got our Spectrum +2 for Christmas 85 or 86 IIRC.

When I was 12 I had a fight with someone who insisted that his IBM compatible was superior to the Amiga 1200. What an idiot, he was obviously wrong. Oh, and I won the fight by the way, and got let off without even getting a detention. Obviously the teacher agreed too (either that or was wondering what the world was coming to when boys would fight over graphics architectures!)

But I have grown up since then, I can talk with the Mac-lover in my office for nearly 10 minutes in a go and am yet to end up thumping him. Even when he insists that Apple invented everything including sliced bread.

You may all appreciate this site too.

One last thing, why did Acorn insist on naming their computers after Amigas? I know you can't copyright numbers (hence 486 evolved to Pentium rather than 586), but when a kid at school told me he had an A3000 I was impressed until I realised he meant the A500 rip-off BBC-compatible pile of knackers. RISC my a**e.

 

[AdamW]

To this day, I beleive it was the better machine, but although it had it's own GUI (with the Amiga you had to load a disk to get a desktop),

I believe the ST Operating System was called "TOS", was it not? And when its successor came out with multi-tasking it became "Multi-TOS"

Ask me how much capacity there was on an Amiga diskette... Go on, ask me! OK, I'll tell you: 901kbytes on an FFS-formatted floppy, or 1.8mbytes with the high-density drive. Tell that to a PC or ST user with their laaaaame 720kbyte and 1.4mbyte disks To this day, you can't read an Amiga floppy on a PC. But you can read a PC floppy on an Amiga.

My current set-up is not quite so nimble as Simons: Athlon XP 2200 (I don't trust the AMD marketing numbers though). But I think I am slightly upspecced on the other bits: 512mb RAM (thought about 1GB but realised I don't really need 512!), 380 GB HDD space (yes, 380 GB, not 38GB ) 4x DVD writer (only single layer, my bro has a dual layer writer but the discs are very pricey) I've got a funky NVidia graphics card, FX something or other. Works pretty well for games, I also do video editing on it so I have a firewire card in there too.

The large HDs are for the video work. I have a separate HD purely for a scratch disc (storing all the video files on). Digital video take up about 13GB per hour, so recently when I decided it was time to do some editing I put 50GB or so of raw video on there.

I have looked at building a RAID with 1TB of discs but am yet to figure out what I would use it for! No point in doing it for bragging points as a) that's sad, and b) every mobile phone and iPod will hold that much by the time I have decided what to use it for.

 

[kendor]

SPECTRUM?

You don't know you were born!!

My first "home computer" was a ZX80/81 with 1K. Yes, folks, 1K!

Did you buy the kit and build it yourself? i did with the zx80 but the zx81 was pre built.

 

[2scoops0406]

To this day, I beleive it was the better machine, but although it had it's own GUI (with the Amiga you had to load a disk to get a desktop),

I believe the ST Operating System was called "TOS", was it not? And when its successor came out with multi-tasking it became "Multi-TOS"

Ask me how much capacity there was on an Amiga diskette... Go on, ask me! OK, I'll tell you: 901kbytes on an FFS-formatted floppy, or 1.8mbytes with the high-density drive. Tell that to a PC or ST user with their laaaaame 720kbyte and 1.4mbyte disks To this day, you can't read an Amiga floppy on a PC. But you can read a PC floppy on an Amiga.

My current set-up is not quite so nimble as Simons: Athlon XP 2200 (I don't trust the AMD marketing numbers though). But I think I am slightly upspecced on the other bits: 512mb RAM (thought about 1GB but realised I don't really need 512!), 380 GB HDD space (yes, 380 GB, not 38GB ) 4x DVD writer (only single layer, my bro has a dual layer writer but the discs are very pricey) I've got a funky NVidia graphics card, FX something or other. Works pretty well for games, I also do video editing on it so I have a firewire card in there too.

The large HDs are for the video work. I have a separate HD purely for a scratch disc (storing all the video files on). Digital video take up about 13GB per hour, so recently when I decided it was time to do some editing I put 50GB or so of raw video on there.

I have looked at building a RAID with 1TB of discs but am yet to figure out what I would use it for! No point in doing it for bragging points as a) that's sad, and b) every mobile phone and iPod will hold that much by the time I have decided what to use it for.

Does it come with an optional burberry casing

 

[AdamW]

What, the iPod?