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Caleb Strange Special user Manchester UK 676 Posts |
Not my first, but my favourite computer was the Atari ST. Like Rob Eubank, I'm also a musician, and I spent many a blissful month working with Pro 24.
Happy happy days. Caleb Strange.
-- QCiC --
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Reg Rozee Special user Vancouver, Canada 592 Posts |
Some of these comments remind me of the time we all gasped in amazement when one of my programmer friends announced his new computer had a 20 megabyte harddrive (yes MEGAbyte!). 20 megs!! No one could ever possibly have enough software and data to fill that! Now I'm happy if a single good piece of software only takes up twice that space.
-bigwolf {*}
Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. -Phillip K. Dick
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? -Chico Marx |
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HiveMind Veteran user 303 Posts |
Commodore 64. I still have it too, well most
of it.
"Free will is an illusion." - B.F. Skinner
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ChrisZampese Veteran user Hamilton, NZ 341 Posts |
Computers are truly remarkable in their development.
My first computer played tapes, and ran a basic BASIC OS. The first 'real' computer (with disk drives -5 1/4 and 3/12 - and everything!) I used had 12k ram and 2.4mb hard drive!! That was only about 15 years ago. My current home PC has 40gig HD and 128mb ram, with a 64mb graphics card!! And even that is getting to be obsolete! Makes you wonder what the future will hold?
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are
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Hideo Kato Inner circle Tokyo 5649 Posts |
The first one was Hitachi's board computer with 8K. I programmed it in machine language by inputting numeric codes.
The second one was Apple2. I performed magic with Apple2 at Tenkai Prize Party. I programmed it in Assembly. I also programmed Pentomino and solved all 2339 solutions in 2 hours and 30minutes. The third one was Fujitsu's Micro 8. I programmed in BASIC. I programmed adventrue games. Then I don't remember the order. I bought Amiga, NEC's PC-8001, MSX, Oki's ???, NEC's PC-98, Compaq, Presario, NEC's Value Star, Sony's Vaio and several more. I used computers for my creative works such as 3-D art and Mosaic Art. My creations were manufactured as Jigsaw puzzles by Tenyo. I use computers for magic work very often recently. I am now studying Capturing video and Editing. I hope I can publish Multi-media manual for magic in future. I can't live without computers. Hideo Kato |
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CloseUpMagicKid Regular user Los Angeles 105 Posts |
C64 was my first and most favorite computer!!!
I learned Basic and my friend and I would create very simple programs. Then a modem came out for it and we went on BBS and had a great time! Ah... those were the days... the late 70s and early 80s! I MISS THEM! |
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Steve Brooks Founder / Manager Northern California - United States 3780 Posts |
Wow, reading all these terrific posts certainly does bring back many, many fond memories.
Most Café members may assume that magic is my only thing (my wife would probably agree!), but being a graphic artist from birth, computers caught my interest from the very beginning. Around 1977 (or there abouts) I was attending junior college here in northern California, hanging out with the rest of the computer geeks of the day. Used punch cards for the big mainframes, but had access to the school's Commodore Pet machines. Black and white monitors and the machine only had 4K of memory! Funny thing is, we often pondered how on earth one could use up that much memory. During the many hours in the library, a couple friends and I (being Star Trek fans) would write small Trek games for our own amusement. You know, us versus the Klingons. Great fun at the time. The next summer found me in southern California spending several months with my uncle, who had just shelled out like $2000 for a Radio Shack 16k Level ll Basic machine. I learned to program basic, and started designing my own simple computer games. I remember spending countless hours typing in code from books, only to find there were bugs, and the program would not run...very frustrating. So I started fixing them myself. Space Invaders was big at the arcades (pretty much the first video game where the aliens shot back at ya), and Pac-Man had just come out. Watching the crowds, I knew this was going to be big. Another year passed, while I learned more about computers and started the ground work for several future video games. I had an Atari 800, then a Atari 1200XL, a Apple lle and a Commodore Vic 20, but quickly upgraded to the faster and more efficient Commodore 64. I mean, 64k of memory was a lot in those days, plus all the colors, etc. My walls were covered with giant sheets of graph paper, showcasing thousands of squares which were filled using colored pencils. You see, each square represented one Pixel or Dot that would appear on the screen. Two friends and I started on what ended up being three years of painstaking work on developing several video games. We programmed the games using Assembly, (we had decided that Pascal, Fortran, etc. were not powerful enough) and had to invent and create our own utilities to help with the writing, debugging and animation of the games themselves. I remember how excited we were reprogramming the Commodore's Jiffy Clock, and getting the screen to scroll smoothly during game play. No small feat at the time. Working with Sprites ( no soft drinks here, but make great aliens), we figured out how to surpass the 8 limit, and were able to have hundreds at once using clever programming techniques {Thank goodness for the human eye and all its flaws). Music and sound was no small feat either. We spent weeks to fine tune that stuff! You have to remember, there were no good books available for this sort of thing. The technology was changing very rapidly (still is), and most folks who did purchase a computer were lucky to get the machine to load a game at all, let alone design one. We stored everything on the big floppy disks, and used an old (then state of the art) Epson bi-directional dot matrix printer to print out all our sheets of source code and object code into seperate piles (Hundreds of pages). Those old printers were really loud, once had neighbors complain during an all night session...okay, several weeks of all night sessions. You have to remember that in those days games were being designed by one or two people who did it all, compared to the hundred or so required to produce today's advanced programs. Here in America, most people were using floppy drives, though Europe had mostly tape systems. New games were always test marketed in Europe and Japan before ever hitting the States. This required us to make Beta versions onto tape; not easy when your program is structured for a disk system. Piracy was getting bad, and the big companies that once rushed to see the fruits of our labors (Creative Software, Epyx, Broderbund, Activision,Sierra-On-Line, Sirius,etc.) were getting into major financial trouble. Too many games that all looked alike (the magic industry could learn a good lesson here), and cut-throat tactics in marketing led many to Chapter 11 status. Fact is, the software companies were partially to blame, often giving unrealistic deadlines, and not really caring about quality. In the end, those that did survive downsized from several large buildings, to one small. Games were carefully analyzed before being published, and the console systems (ColecoVision, Intellivision, Atari, etc.) were well on their way to the graveyard as well. Major magazines were dropping like flies, and the only programs still making moola were the arcade machines, though that too started to fade for many of the same reasons as the home systems. Around 1987 or so I purchased the first Amiga 500, sporting an impressive Motorola 8086 processor, 16 bit graphics, and Icons that worked much the same way Windows does today. This was a last stab at game designing as a career. The machine was very cool, easy for the end-user, but a real bear for the programmers. Commodore had a good thing, but blew it in the end (but that's another story). Again, very little information, and once again we found ourselves making our own utilities and programs. Sprites and Bobs (Blitter object blocks) became useful, and we even managed to use Zero Page and The Stack to our advantage. Dangerous stuff at the time, but resulted in State of the Art game play. The last game we did had thousands of screens, killer animations, and a wonderful musical score. Unfortunately it was too little, too late. After that, I pretty much dropped off the computer scene until about three years ago...my, have the times changed. Games are produced like movies involving a slew of people, tasks that we once had to hand code are now hardware-driven (scrolling, lighting, etc), and the market is a whole new ballgame. Though I see many companies don't seem to learn from history. Fun stuff, great memories. Thanks for the opportunity to share...
"Always be you because nobody else can" - Steve Brooks
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WilliamWHolcomb Special user Twinsburg, Ohio 533 Posts |
Yes, it is a wonderful walk down memory lane. Like Steve, I also began with a Radio Shack (Tandy) LII Basic. From there my parents bought me almost every computer that came out: Atari 400 and 800, Commodore Vic-20 and 64 (both with tape drives), the add-on to Colecovision...well the list goes on.
I can remember a time when a 250MB HD cost nearly $1000! I ran a BBS using Wildcat software and hardware costing well over $5k...today's handheld PDAs have more power! Ah, the good ol' days!
William Holcomb
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