Micro Men
in [UK Mac]
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From: Adrian on 11 Oct 2009 13:30 usenet(a)alienrat.co.uk (Woody) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying: > I got an MZ80K from a car boot sale a few years after they weren't made > anymore, when I also had other machines. I totally rewrote the rom and > had great fun with that machine - great case, less than great keyboard. We got an MZ80K to replace a ZX80. The keyboard seemed phenomenal...
From: Duncan Kennedy on 11 Oct 2009 13:37 In message <1j7f99g.16anixu18uyc28N%tim(a)nospam.demon.co.uk>, Tim Gowen <tim(a)nospam.demon.co.uk> writes > It'll be >the C5 that's mentioned in his obituary not the millions of computers he >sold to people of my generation. > >And he was sort of right because a whole lot of programmers didn't >emerge from that period. People of that generation may be more computer >literate than any generation before them but I know a lot of people >who're younger than me who don't like computers. > I started out with one of the first 81's (for my son, of course). That was just under 100 GBP at the time. I learned to program Sinclair BASIC on that and managed to develop some simple stuff for my office. A year or so later the price dropped to 50 GBP if I remember and I bought another. This one I built into a large box with connections, controls and meter for the tape recorder, a full size, full travel keyboard, a programmable joystick box, and, of course, cable mounted RAM module, along with sockets for externals like the thermal printer and joystick . I still have both of them somewhere. Such was life. As somebody said, Monster Maze was a big step at the time. -- Duncan K Downtown Dalgety Bay
From: Jim on 11 Oct 2009 16:07 Steve Firth <%steve%@malloc.co.uk> wrote: > What I miss from those days is the comparative excellence of magazines > about computing. Today magazines are simply consumer sales vehicles > pushing the latest MouseBlaster 2800 series of multi-core gaming > machines. At least back then there was editorial content wirth reading, > written by people who knew what they were talking about and (mostly) > able to communicate it to others. I've got every issue of Personal Computer World from issue 1 up until roughly 1993. The rot (which was sadly inevitable) started in the late 80's when the PC started to become the only architecture worth writing about. After that, as you say, it started to become reviews of similarly capable machines, rather than alternate solutions to problems you hadn't thought of yet. The days of magazines containing source code where you are effectively hitting the bare metal are, sadly, behind us. Jim -- "Microsoft admitted its Vista operating system was a 'less good product' in what IT experts have described as the most ambitious understatement since the captain of the Titanic reported some slightly damp tablecloths." http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/
From: Jim on 11 Oct 2009 16:07 Steve Firth <%steve%@malloc.co.uk> wrote: > Mmmmm... at the time, we used to get applicant for Secretarial jobs who > when asked if they had WP experience would mention something on the BBC. > "View" was it? Yep, that was it. There were a few 'View' products but I can only remeber 'View' (word processing) and 'Viewsheet' (spreadsheet). > Anyway whatever it was they didn't get the jobs. The BBC > Micro did people wanting to use a computer for work no good at all, > unless that work involved blowing EEPROMs. TBH for me it was tried one, > it wasn't much cop, I stuck with an Apple IIe which did the job better. > IMO etc. The Apple ][ was much better at certain things - such as 80 col text with a usable RAM space. The Beeb, however, was superb at connectivity - the thing had so many ports that the case barely held together. You could link it to a disk drive or your fridge with almost equal ease. In some ways it was an upmarket PLC with big, BIG brass knobs on. And I mean that in a good way. The sideways ROM/RAM thing was sheer genius - as was the MODE 7 Teletext feature. And where WP was concerned, well, if you were a small business you were probably outputting onto a dot-matrix (or maybe golfball) anyway, so who cared what the input was like? That was Someone Else's Problem. Jim -- "Microsoft admitted its Vista operating system was a 'less good product' in what IT experts have described as the most ambitious understatement since the captain of the Titanic reported some slightly damp tablecloths." http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/
From: Peter Ceresole on 11 Oct 2009 17:09
Duncan Kennedy <nospam(a)nospam.otterson-bg.couk> wrote: > As somebody said, Monster Maze was a big step at the time. Did you watch Charlie Brooker's 'Gamewipe' this past week? It used 3-D Monster maze as a (good) example; that's what reminded me of it. -- Peter |