Anyone miss the old computer days of the 90s?

57Deluxe

In the mid 90s had succesfully got Windows  3.0 running on a DOS (v3.3) palmtop - the Sharp PC3000. Against all the odds I devised a setup and routine that enabled me to run Word and Excel under it as well as Wordperfect 5.1 and connect to the internet to login to my Compuserve account for emailing etc; IRC and Telnet out in the big internet world and even browse the web via the DOS web browser Aracne.

 I also was able to link it to my Atari ST via  Ghostlink and could run MIDI DAW type software such as Cakewalk. It was hard work and full of compromises but for such a lowly spec machine, the usability was vast! - and it fitted into a large pocket!

I even wrote a dedicated webpage on it and hosted it and it is still live believe it or not!...

http://home.freeuk.com/hieroglyph/index.htm



http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Oakland/5769/dsc0246.jpg

quarky

That is awesome. I wish I could give you two WOWs for that.

bigjon

If anyone wants to learn ZX Spectrum machine code, it's really easy in these days of emulators, debuggers etc. I wrote a 'learn machine code in 30 minutes' tutorial based around programming a roadrace game which you can find at 
http://chuntey.arjunnair.in

thermionic

The first computer I remember seeing was the Commodore PET, which looked very futuristic and powerful in the late 70s. A friend later had a ZX81 with the 16k memory pack and thermal printer but I didn't. When my dad retired (a primary school headmaster) I helped him clear out stuff from the school. In the storeroom were 3-4 old ZX81s that well-meaning parents had donated to the school. They probably ended up in the tip, I wish I'd been cheeky enough to grab one, just as an interesting historical artefact.

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum, which I persuaded my parents to buy because I was doing a Computer Studies O-level. It eventually developed an intermittent fault, so out of warranty, I sent it for repair to some place I'd seen advertised in a magazine. The company immediately went bust but luckily I got it back before the receivers seized it as an asset. My brother-in-law donated his old ZX Spectrum to the National Museum of Wales!

BBC Micros came shortly after. I made extensive use of one to control experiments during my physics PhD. They were excellent for that, really easy to program them to control stepper motors and stuff, and make measurements through the A/D inputs. One of my colleagues wrote a program in BASIC on an Atari 520ST (which had MIDI sockets!) to control a spectrometer and take readings. We also had a Dragon 32 (made in Wales!) lying around the lab, but it wasn't used for much. We eventually had a couple of DOS PCs, which you booted up from a 5.25" floppy, then took it out and put your own floppy in to save your work.

Later on I worked a lot on UNIX machines, running CAD systems for microlectronics - generating the lithographic mask data fro fabricating silicon chips. I enjoyed learning about shells, Perl scripts etc. At the university I worked at there was a room full of Macs you could use for writing reports etc - that was my first encounter with them. My first Mac was the translucent blue CRT iMac running OS 8. Had Macs ever since. I was trying to remove some adware the other day and opened up terminal window... dug around the directory structure and wielded "rm - r *.*" a few times - I didn't even have to look it up in my old UNIX book!

fields5069

My first computer was a ZX81, christ that was shit. It had the 16k RAM pack, I once spent 3 hours typing in a program out of a magazine, and then stood up and the computer restarted. Shit.

Then I had a Commodore 64, christ that was still shit. Games were quite good, but programming with all those peeks and pokes? F off.

At school we had a Research Machines 380Z and a Research machines 480Z. You guessed it. The main thing I remember about them is that they had to be hidden whenever the school inspectors visited, while schools in the middle of Newport had vast labs full of BBC model Bs.

I don't remember what we had in Uni, but by the time I did my MSc we had a room full of shit Mac Classics. My abiding memory is of seeing a massive penis on the start-up screen of one and wondering how someone had managed to do that. Clever, I thought.

I had a PC with an AMD 386-40 chip, and typed up my thesis on it using DOS-based WordPerfect 5.2. Then I sat getting a headache as I printed it out in high quality on an awful Epson dot-matrix printer. My placement was at the MAFF in Cambridge where I processed sensitive water data, writing programs in FORTRAN to draw pretty graphs about pollution on Swavesey Fen. They had big line printers so I got a headache there as well.

My first meaningful job was at Ericsson, where we had Sun Sparcstations which were quite good, although for the first couple of years we had to write documents in markup language in a glorified text editor, i.e. not bloody WYSIWYG. Porn was shit as well, you had to download parts of a naked woman before stitching them together and UUDECODE-ing them. My boss's boss once caught me when I was brazenly staring at some porn but he didn't say much. Shortly afterwards we had to have it officially pointed out to us that porn was a no-no so please don't download it.

TheBlueWolf

I had a ZX81 too. They were shit but I regret not keeping mine.

Games tended  to load only after spending an age getting the volume just right too.

scrumhalf

Somewhere in the loft I have my old ZX-81, at least one Spectrun and a Yamaha MSX music computer.

The games on the Spectrum may not have had whizzy graphics and sound but you didn't need 16 arms and the reaction speed of fly to play them.

About to hunt for my MAME CD, I fancy a game of Juno First.

thermionic

fields5069 said:

At school we had a Research Machines 380Z 

My first meaningful job was at Ericsson, where we had Sun Sparcstations which were quite good, although for the first couple of years we had to write documents in markup language in a glorified text editor, i.e. not bloody WYSIWYG. Porn was shit as well, you had to download parts of a naked woman before stitching them together and UUDECODE-ing them. My boss's boss once caught me when I was brazenly staring at some porn but he didn't say much. Shortly afterwards we had to have it officially pointed out to us that porn was a no-no so please don't download it.

Ah yes, we had one RM 380Z between about 8 of us doing Computer Studies O-level. We weren't allowed near it in the first year, because we had to learn assembly language first. This was done by filling in photocopied forms (had be in pencil, and CAPITAL LETTERS), which the teacher collected and then sent to the computer department at Bangor University. They would be typed in to the mainframe, line by line by an operator and we'd get the output of the program a week later, on a couple of sheets of lineprinter paper. Of course if your writing wasn't legible to the operator, the program would fail and you'd wasted a week. "Garbage in, garbage out" as our teacher used to say!

Yes I remember Sun Sparcstations. That markup language was probably LaTEX, wasn't it. Funnily enough, I remember stitching together those ASCII files as well.. removing the first line and combining 3-4 files to get a jpg. I worked in a group which did a lot of image processing work, and one of the standard demonstration images in that field is a Playboy Playmate of the Month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

cruxiform

I miss those days too. Everything was so new and exciting. I worked in an independent games shop 1992-1994 when the Sega Megadrive and SNES were landing. We specialised in imports so did PC Engine and Neo Geo too. I also had a sideline in Amiga games (Xcopy Pro anyone?). When Streetfighter 2 was released in Japan for the SNES we were selling them for £120 a copy with the adapter to play them on UK consoles. We had a queue out of the door and struggled to keep up with demand. Mad days.

I built my first PC in 1995, a 486 133mhz. I remember paying over £100 for 4mb ram! Built to play Doom, naturally.

4114Effects

Still play this now ... 

Emp_Fab

Pah...  call that old !  I remember spending three weeks aligning brass wheels just so we could play "Adding Integers" on Biffy Babbage's Analytical engine.

paul_xt

stickyfiddle said:

RAINBOW ISLANDS! 

Also Chip's Challenge - I tustve spent hundreds of hours playing that.

Rainbow Islands was amazing! There was also a game on the Amiga called 'The Great Giana Sisters' which was essentially a rip off of Super Mario Brothers that I played for years!

fields5069

thermionic said:

fields5069 said:

At school we had a Research Machines 380Z 

My first meaningful job was at Ericsson, where we had Sun Sparcstations which were quite good, although for the first couple of years we had to write documents in markup language in a glorified text editor, i.e. not bloody WYSIWYG. Porn was shit as well, you had to download parts of a naked woman before stitching them together and UUDECODE-ing them. My boss's boss once caught me when I was brazenly staring at some porn but he didn't say much. Shortly afterwards we had to have it officially pointed out to us that porn was a no-no so please don't download it.

Ah yes, we had one RM 380Z between about 8 of us doing Computer Studies O-level. We weren't allowed near it in the first year, because we had to learn assembly language first. This was done by filling in photocopied forms (had be in pencil, and CAPITAL LETTERS), which the teacher collected and then sent to the computer department at Bangor University. They would be typed in to the mainframe, line by line by an operator and we'd get the output of the program a week later, on a couple of sheets of lineprinter paper. Of course if your writing wasn't legible to the operator, the program would fail and you'd wasted a week. "Garbage in, garbage out" as our teacher used to say!

Yes I remember Sun Sparcstations. That markup language was probably LaTEX, wasn't it. Funnily enough, I remember stitching together those ASCII files as well.. removing the first line and combining 3-4 files to get a jpg. I worked in a group which did a lot of image processing work, and one of the standard demonstration images in that field is a Playboy Playmate of the Month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Ericsson were very much into proprietary systems, so it was called EDML (Ericsson Document Markup Language), and it was a bit like HTML code now I guess. Lots of <p> </p>, <br>, <h1> </h1> etc.

We even coded in their own language, PLEX (Programming Language for Exchanges), which was sort of fair enough as it was a 3rd generation language with some 2nd generation features. Corrections were coded in ASA which was pretty much exactly the same as assembly language. In PLEX we had to count lines so we knew when to send an interrupt so that our code didn't hog the CPU.

olafgarten

I missed the early development of computers, but when I was very little my dad had a Compaq LTE Laptop which ran Windows 95. It's amazing how far we've come in less than 20 years. 

Funny thing about that laptop, it first shipped with Windows 3.1, and was powerful enough to run Windows 95, but if you tried to install it,  due to the non standard resolution the Install button was cut off. You had to send it to Compaq to get it updated. 

57Deluxe

When I was at IBM the dumbfucks used to just toss their Thinkpad batteries into the waste bins when were dead... I used to retrieve them and over time developed a routine to reserect them to full life and sell them and the rejuvenation service for other makes on the web...

Bygone_Tones

Rainbow Islands was gay, are you serious? I used to love Indy 500 on the amiga. Graphics were very basic but it was a fast game and I loved replaying the crashes.  I used to wait in the pit lane and drive out the wrong way for awesome head on collisions.

marcus449

i got my first pc in 2008, god it was slow and useless compared to my new macbook pro

RocknRollDave

Anything post-Pac Man is superfluous to requirements.

IvanMC

The halcyon days! I also frittered away hours playing Giana Sisters! But I still miss the flawless Defender of the Crown. Didn't anybody use to play this one? It was a first-rate one: Wilfred, Cedric, Geoffrey... against the evil Normands... and I'd love to play the Archon series again, which I mentioned somewhere else. I'm talking about the great C64 thing indeedy. Lovely s..t !

ChrisMusic

Amiga  

Hold down lots of keys and the space bar with your nose (or other spare appendage  ) on boot up, and a ticker tape message scrolls across the screen...

"We designed the Amiga, Commodore fucked it up !"

So true, a very advanced machine and OS for it's time, it could easily have cleaned up over both PC and Mac, so sad.


And as for games, no one has mentioned the most mental game of all time (AFAIK)

Llamatron

Stereo on room shaking full blast, lights out, Llamas to love, and just look at the enemies you have, Coke cans, telephones, and my favourite, long into game play, exploding toilets, replete with flying shit and bog rolls, fab-u-lous  

It gets too fast, so you couldn't think about game play, just defocus your eyes, defocus your mind, and get in a zone beyond normality !  
(that precious zone akin to guitar playing at it's finest)

Duration 8:19

has anyone else got fond (or deranged) memories of this one ?