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[on:]

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Speccy is now 30 years old.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17776666

man does that make me feel old :-)

I remember getting in my late teens and it was a fun home computer to have

[Reply #1 on:]

I preferred the BBC Model B - much better built and more easily expandable.

[Reply #2 on:]

I started programming in one at the age of late 7/almost 8. My firs whole functional program was a diary with password access ( which, funny enough i realised was easy hackable lol). Still, loved it !!
And look at how far e came: Any 20 quid phone has has SO MUCH MORE POWER.
Couple years back installed an emulator to play a few old games i used to love( R-Type, Double Dragon, Target renegade) and all seemed so silly from graphics to sound...
But then, all my mates in the neighbourhood would camp at my house to play it, as i was the only one who had one !!!

[Reply #3 on:]

Hi,
   I was one of about 6 people who bought an MSX. Mine was a Sanyo, but you could also get Sony, Mitsubishi, Yamaha, Toshiba etc if you preferred. From memory the Toshiba was the most popular and also had the worst looking keyboard of any computer ever - apart from the Spectrum :-)

Duane B

rcarduino.blogspot.com

[Reply #4 on:]

Actually remember one of my friends later( maybe a year) turned up with a Philips computer, which he always had problems getting games for, compared with the spectrum. Not sure if it was a 8235 or could have been their version of the MSX as well...

[Reply #5 on:]

Hi,
   Games were a problem, but some of them were very good, especially the Konami catridges - Yei Ar Kung Fu, Road Fighter, Kings Valley etc. Getting all nostalgic now and going to have a reminisce on youtube.

Duane B

rcarduino.blogspot.com

[Reply #6 on:]

Anyone remember the Commodore PET?

Code:

Introduced: January 1977
Released: June 1977
Price: US $795
CPU: MOS 6502, 1MHz
RAM: 4K, later 8K
Display: 40 X 25 text
built-in 9" screen
Ports: IEEE-488, cassette
parallel, system bus
Storage: Built-in cassette
OS: BASIC in ROM

This was the first PC (is it technically a PC?), I used aged 19 at Uni. Prior to that our school had a single BBC for the whole school (800 kids). When I was at Uni most systems were mainframe. I recall writing programs and data onto punch cards and stacking them in a mechanical reader of some sort  . At that time we were learning BASIC  and a smidgen of FORTRAN. No colour printers just huge plotters and Diablo daisy wheel printers. There was a heck of a racket in the computer centre!

I wonder what happened to all that hardware? Probably in a museum now

[Reply #7 on:]

When I started Uni, the smallest machines were the PDP-8s, the size of a large fridge, with just 4K of 12 bit memory.
To even get your program off paper tape, you had to toggle-in a first-stage bootloader (about twelve 12-bit instructions), then load the BIN bootloader off paper tape, then finally your own PAL-8 program, assembled off-line on a mainframe and punched out via a teletype (Man! the TTY room was noisy!).
For mainframe programming (Algol/COBOL/FORTRAN/ASM-360), you were lucky if you got three batch jobs a day, so dry-running was essential.

[Four Yorkshiremen accent] And you try telling that t' young people today, they won't believe you [/Four Yorkshiremen accent]


Edit: I'm talking nonsense - the PAL-8 was assembled on the PDP-8 itself, so toggle in the RIM loader, load the BIN loader from paper tape, load the assembler from paper tape, run your PAL-8 source paper tape through the assembler once for the first pass to set up the symbol table, run the tape through again for the second pass to assemble to code and punch out the object-code tape, and a third pass for a nicely formatted listing.
If you were lucky, the PDP-8 had a high-speed (a few hundred characters per second) optical tape reader. If you were unlucky, its bulb had blown and you had to use the 10 character per second TTY paper tape reader.

Finally, take the object code tape and load it via the bootloader.

[Reply #8 on:]

Anyone remember the Commodore PET?

Yes, I learn to program on one at school in the very early 80's.

I later picked a couple PET's up to add to my other retro computers

[Reply #9 on:]

I am so old that i have seen the Forth language running on the Spectrum, i am so mad i have put the 6800 core into fpga with the Forth Language running =D

just for fun 

[Reply #10 on:]

My first PC was Sinclair zx81 using Z80 CPU, I had also the 16K RAM expansion module



The set still keep in my store room and not like this

[Reply #11 on:]

Now thats what i call proper "pornography" for old classic computer lovers... lol lol
Thanks for sharing your pics...

[Reply #12 on:]

[Four Yorkshiremen accent] And you try telling that t' young people today, they won't believe you [/Four Yorkshiremen accent]

Luuuuuxuuury.... we used to dream of having a computer t' size of t'fridge...