i did m y first program in Fortran on an old IBM with punch cards
i canāt believe i did that
so slow and tedious
one error on card and back correcting cards
time consuming indeed
i learn how to work on relational Database on Small Apple 1e i think
and had to transfer a Database from Apple to PDP-11-44
very difficult to do no internet at the time!
had to print the Database records to a printer and use a PDP-11-34
using the keyboard input connected to the printer output of the Apple 1E
and it worked
only problem is that all the date format was wrong
so had to make a small program on PDP-11-44 to correct the dates fields
but i would not go back to these old techno LOL
note:
i did a model of one of the first IBM see this trhead
giving an idea on the physical size and specs !
no comparison with what we have now as PC
Wow, I always thought it was a hassle having to travel to the coder of our games to deliver my latest graphics on a bunch of 3.5 inch diskettes, because one of us didnāt have a modem yet, and modems were quite slow in the late 1980s.
Speaking of print to digital: I remember typing pages filled with BASIC listings from a computer magazine to my Commodore 128, only to get an error when I ran the program.
In the mid-1980s there were also computer radio shows that broadcast bleeps. If you recorded that on analog cassette tape, you had a chance that all data had been properly transferred, and you could run the program from tape. That was like magic.
My first computer was the American version, the Timex-Sinclair 1000, but with 2K of memory. I also had the 16K memory expansion with all of itās reset the computer randomly with any key press. I ended up putting a really large rubber band around the entire computer and the expansion to keep it from resetting all the time.
I remember such things very well, similar to things like having to fine-adjust the azimuth of your data cassette recorder in order to make a program or game properly load. If you got another load error, you had to rewind the tape and adjust the azimuth again, until it worked.
I also remember a friend of mine had practiced turning his C64 off and on so fast that a program would still be present in the RAM. Then he could open up a code monitor tool and crack it.
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Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
26
Itās the little things like this that mad the classic computers so very rad. With only a minimal amount of effort, you could dig all the way down to the metal itself, manipulating it to do amazing things even the developers of the hardware itself wouldnāt have thought possible.
the home computers i had as a child were the sinclair zx spectrum 16k (i liked to play the horace games :)), later a spectrum with 48k and then an amstrad cpc 464 with green screen monitor. it had an external 3" (not 3 1/2"!) floppy drive. i always got them from my uncle several years after their release when he upgraded to something new. unfortunately i was too young to really learn programming on them though. i didnāt understand english, had no good books and on my own i only figured out how to do simple things in basic.
at the same time i also always used the pcs of my father. commodore pc 10 (ibm clone), commodore pc 20,ā¦ i found them really cool and never missed a c64 or amiga. at friends i always was astounded about how extremly slow c64 floppies were. loading a cpc 464 tape almost seemed to be faster.
my first own pc was a 486 with 8mb of ram. the ram was on an extension card that was as big as current high end graphics cards. on it i learned programming with turbo pascal.
I didnāt have much on cassette tapes as they were not as popular as they were across the pond. I did actually write a game on my Timex-Sinclair 1000, and put it on tape too. As I only had 2k of memory I split the game into levels (really simple levels) and put each level on tape as a separate program. The TS-1000 had a cool command to both load a program and run it, kind of like the C64 with load ā*ā, 8, 1. So for each level and if you won, it would load the next level from tape and run it automatically. I only did this once as it was incredibly painful to do. Getting all of the levels on the correct spot on the tape and working was interesting. Now I wish I got into assembly, I think it would have been more productive.
Went to kindergarten in 1979 and learned some French on a System 80. A couple of years later the school put in a computer lab with about 5 or 6 Apple IIe computers. They had the same machines all through high school. Good grief.
But they were a lot of fun back then.
Damn I thought I was old, since computers werenāt a thing until I was almost a teenager, but after reading some of your responses about punch cards and programming in FORTRAN and whatnot, Iām feeling pretty young now.
Thank you for that.
Did anyone else used to get those computer magazines that had programs listed inside as BASIC code, and type them in, very carefully, over the course of many hours, only to RUN them and encounter endless SYNTAX ERRORS and the like? And when you did finally successfully get them to run, your reward was something like a bouncing square that changed colors, or something along that line. Endless fun, and so many memories.
I also fondly remember the excitement of reaching the monthly publication date of several computer magazines, particularly the British ones. On that day I rushed to a local bookstore over here in the Netherlands, bought two or three magazines, rushed back home and excitedly devoured every page of game news, reviews, articles, interviews and charts. In the pre-internet era those magazines were your main source of computer-related news.
The magazines I loved to read were Computer + Video Games, The One, Zzap! 64, The Games Machine, Commodore User, Amiga Format, Amiga Mania and the American Amiga World magazine. It was a true delight to read reviews of our own games in those magazines when they had been published.
Some guys go step further. Check his Artstation blog, there he post process of re-making his beloved C64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXKkX_TYpRs
PS. imagine that someone these years say to you that entire C64 can fit in cigarette box
I got mine and started learning about Linux, reading Michael Abrashās Graphics Programming Blackbook (explaining the innards of Quake) a little later, and somewhat after THAT, x86 assembly.
Same here re: Imagine 3D off a cover disk - Imagine v2.0 off an Amiga Format issued in the early 90s. It blew my mind at the time - running on an A500+ with a massive 2Mb ram upgrade (direct from floppy - no HDD!) which cost twice as much as the 32Gb DDR4 I bought yesterday :] Iām sure I still have my old project files in a box of disks somewhere.
I owned Imagine through to version 5.x - eventually running on an A1200 w/68kā060 bodged into a massive PC case with all kinds of weird upgrades hacked onto it. It was amazing some of the crafty things they came up with back then.
I even wrote a couple of Imagine tutorials for Amiga Format (and Amiga Active) but sadly never got the chance to finish them due to the market imploding and the mags closing down.
I well remember the demo disks and PD/Shareware catalogues etc arriving in the post - it was a massive scene; I doubt there was a single kid at my school that didnāt get into it.
Some other great software I used to own beside the standard Dpaint (legit copies) Reald 3D, ImageFX, Photogenics, Personal Paint, Pagestreamā¦ happy days :] I always wanted to own Lightwave when it got decoupled from the toaster but it was way beyond my budget back then.
Does anyone remember Tornado 3D? I recall demoing it when it first came out and thinking it had great potential - but it came a bit too late in the Amiga lifecycle I guess.
I think I enjoyed computing in general a lot more back then.
Imagine was quite a nice 3D editor indeed. It was an evolution of Turbo Silver, the first bucket-based renderer for the Amiga. When I got my first 386 DX PC in 1993 or so, there was an MS-DOS version of Imagine I used for a while, in the pre 3D Studio DOS days.
Speaking of evolution: Lightwave was sort of a follow-up to Aegis VideoScape 3D, which was quite an impressive piece of 3D software around 1986. Its developer Allen Hastings went on to develop Lightwave for Newtek.
I also owned DPaint and PPaint legitimately. Worked with those pixel editors on a daily basis for about ten years, creating graphics for commercial games, TV game shows and advertisements. Loved it.
Iāve still got my DPaint V box with diskettes.
Me too. Those early computing days had a pleasantly exciting feel of all-new territory being explored. You knew a revolution had commenced, but it had yet to reach the mainstream.
I also used Vista Pro, that was awesome for doing canon fly-throughs. Oh and Art Dept Professional was my absolute favourite tool for batch processing images.
Yes, Lightwave was very expensive and I could only afford it through months of saving and going without. I was a very junior engineer at the time and was lucky enough to get months of overtime working on the commissioning of Sizewell B which got me over the line. It felt like a huge achievement and consequently I spent every spare moment learning LW and animation.
Vista Pro was cool. Loading up DEMs of real world places and watching them render (very slowly) was somewhat mesmerising :] I think I got that off a mag cover disk. I was not long out of school back then and apprenticed as an electro plater/metal polisher on something like 50 quid a week so a lot of my software was sourced from the likes of Amiga Format, CU Amiga etc. Buying all those mags each month was quite an outlay too.
These days (for the last 20 odd years) I work as a print designer - no formal education in it, just the skills I taught myself on my trusty Amiga :]
I ended up putting a really large rubber band around the entire computer and the expansion to keep it from resetting all the time.
