Commodore 64

[Paddy]

Hi @Bealman

Seen a number of reviews of The C64 Maxi and all are positive.  The firmware seems to get regular updates (which is positive) and the new joystick is now micro-switched.  It would be great if they added support for other Commodore models as well e.g. C16, C+4, C128 and PET.

Who knows, maybe this will happen post CV19.

Personally, I rather fancy the ZX Spectrum Next when they open the second run for ordering.

Kind regards

Paddy

[Malc]

Looks interesting, but I will wait until someone does a 16 bit machine.

[Bealman]

But wouldn't that mean it wasn't a C64 anymore? 

[Malc]

I was never a user in the old days. I went from a self built UK101 to a BBC model B then an Atari followed by an Amiga. The last 2 being 16 bit 68000 machines with disc drives.

[Bealman]

Ah well, that explains it, Malc.

I'e still got the issues of Practical Electronics mag with the UK101 in it!! That was based on an Ohio Scientific design, wasn't it?

Good to hear about the positive reviews, @Paddy .

I have no experience with the Sinclair Spectrum, except by reading magazines of the day, so cannot say anything except it's good it's being resurrected as well. Strangely, I did have a bit of a muck around with a ZX81 that someone brought in at work.

I notice the VIC-20 wasn't on your list - that was my first 'real' computer! 

[tutenkhamunsleeping]

I await a version of JMRI for it with interest

[Dorsetmike]

Back in those days I was teaching electronics, inluding microprocessors, but the company used 4040 and 8080 processors so I settled on a colour Genie which had a Z80 processdor which used an enhanced version of the 8080 machine code; I used to do some programming in Basic but where I wanted something to run a bit fster I'd call a machine code sub routine; our boss wanted us to work in octal but we eventually convinced him that hexadecimal made more sense. My first PC  was an Amstrad 1512, with a single five and a  half inch floppy, later traded for a 1640 to which I added a 3.5" floppy and a 32Mb hard drive on an expansion card., the next two I "built" a 286 followed by a 386; todays machines make them seem prehistoric, I'm currently running 2 PCs with AMD 12 core processors (4CPU, 8 GPU) 16GB RAM, 256Gb SSDs and 2x2Gb hard drives and a DVD drive

[Malc]

Ah well, that explains it, Malc.

I'e still got the issues of Practical Electronics mag with the UK101 in it!! That was based on an Ohio Scientific design, wasn't it.

Yes, the UK company ripped off the mother board but added a UK TV adaptor. It used 1k video ram which I doubled by piggybacking another RAM chip. It also only had 4K ram as standard but had slots for the 2114 chips to make it 8k. Each chip was £10 at the time.

[themadhippy]

10 PRINT "WH SMITHS IS RUBBISH!!";
20 GOTO 10

pah amateurs,

10 for n= 0 to  65536
20 poke n,255
30 next  n

I progressed onto deltree *.*/y  when pc's  got left unattended in comet or dixons

[Paddy]

My first computer was a ZX81 - saved up for months and bought it in Currys for £50!

Best £50 I ever spent as it lead to a life long career in programming/IT.

Happy days.

Paddy

[guest311]

used to love the black screen with green lettering 

[stevewalker]

In my school days, a supply teacher brought a ZX-80 in during some study periods. Soon after a friend's father managed to borrow a PET 2001 (which we soon got to grips with and had it calculating our physics homework on reflection and refraction for the next few weeks). Another friend got a ZX-81 and we messed about with that, writing a game that was used at a church open day to raise money for famine relief.

I was just about to buy a ZX-81 when the ZX Spectrum came out. I had years of fun with that - more programming than playing games, but some of both.

I sold the Spectrum (and my OO-gauge railway, with Zero-one controller and slave controllers) to buy a QL, which gave me word-processing and spreadsheet capabilities and a Super-Basic compiler for my programming.

I bought my first audio CD player and a couple of CDs with the money I got paid by QL World for one of my programs - which I'd actually written as my O-level computing project!

From then on it was PCs - the first with an NEC V20 processor (could work as an 8088 PC running DOS or as a Z80 PC running CPM) with the heady turbo speed of 8MHZ.

These days the house is full of PCs (4 desktops, a laptop and a server, plus a spare laptop, a work one and a couple of now unused PCs), but my home programming is back to basics with Arduino and PIC and my (N-gauge) layout is far larger. Work these days involves a lot of PLC/SCADA specification, some programming of it and lots of testing.

[railsquid]

My father bought a ZX81 with the vague idea it might be useful (I think he had managing the household accounts or something in mind) and when it turned up all it did was sit there and display a mysterious "K" character in white on a black background. Literally all we could do with it was type in the examples in the manual, so I ended up learning the principles of programming from that and typing in games from listings in magazines ("Your Computer" anyone?).

Yours truly a couple of years later:



(Never intended to go into IT but was working as a translator in a startup back when people still used floppy disks regularly and we needed the clunky content management system to do something it couldn't, and the IT people (who were a caste of priests to whom the management was beholden) swore blind it was impossible, and me in my naivety thought "what a load of male dangly bits", bought a book on databases, wheedled my way into some systems and (to cut a long story short) a couple of years later ended up in charge of the whole kaboodle after some rounds of downsizing (found out a couple of weeks ago the software I wrote in 2001 was still running until very recently  )

[Ditape]

I started out with a ZX80, moving on to a ZX81, then to the home grown Dragon 32 which was later replaced by a Dragon 64. My next machine was a Wyse PC 286-16 with both 3.5" and 5" floppies, 100mB HD ,1 meg memory,  tape streamer back up drive and a 16 colour graphics card, I also had a modem 1200baud.

[Chuffington]

Somewhere I still have my old ZX Spectrum - complete with microdrives & printer...might have to dig it out.