Just to prove that your audio investments are good.

evhudsons

I had one of these as a kid. I remember my excitement when we upgraded from 4k to 16k. Four times the memory! I was the coolest kid on the block or so I thought.
My dad signed me up without my permission to present a silly program I had written one silly night. My dad is a math professor and showed me some Basic programming. In a slight rebellious mood and trying to be sarcastic about our yard situation with a dog I didn't like or want, I wrote this program.
I had to present this program to an auditorium full of academia and other interested folks from around the entire town.

My program was written in basic and I called it "puppy plops". It was a very simple randomized program where you start off at the front gate of the house and try to cross the yard to the front door and avoid stepping in dog doo. With each step you either made one successful step, or you stepped in doo. After a certain number of successful steps you reached the door safely. There was only one other kid that presented a program. The other people were mostly college professors and some college students that had written programs. The other kid was smart as heck and had written a program on an Apple II that displayed the Hebrew alphabet as graphics in which each letter appeared as 3d and in different color. So after this kid wowed the entire auditorium with his kickbutt program, I had to get up and with seriousness explain my dog doo program.
Thanks Dad! I guess he got me back for writing the program to begin with.

I was so embarrassed, but even more embarrassed when people actually asked questions at the end of the presentation. I was only 11 or 12 years old! I'm hearing my voice mic'd up for the first time ever bouncing off the walls in front of hundreds of people. It was otherwise silent except for me talking about puppy ****. The questions were serious and I was doing my best to respond in kind. I remember how people really seemed curious, almost more curious about my program than the other brilliant kid who wrote what I thought was a killer program.

I saw this ad today and it brought back all these memories so I decided to share. It makes you also feel more confident that your depreciation of your audio investments will be much less than these old computers were, just look at the price of the printer package system!

Glowrdr

My dad was a computer programmer and was in college during all my years of growing up (or should i say getting older..lol). I remember 2 things that stuck out from being a little whiz kid on a PC. First was helping teachers learn to use the PC. I couldn't have even been 8-10 yet. This was back in the day when each floor in the school had 1 PC and printer on a cart, and it basically was used for printing birthday banners using PrintShop. The school sent me home with a permission slip and everything so I could stay after school and show the teachers how to use everything.

The second thing I had a blast with was a little program I wrote as well. Nothing fancy, basically just made fun of my sister (my dad thought this was hillarious at the time). It pretty much said "Type your name" - if you typed "Brian", it said you are cool. If you typed anything else, it cycled through you are dumb, you smell, and Brian is cooler.

gimpod

"Hello World."

evhudsons

That's a great program too! Mine was super simple. It was only maybe 12 or so lines of basic. Something like : if number between x and y then goto line 6. And so on

dudeinaroom

Man I kind of miss those days, mine was on a commodore 64c though. I remember when CD-rom drives first came out. The teacher was in the front of the room and I was in the back. We were doing a demo of installing the drives with half the class around either of us. We were installing them on some 486/sx 66mhz machines, you had to use jumpers for DMA and IRQ settings. After we were done I popped in a beastie boys cd and recorded about 10 seconds of Paul Revere.

TitaniumMan

I started out with a couple of end-of-life computers. C=64 and Coco2. I liked programming so much, I quickly progressed to 6502 and 6809 assembly and machine language. Proofing that stuff led to eyestrain like you wouldn't believe.

Now if someone needed help with that kind of stuff, I'd be completely lost. Heck, I barely remember how to load a program on those old computers .

JimMueller

I started with a Atari 1200XL and later a //e & //GS. I programmed BASIC on the Atari, but learned machine language (not assembly) on the //e as a result of removing copy protection. My HS CompSci teacher wouldn't let me submit the final project in machine though, and I remember him docking my only points because I didn't document the command POP - because we didn't cover it in class. I remember the days where I'd write machine code in the back of my notebooks. Now I barely remember $A9 was LDA and $EA was NOP.

dfretwell

I remember paying $1000 for a VCR. Seems funny these days

ViperZ

dudeinaroom wrote: »

Man I kind of miss those days, mine was on a commodore 64c though. I remember when CD-rom drives first came out. The teacher was in the front of the room and I was in the back. We were doing a demo of installing the drives with half the class around either of us. We were installing them on some 486/sx 66mhz machines, you had to use jumpers for DMA and IRQ settings. After we were done I popped in a beastie boys cd and recorded about 10 seconds of Paul Revere.

DX2 was 66, SX was 33 and 40 if I remember

Joe08867

I went from a VIC 20 to a TRS 80. I thought I was king of the world that day.

evhudsons

I remember the "computer room" at my dad's school. It was a room with machines that had punch cards that would run at the top. I don't know what they were but they were the computers of the day then.

dudeinaroom

ViperZ wrote: »

DX2 was 66, SX was 33 and 40 if I remember

Yep. I think you're right. I remember half of the computers at school having a turbo button on them. Sitting there using basic, and making the computer say swear words. Man wish I would have stayed into computers and electronics more. But nooooo, I had to take a year off. You know what happens when you take a year off. Oh well, my fault, I'll fix it, better late then never.

Danny Tse

TitaniumMan wrote: »

I started out with a couple of end-of-life computers. C=64

Meet the all-new Commodaore 64

If TI can only bring back the 99/4A :rolleyes:

evhudsons

That's incredible!

cnh

Are we getting our geek on here? lol I'm probably older than everyone above and I wasn't aware of PCs till I had to write up a Dissertation and they began to appear in University Depts. like mine! I had heard of Fortran, Basic and COBOL, because my undergad college also had a college of Engineering and some of us took an introductory course on computers over there. God, how "tedious" algorithmic reasoning was, is? Since I haven't followed any of this since then I simply imagine that all these "machine" languages are just endless ways of figuring out how to write code for something unbelievable simple--yet the code took forever to get that mindless computer to do that--its only saving grace was that it could repeat a series of instructions at lightning speed again and again and again. So it made up for its stupidity with speed. lol

Obviously my knowledge and understanding of all this is quite dated! But I would imagine that you still have to be a bit geekish and nerdy to learn such languages, even if they're more streamlined and less tedious and complex. I bet they're still out of reach of the "average" person.

Commodore, one of my suite-mates in Grad School was the son of one of the owners of Commodore. He introduced us to his PET prototype and was majoring in Experimental Physics at the time. Ah, memories! How the years pass, and pass and pass!

cnh

NotaSuv

evhudsons wrote: »

I remember the "computer room" at my dad's school. It was a room with machines that had punch cards that would run at the top. I don't know what they were but they were the computers of the day then.

hahahah had one in our HS like that.......seemed like all in there had thick black rimmed glasses