Who's still got their old machines?

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 10:55 pm

@JB - I agree entirely with your sentiments in the final paragraph. Now even the games industry is complaining that there aren't enough physics and maths grads - didn't matter when we didn't havce any engineers or boffins but now the games industry is suffering its big news and a problem!

Re: school networks - not only were the Beebs networked but he had a school "website" which we produced using the "Teletext" page creation functionality built into the Beebs. We had a dial up link to Durham Uni (9600 Baud acoustic coupler) so we could get "big" programs compiled for us to run as executables (mainly Pascal) - they were great days - it wasn't even just the programming side either in CDT I made a joystick from scratch (casing, microswitches, stick, the works) and when I got hold of the C64 reference manual - I built myself a hard reset switch the plugged into the cartridge slot (the days when Tandy sold RS stuff) and a set of piezo-electric speakers that ran off one of the ports on the back (7 pin monitor DIN?). I even managed to wire up the C64 to a "Granada"-badged portable TV that had a non-standard monitor connector on the back - my parents thought I might blow it, or the house up, but I didn't and they learned to trust me (a bit).

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 2:19 am

Thing is, the most creative people, the ones with the skills, and twisted mind set, is the ones who come up with ingenious programs.

These are not the people you find in a firm. and being a firm, ideas that are not from inside the firm aint welcome...

just like being an inventor..

however most "home programmers" dont have the funds, or the time to follow through in their ideas, and their ideas are mufballed on their hard-drives, until its deleted in some way.

Also i´m sometimes struck by amazement when i stumble into people who has several IT titles, but seems to be IT illiterate... all theory and no practice, and when you act upon their mis-information, they are offended cause you pointed out theire flaws...

Lately one of my wifes colleges was told that her motherboard was fried (cause the thing couldnt start at all), by a Computer Technichian..

She had the PC at home and was about to throw it out, when i heard that it did not want to start up, i figured it was the power supply(didnt know about that she had allready had a "certified intel / HP" repair shop look at it...

i opend the power supply suspecting the fuse to be burned, and right there was the cause, a fried electronic component in the power supply, nothing i could do about it.

So, I got an old spare 250 watt i had at home, installed it, and the computer started up like nothing had happend, a tad underpowerd i would say, but it was just a 2d computer with windows XP home, and some onboard GFX crap card, so it should work...

It was then that she told me what the "technician" had told her...
that is just the latest event of me stumbling on to socalled Certified Computer techinicians that are in fact Computer illeterate...

Ofcourse she would have needed a whole new computer, had she followed the technicians advise... instead of shelling out 100$(brand new 500+ wats) for a new powersupply, she would need a 1200$ computer. and in this case she got the power supply for free, cause i had no use for it...

i just noted the name of the shop, and told her never to use them again, and directed her to a more thrustworthy shop/company, when she eventually need a new computer, since the one she has dates back to the year 2000 i think...

And i´m afraid that we may find many programmers, who has the Titles and Education, but lack the Twísted mind set that are needed to be a programmer. and ones it becomes a job, then it is a job, and you dont want to do the same at home as on your job

..

Thats mainly why i never went that way educational, and therefore dont know a whole lot about the theory of programming. I just know what works and why it works, and when it does not work i discover something i did not know before... learning by doing so to speak...

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 6:38 am

@Frame - sadly evertything you've said I have also experienced too! Fight the good fight - that's all we can do.

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 1:15 pm

DaddyHoggy wrote:
@JB - I agree entirely with your sentiments in the final paragraph. Now even the games industry is complaining that there aren't enough physics and maths grads - didn't matter when we didn't havce any engineers or boffins but now the games industry is suffering its big news and a problem!

Well that's because the marketing people rule the high-tech organisations now, and they just see every youngster as an 'end-user' or 'consumer'.

Back in the 80s, guys like you and me had the opportunity to teach ourselves computing at a young age thanks to the availability of simple 8-bit computers with simple operating systems that didn't get in the way of simple programming. No 'distros', user accounts, object-oriented languages or any of the other crap that gets in the way of putting some basic shapes on the screen and discovering how to change the shapes or move them about.

The funny thing is, now that 8-bit chips would cost pennies to make and buy, a replica of a Beeb or Elk would be so easy and cheap to remake - possibly with some modifications to allow it to use a PC keyboard, a TV with a SCART socket and a USB pen drive for storage. Briel Computers in the US have been making replica Apple 1 motherboards for a few years now. If we could do the same in this country and sell them for peanuts, the current generation of 12 and 13 year old nerds would have a simple machine that would teach them so much and fire their interest in creating programs rather than just playing GTA on a PlayStation.

DaddyHoggy wrote:
they were great days - it wasn't even just the programming side either in CDT I made a joystick from scratch (casing, microswitches, stick, the works)

This is uncanny! In my CDT class, I made a micrometer from an old potentiometer, some flex and a casing from some perspex. Connected it to the Analogue-to-Digital Converter port on the back of my Electron's Plus One, and was able to (very roughly!) measure distances with it.

Frame wrote:
Thats mainly why i never went that way educational, and therefore dont know a whole lot about the theory of programming. I just know what works and why it works, and when it does not work i discover something i did not know before... learning by doing so to speak...

Frame, you follow in the footsteps of a long line of people with exactly the same experience - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, John Carmack (author of Commander Keen, Doom and Quake who once wrote on an exam paper "Why don't you give me some real problems to solve?" before he dropped out of a Computer Science course) - in other words, anyone who has recognised the 'education' system for the glorified memory test that it really is.

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 4:38 pm

Thank you Gentlemen, for a thoroughly stimulating debate (even if we all seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet!)

Damos · Post by **Damos** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 2:37 am

I've still got my Acorn electron with a plus 3 discdrive and a slogger rom board sitting in the garage. Not too sure wheather the old Atari 2600 is still there. Parents might have got rid of it. But maybe I boxed it up and kept it.

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 10:26 am

I wish I had a Plus 3 for my Electron, or even an Advanced Plus 3 made by PRES (photo). They're both as rare as hen's teeth now...

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 8:47 am

DaddyHoggy wrote:
Textures - never seen that before - so thanks for that!

It was awesome at the time. Just imagine it: A complete TeX-distribution, with a shell and a compiler that worked in the background.

That means that while you were typing in the editor-window, the compiler would automatically start over again and again and rewrite the display-window. The result: practically what-you-see-is-what-you-get LaTeX. Or real-time TeX.

It was so revolutionary at the time that even the (German) TeX- and LaTeX-manuals were just whispering about it in awe and disbelief.

FSOneblin · Post by **FSOneblin** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 11:49 am

@Frame: Reminds me of my old computer teacher. She always talked about how if you AIM someone, your ip address will popup on thier screen real fast, and some people know how to make the ip address stop, so they can get it and hack your computer

. She also once said that in your address is in your profile.

@jonnyboy: Because of your post, I think I might get my dad's old apple 2 out and see what that can teach me.

Don't Panic: FSOneblin

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 1:32 pm

FSOneblin wrote:
@jonnyboy: Because of your post, I think I might get my dad's old apple 2 out and see what that can teach me.

Give it a try, my friend! We're conditioned by the people who make computers to believe that new=good and old=bad, so we assume that there's nothing that an old 8-bit machine could offer us. But if you can find some Apple 2 tutorials or program listings on the net, type them in and start to experiment with them, you'll be amazed at how satisfying some good old-fashioned hacking is.

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Tue Jul 08, 2008 9:46 am

JohnnyBoy wrote:
I wish I had a Plus 3 for my Electron, or even an Advanced Plus 3 made by PRES (photo). They're both as rare as hen's teeth now...

Well I found a Plus 3 interface as well as some other peripherals being auctioned in Australia. And the prices..... well, see for yourself....

Plus 3: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Acorn-Electron-Pl ... 0266243590 (My inquiry into the cost of shipping to the UK is at the bottom of the page)

Plus 1: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Acorn-Electron-Pl ... 0266242336

Voltmace Joysticks: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Acorn-Electron-BB ... 0266245357

Davidtq · Post by **Davidtq** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 9:02 am

Most of my childhood computers were family computers so belonged to my parents, they still have a massive collection of different 8 bit computers and old consoles.

I sold my apple II about a year ago, I still have a tatung einstein in the attic and around 4 cambridge Z88's (a notebook computer that worked on AA batteries and used ram drives for storeage back in the late 80's early 90's. I once upon a time developed a GUI operating system (name CLIcon), an AI based "techie" in a window self help program, and a few games (including a 3dfps) for that format.

FSOneblin · Post by **FSOneblin** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 6:53 pm

My brothers friend got an atari and some of the really bad games that he knew were bad (Indiana Jones, E.T., exe). Sega mega drive and atari controllers are interchangeable. I think we also have a gameboy, gameboy color, gameboy advanced, gameboy advanced sp, and the 36 or 37 ds sold at a best buy near here. I have a lot of junk.

Don't Panic: FSOneblin

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:06 am

I'm just re-reading 'Hackers' by Steven Levy - possibly my favourite book - and it features a coder from the early 80s called John Harris who programmed the Atari 800. I had a look around the web too remind myself what an 800 looked like, but didn't realise how advanced a machine it was for its time.

As well as a 6502 running at 1.8MHz, it had four co-processors that could handle graphics, sound, game controllers and interrupts, leaving the 6502 free to process program logic. Unfortunately for the 800, Atari dissuaded hackers from writing for the machine by trying to keep the specialist assembly language opcodes for the machine as secret as possible. Really smart move, Atari....

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 7:21 pm

@JB - Commodore did the same with the Amiga (68000 running at just 7.14MHz compared to ST's 8MHz, but with Gary, Agnus and Denise, looking after gfx, memory and I/O it ran faster). When programmers were ringing up CBM and saying I want to know how this bit of the chipset works because I want to do X, Y and Z, Commodore would ask why, the programmer would say he was writing a game, Commodore would explain that this wasn't a game machine it was a small business computer and the line would go dead...

Ho Hum...