Regarding yesterday's entry about Holly

[miss_s_b]

(which is here if you missed it)

I am proper amused by the number of you who, like me, grew up tapping BASIC into a speccie or an AMSTRAD.

That is all.

Comments

[drunkwriter]

It's all there was to do in the 80s!

[ginasketch]

This. Then floppy discs happened, and we were all really excited whenever a heavily pixellated photo appeared during a game.

[drunkwriter]

Aha, yes! I remember the lengthy intro montage of sepia-toned pixellated photos in Ghostbusters II, and thinking at the time that indeed we were living in the future :)

Not to mention the slight hint of an American accent in the speech sample "Uphold the law" on Robocop...

[ginasketch]

I still laugh when I realize that back then we worshipped a machine that couldn't run unless there was a disk inside it.

[yoyoangel]

I did that too.

[(Anonymous)]

Yup. I used to write very simple games on my ZX81 in BASIC with it's 1K of memory.

Imagine the brave new world that opened up when I finally saved up enough for the 16K extension.

Tell that to the kids nowadays and they don't believe you ;-)

Liberal Neil.

[http://www.nickbarlow.com/blog/]

We started with the 16k pack in, and it felt like so much memory it could never be filled - or at least, that no magazine would ever publish a program to type in that would be long enough to fill it.

(And a quick check suggests that the source code for this page is about 50k)

[gwenhwyfaer]

And even if a magazine did exist that could pubish a 16K program, typing it in on the ZX81 "keyboard" would dislodge the RAMpack and crash the computer long before you got to the end of it anyway...

It has to be said, the computers of yesteryear *really really sucked*. The ingenuity of their software was pretty much their only merit, and I was too poor and too isolated to get the kind of documentation you can get now in seconds with a well-chosen search term and the click of a mouse. These days of Raspberry Pis and gigabytes of storage on a thumbnail-sized, magnet-proof card... truly the kingdom of Heaven is all around us ;)

(btw, Holly's intelligence knocked my socks off too :) And her confidence & motivation - possibly even more so!)

edit: Actually, there is one thing I miss. Having to fit everything into 64K was a profoundly useful and sensible discipline...

[andrewhickey.info]

They were rubbish compared to today except in one very important way -- they came with the tools to program them built in, obvious, and accessible. Given the choice of having kids' first computer be an Acorn Electron which came with two books on how to program in BASIC, as mine was, or some iThing or other, I'd go for the Electron every single time.

[gwenhwyfaer]

True; I really do miss that immediacy.

[ponygirl72]

For i equals 1 to 100. Next i. (It was an Atari 400, in my case.)

:-p

[nadriel]

Yep, coder and proud, from a rather early age :-)

[pseudomonas]

With me it was an Acorn Atom...

[lizw]

You can add me to that list (Spectrum, for which I spent years saving up my pocket money.)