I remember spending a lot of time with my Dad typing in programs from a magazine…and then even more time trying to find the comma or semi-colon that was missing or mistyped. It would take hours sometimes. When we finally got it to work it was a good feeling.
Now that I am thinking about it, checking through each leg on an oceanic flight plan, making sure every waypoint is in the correct order and that the Lat/Long data is correct is kind of a similar process (although much quicker than sifting through hundreds of lines of code).
Apple ][e off the top of my head. My dad picked it up when were we stationed at Kadena, it’s still in my parents study and still runs just fine. Dual 5 1/4 bays, and eventually a color monitor, 3 1/2 drive, modem, and eventually even a Mouse! Flight Simulator 1, Moon Patrol, Choplifter, Gato, Apache, all kinds of goodness.
We had a subscription to Apple Magazine which always had programs in it. I spent a lot of time retyping them, and to an extent learning how they worked. I guess it paid off some dividends since I have a Comp Sci minor.
In the early 90’s we got a 386, that led to A-10 Tank Killer, Wing Commander, and other Origin goodness.
Ironically as I sit here typing this on my 6 month old ~$3k gaming laptop with every bell and whistle MSI offered, I am planning on loading up Tornado on DosBox here in a few.
I bought my first 50cc motorbike (moped in the UK) at 15 by submitting games to those ‘type them in magazines’. I got about £75 all in from Sinclair User and Micro Adventurer for about 10 clones of other things I saw, which got me a bike without a clutch cable and no battery from a guy that looked glad to be getting rid of it. It almost killed me.
It looks like a luxury to have BASIC to type in, as they sort of moved on to using hexadecimal codes with a checksum pair eventually - it was brutal for the readers. Hard to believe nowadays (something, something snow up hill, coal for presents etc)…
My first home computer experience was the ZX81 as well. Christmas day 1982 (I think) and it was a lot of money from W.H. Smith’s at the time. I had a black and white TV but it would flicker badly, and I had to be dragged away from it when I started being ill after not sleeping (or blinking) for 48 hours. My parents were fairly certain they had made a huge mistake at that point, and wanted to take it back.
The nicest thing about those days in computing was that if you were really into it (and boy did I ever) was that you could conceptualize and understand the entire ‘stack’ from top to bottom, from how a logic gate worked, the CPU, the bus, the EPROM, the user space assembly, the high level language, the chipsets in those early machines, all the way up to the photon bouncing on your retina - it was glorious and felt like a new world to master. Today I have trouble remembering which continent a bit of my code is running in and where, and the 'top and ‘bottom’ of the conceptual stack is no longer perhaps possible to keep in your head in one go. Simpler times.
Years ago we played some Andy Griffith Show episodes (on DVD) to the grand-kids, the black & white early versions. They too were mesmerized, which was kind of encouraging; cuzz they couldn’t figure out what was not quite right [with the color]?.
1st computer I ever seen was a Tandy TSR-80 in High school. the first computer I had was a vic-20 and a cassete drive for backup of my programs I wrote in…
Yes it was brutal for this 17 year old kid to type all that machine code that I read in those UK ZX81 mags! I probably typed one of your games in at one point.
I used to drool over that ZX Spectrum.
We had Apple 2’s in the high school library computer room … that room would ALWAYS be full of us computer geeks playing games after school.
Good stuff guys … lots of nostalgia brewing around here.
That is so true. I had a lovely spiral-bound book called “Mapping the Atari” which mapped every byte—all 64000 of them (or was it 16,000?). Anyway, it wasn’t much. I had begun to get interested in assembly until flying took over and I never looked back. FWIW, a few years ago I rekindled that old joy with the Raspberry Pi.
I think the big mistake was connecting the computers. Once we did that then it spoilt the fun and made things more complicated than they needed to be.
For video game systems, I got a 2nd hand Vectrex which had beautiful rich color, by the virtue of see-through cellophane sheets you’d stick on the screen for each game. It could only do vector graphics, like a big oscilloscope.
I grew up in a sea-side resort town, so there were video arcades to hang out in, where we’d stalk around spending a fortune of coins on the newly released cabinets of the day. From space invaders and lunar lander, to the eventually Defender and then on to Outrun etc, it was always something big in my childhood. I had a friend with an Atari 2600, but no colour TV to use it on, so we’d hop between people’s houses using that. Without a thirst for games I wouldn’t have got into computing.
After the ZX81, there was a C/PM system at school and then the ZX Spectrum, and eventually Amstrad CPC 464’s, where I got my first summer job in computing. Eventually for home computers I moved on to the Amiga, which I’ve never met anyone that coded on it wouldn’t love it. Then college and it all got less fun as the computers got bigger.
All you guys with your snazzy cassette decks… My TRS-80 forgot everything when I turned it off, since I didn’t have the cassette deck!
My Dad had bought the computer for me at RadioShack, and never really touched it again. It was all me alone with pages of BASIC programs I typed in over and over. I saw the Cassette Deck illustrated in the CoCo2 BASIC manual, but explaining to Dad why this was so valuable, was difficult.
I think I was 8 years old? Hahah… Still, great times with that computer.
I also had the Timex Sinclair 1000 that I bought from a friend in 1984. I had no knowledge of computers, but it came with a cassette player to load Flightsim on it, and that was my introduction to not being able to fly super pixelated blocks…lol.
Around 1987 I bought a Commodore 64, and again it was purely for games like Top Gun and Fleet Command that I played for a couple of years and then sold it. Later moved to the original NES and Sega since all I did was play games…lol.
1997 I bought my first real PC, a Pentium II with Win95 on it and was excited to load Win 98 when it first came out. Mostly for games, but I finally started doing computer stuff with it.
Mine started with the Commodore PET. Absolutely destroyed the ‘A’ key on that beast playing space invaders. My next computer was the venerable C-64 and that was the start of my experiences with coding: Basic and Assembler. I knew a ton about the architecture - all of which has been pushed out of my brain by time :-). I won a few Canada Wide Science Fair attendances.
I really had some geek envy when the Amiga 500 came out!
I probably typed one of your games in at one point.
