Queue on 4/12/2010 at 23:24
Quote Posted by ZymeAddict
Goddamn you guys are old.
Yup...it certainly feels that way.
Quote Posted by Briareos H
Amiga all the way.
No way. TI-99 all the way, baby! That was my Christmas gift the year it came out (I think 1981). The damn cost around $500 (or a year's salary back then) and was utterly useless.
But, I was always a Radio Shack geek from early on and into my late teens/early 20s: a TRS-80 Model I, TRS-80 Model III, TRS-80 Model 100, a TRS-80 CoCo, a couple different generations of the Tandy 1000, and the Tandy Pocket Computer. Plus that was a Commodore 64 kicking around, and an Apple II. Getting the Tandy 1000 was like being in heaven--I could play King's Quest! And, with an old dot matrix printer attached, it got me through a lot of early, and much-deservedly destroyed, years of writing.
Man. Why the fuck did I have so many computers?
ZylonBane on 5/12/2010 at 00:45
I did a ton of BASIC and a fair amount of assembly language programming on my various 8-bit Atari computers. Only thing I did that gained any repute was a VT100 terminal emulator, dubbed "FlickerTerm 80" due to the hackish approach it took to getting 80-column text on a machine with no native 80-column mode.
gunsmoke on 5/12/2010 at 03:48
oh, God, they taught us BASIC in school. 3rd grade on. We had Apple ][e's. I then got an early IBM (true IBM)in December 83. Had those dinner plate 8" floppies (2 vertical drives), and a monochrome screen. LOVED it, now I could program at home, not just in 30 minute increments @ school. I could lose myself for hours in BASIC and spent the colder months of '84, '85, and '86 locked away in my room copying and creating my own code.
demagogue on 5/12/2010 at 05:01
I used to do this too on my C64. I subscribed to a computer magazine -- can't even remember the name now -- and typed some of the programs in the back, all in BASIC. One game I remember was a boat on a pond and ducks would swoop down towards the water, and you had a platform that you stuck out in front of the boat trying to get them to bounce off (rather than nose dive into the water).
I made a number of my own games too, on my C64 and a little later on my calculator (TI-85). It's funny; when I finally got a C64 emulator on my computer, I made a few basic programs to run on it for old time's sake.
