Oolite Bulletins

FSOneblin wrote:

And we still have an apple 2 and a sega genesis (Or mega drive, as it's called in japan and that Europe).

Or maybe you have a Sega mega drive (or genesis, as it's been renamed in the US due to TM registration problems)?
You're young enough to still be salvaged from the well known American tendency for bellybuttoncentrism (known elsewhere as jingoism, but worsened by the omnipresent media bombardment)- all you need is to be aware.

My spectrum was sold to raise money for a second disk drive for my Amiga.

My Amiga 500 was handed down to a relative.

I still have my CD32 with SX-1 addon (basically makes it into an A1200) and I still have Elite and Frontier for the Amiga.

Yay!

I was offered a CD32 by a work colleague but it was done sociably when my wife was present who glared in that "go on, I dare you" kind of way - so I declined. Such a shame it was so badly promoted - it was way ahead of the game for its time.

@JB

Well my PS/1 has the amazing monochrome monitor (displays 64 shades of grey!) A massive 512kb (couldn't play many games - though it did run F29 Retaliator okay).

Only teasing about the worst computer ever - it was my very first PC and I did think it was the bees knees when I had it, so one shouldn't be too hard on it. (though it does come close to being one of the worst computers).

No, the worst computer must have been the Dragon 32 (I never owned one, but then, neither did a lot of people . Was Elite ever released for it?)

Somewhere deep in a cellar I still have my C64 - still working, I think. Don't know whether the Datasette is still there, but I'm reasonably sure, as far as the 1541 is concerned. At least it was when I laid it to rest in favour of an Atari ST some 20 years ago.

I also still have the said ST - to be precise, a Mega ST 4 - complete with its monochrome monitor and the Megafile 30 (and of course the "blitter"). Oh my god, that was a lot of disk space at the time. Never filled it. (Actually I find it a little disturbing that for every new computer the RAM is roughly as big as the harddisk of its predecessor was...) Anyway, what I loved most about the 4 MB of memory in the ST was that some games would come up with a message at start-up, saying something like "Wow! I found lots of extra memory." and used better graphics or whatever. I think the whole thing should still be working.

Next came the first Mac (and first laptop as well), a Powerbook 150. Neat little thing, and comparably cheap. Had its drawbacks as well, though, one of them being the four-greyscales-monitor. And due to some bug ClarisWorks could not display one of the two intermittent shades of grey. But that didn't matter much, as the computer was mainly a working horse for my wife. She was writing her PhD-thesis at the time. And Textures was an awesome tool for that, and ran beautifully on the machine. Its end came when one day the harddisk broke. Which actually disqualifies it as an entry in this thread.

Then came the iBook. It was new, it was hot, it was translucent (not just simply transparent!). I had to have one. When it was five years old I gave it an overhauling: maxxed out RAM (288 MB), bigger HD (necessities for the following), Panther. Quite a step from OS 8.6. But, big drawback: Oolite wouldn't run on it. And, to be honest: Weren't we all tired of translucent at some point? (Also the hull got some cracks with the time.) But apart from that, it is still working perfectly fine.

So much for my past loves (as far as computers are concerned).

Gareth3377 wrote:

Well my PS/1 has the amazing monochrome monitor (displays 64 shades of grey!) A massive 512kb (couldn't play many games - though it did run F29 Retaliator okay).

Only teasing about the worst computer ever - it was my very first PC and I did think it was the bees knees when I had it, so one shouldn't be too hard on it. (though it does come close to being one of the worst computers).

I'm in no position to judge - my first PC was a PS/2 Model 30 with an 8MHz 8086, 640KB memory and a 20 meg HD. IBM's curious habit of needlessly crippling computers to make those further up the range look better was in full swing; the Model 30 had an MCGA graphics card which was half CGA, half VGA and totally incompatible with EGA's hi-res modes.

I installed an 8087 co-pro which meant that my Pascal compiler, spreadsheet and CAD package (Yes! CAD on an 8086! ) suddenly ran quicker than a tortoise wading through treacle.

I mock it now, but the funny thing is that I really loved that machine. Compared to using an Electron with a cassette player, the Model 30 felt like the future had arrived.

Textures - never seen that before - so thanks for that!

I used to leave my Amigas running for days to render a few frames of animation in Raylab which was a fantastic program - having trawled the 'net just now though I find no working link to anything ray lab ish!

@DaddyHoggy - You're clearly a big Commodore fan, I wondered if you'd seen "On The Edge" by Brian Bagnall?

Thanks JB - vaguely aware of it but you've re-piqued my curiosity - will investigate further, Cheers.

Since we are reminiscing have a look at this
My fave Xelite is there along with lots of little download buttons all over the place.....oops

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Starting this thread has had a strange effect on me. I've been up into the attic and hauled down an Agfa SCSI scanner, an Epson inkjet printer and a 15" Samsung CRT monitor. My uncle's coming over tomorrow to pick the lot up and give to his local school. Hopefully someone will find some use for it all.

Hopefully you'll start a fad!

COME ON, PEOPLE! LET'S DO A CHARITY RUN!!!

My uncle came over yesterday, and took a shine to the scanner and the inkjet printer. So it looks like the school is going to be the 'lucky' recipient of a 15" CRT monitor and an 80 col dot-matrix printer that I also dug out of the attic.

@JB - I salute your avatar logo thingy. Brings a tear to my eye seeing the old Elk.

When I got my PS/1 I did feel the future had arrived and lorded it over my classmates who had Amigas and STs (I've got a PC!

*sigh* I was so naive back then.

Um, no, that's no quite true.

I still lord it over fellow people who have consoles lol.

Gareth3377 wrote:

@JB - I salute your avatar logo thingy. Brings a tear to my eye seeing the old Elk.

Thanks. I don't know whether I keep my Electron because I keep promising to teach myself 6502 assembler, or whether it's just nice to have a reminder of the days when the British could just design and manufacture a computer for themselves.

Gareth3377 wrote:

When I got my PS/1 I did feel the future had arrived and lorded it over my classmates who had Amigas and STs (I've got a PC!

It's strange - there's a lot of people on this thread with old STs and especially old Amigas, but the whole ST/Amiga thing somehow passed me by.

When I took my Comp. Studies GCSE in 1988, we were all using the school's Model 'B's and Elks. I then spent two years screwing up my A-levels, and when I got back into computers for my Engineering course in 1990, we were all expected to use the college 286s. That's when I got my Model 30.

JohnnyBoy wrote:

When I took my Comp. Studies GCSE in 1988, we were all using the school's Model 'B's and Elks.

It would appear we're the same age too - 1988 was the first year of GCSEs and was the year I also did Computer Studies. We had a very proactive Computer Science teacher - he had a suite of about 15 Model Bs, networked to a BBC Master (128KB!!) and a massive 5MB Winchester Hard Drive. He also had two C64s so, as I had one at home, I used to borrow a school one at the weekend and we'd play "Twin Tornado" - the first and only C64 game that allowed two machines to talk to one another - I've now got two C64s of my own - I still have Twin Tornado and the connecting cable...

I even bought the Simon's Basic Cartridge and Simon's Basic Extension on 5.25" floppy and produced an Art Package (called Arty-Farty!) for my GCSE Computer Studies project.

No, I've gone all misty eyed again.

@DaddyHoggy - Yep, in 1988 guys like you and me were the guinea pigs for GCSEs.

Networked Model Bs, eh? I read somewhere recently that Bill Gates didn't realise that home computers could be networked until he was in the UK in the 80s and someone showed him a bunch of Beebs connected through Econet. Got his attention, apparently!

I don't know if I'm being a sentimental old fart, but when I were a lad you were 'computer literate' when you knew how to store data in an array or move some often used instructions into their own sub-routine. Now it seems that kids are 'computer literate' when they can use a word processor and surf the web.

People will argue that times have changed, but I still don't know where our next generation of computer boffins will come from when curriculum creators think that technological innovation can be improved by a bunch of youngsters whose 'computer literacy' is demonstrated by making their own MySpace page.