Let's talk about retro computing! (Split)

[Tannin]

/OT a little:

 

I just realised that I'm old. BAT files used to be very popular back in a day. (AUTOEXEC.BAT & CONFIG.SYS, anyone? :D). I also recently saw a question asked on one of the popular question/answer website: "Why is the first drive in a PC called C: and what happened to A: and B: drives?". Just the idea that there is now a generation that doesn't know this... :o_O:

I realised how old I am when I was writing that bat file and missed vi. ;)

[wolverine2710]

Tannin there is always vim or gvim

 

Bat files and A: B: are in the same league as 'shadow memory', 4dos, ndos,  Intel 8086,80286, 80386, 640 Kbyte limit in DOS and driver management where it mattered (a lot) in which order you put the drivers in and of course UMB, extended memory drivers. The time were soundblaster cards where the default and and you had to setup the IRQ's for every card (sound, scsi, video) by hand. Far before Plug&Play in Win95 was introduced. Back then it was plug&pray. Ahh the good old days, where you could sw*ar at your computer and praid it would work. I also still have fond memories of my BBC A and later BBC B computer (16 and 32 Kbyte!!!) and Elite (now 30 years ago). Thank god after kickstarter funding Edlite Dangerous will be out next year, and poooof gone is my social life. Not to forget progamming on a teletype, vi then was a Godsend and thank Bram Moolenaar (a fellow dutchie) for vim.  Unix and later Linux where a blessing, got me out of DOS hell and saved my sanity.

 

Ok OK. This old fart goes way OT but I had to write this, sorry guys/galls.

[rootsrat]

Bat files and A: B: are in the same league as 'shadow memory', 4dos, ndos,  Intel 8086,80286, 80386, 640 Kbyte limit in DOS and driver management where it mattered (a lot) in which order you put the drivers in and of course UMB, extended memory drivers. The time were soundblaster cards where the default and and you had to setup the IRQ's for every card (sound, scsi, video) by hand.

Bread and butter of my early teenage years!

 

Thank god after kickstarter funding Edlite Dangerous will be out next year, and poooof gone is my social life.

 

Seriously, Elite:Frontier and First Encounters are the BEST GAMES OF ALL TIMES for me. I still have a genuine boxed games (on floppy discs, yes!) of both. And I'm also waiting for Elite:Dangerous like for nothing else!

[Uhuru]

Elite Frontier on floppy that's new modernised version.

The Elite I lost 100's of hours to was the original played on Commadore 64 (that's 64kb for the youngsters reading this) and loaded using a cassette tape.

Next you'll say it had solid spaceships not wireframe !!!

Sounds like you're all young upstarts to this old timer.

[rootsrat]

Yeah, I know of the first Elite... I never had Commodore. There was Atari version as well, but I never got it. It was quite difficult to get games in Poland back in a day... I was quite lucky to have a computer at all :D

[WilliamImm]

wolverine - yea, I ran into the 640k memory limitation like it was a brick wall when I tried to get a DOS machine set up in VirtualBox... actually, I'm seriously now considering getting a DOS gaming PC just, well, because.

 

(Split this thread, as it was getting quite OT)

[phazer11]

Thanks for moving it for me Will. I'm disappointed you didn't use my title instead. I think "Geek Out: Share your trials, tribulations, and joys of early computing" is much better anyways...

My first real forays into computing were when I was... young. I'm between Will's age and Tech's age and remember where and what I was doing when the planes struck... Anyways I started watching and/or using computers under my dad and granddad's supervision either at their office or the house. I also remember my dad switching back from Windows 2k to 98 because he didn't like it around the same time.

[generalnutt]

Ah the vic 20 with the expanded 16k memory, I would never run out of memory ever again! Plugging in the head set of the phone into modem to dial up a RPG BBS. Games weren't down loaded, they came on paper, and you programed them in, modded on the fly, before you ever played them. TPUG anyone, naw didn't think so?

[z929669]

I didn't get into computers until around 1995 and Windows 3.1 in college, so while I am a latecomer to computing, I remember playing TV Tennis as a little guy in the 70s and then Atari after ... and Intelevision! ... I even remember watching people using punch cards and phone-cradle modems ... whatever those things were called.

[stoppingby4now]

Aside from the gaming consoles of the day, my first computer was a TRS80, followed by the C64/128, Amiga 500/3000T/4000. Didn't go PC till the late 90's. I even had my first foray into virtualization by running an intel emulator on my Amiga so that I could run PSpice at home. Already a slow program on the XT's at the college, but unbearable when running through an emulator.

 

Got my first taste of UNIX via NetBSD in '92, and installed it on an older Amiga. Then stumbled across gcc (downloaded via USENET...uudecode anyone?) to do all of my C programming homework at home. I was livin' fat and happy. Started learning shell scripting, followed by Perl in '95 at my first Systems Administrator job, and gave C/C++ the bird.