It's grandad!

[jhonan]

I'd like to introduce myself. I'm one of the classic breed of coders who grew up in 1980's Britain. Fist-fights in the playground over 'which-is-better-commodore-64-or-spectrum' and waiting a week for my punched cards to get back from the lab to see if my 3-line basic program ran or not.

Ah yes, these were the days of real coding. Learning the 6510 instruction set. In decimal. Having Jeff Minter as a hero.

You whippersnappers don't know how good you have it. What with your GUI interfaces and sound cards and wi-fi and what not. When I was a lad it was 45 minute wait times while 'The Hobbit' loaded from a cassette tape. And there's you lot squandering 4Gb of ram with your shoddy coding. Bah humbug to that! 32k useable ram - if we were lucky!

Now, I must leave it there. My ZX-81 power supply is overheating again, and I'm only half-way through typing in 'Monster Maze 3D' from this month's edition of Computer and Video Games.

[GNU-Fan]

Welcome aboard.

But "Granddad"? Which forum do you just come from?
Belonging to the same age group as you, I think you will laugh about having written that once you get to know some regulars of this forum. They didn't type hexcodes from magazines, they pushed levers and wires into plugboards. At least they could have

[curiousgirl]

My dad is always reminiscing about punchcards...

To this day he still writes all his programs in FORTRAN. I told my (age contemporary) friend this and he was "People STILL use FORTRAN?!?!?!?!?!"

[MASONTX]

Hey Grandad, welcome to the forum. I too remember punch cards, and punch card boxes that seemed longer than your arm. If even one card got out of order your program would crash, or if you got to the end of a line and reverted to your typewriter experience and put the next word on the next line instead of typing on, you got a data error. I don't know how many hours I spent hunting through a card deck trying to find all the extra spaces, and keypunch errors. I pulled a 486 out of the closet a couple of days ago and booted up to win 3.1. Guess I'm spoiled, I'll take my modern GUI, big hard disk, and large amounts of ram. Could I go back to that 486 and get along? Yes, but not near as fast or happy.

[Rubberman]

Well "granddad", I remember when my physicist father was all excited about the new drum memory system he was getting for the department computer! And I still remember using punch cards, paper tape, and finally an IBM key-to-disc console for the System-3 we were using at the first company I worked for after getting married in the 70's. It was the size of a REALLY big desk/engineering station, had a 1 line LED display, and wrote to an 8" single-sided, single-density floppy, but man did it beat the pants off of the card punch machines!

[elija]

Blimey! I can't compete with any of those

But I did program my Vic 20 in hex and yeah Jeff Minter was my hero and the Commodore 64 wiped it's arse on Sinclair Spectrums

[Rubberman]

Blimey! I can't compete with any of those

But I did program my Vic 20 in hex and yeah Jeff Minter was my hero and the Commodore 64 wiped it's arse on Sinclair Spectrums

I remember a vacation with my wife and daughter one time visiting her uncle at his sheep farm in Oregon. He had a Vic20 that he wanted to use to help manage the farm. I spent a day at his kitchen table writing a menu-based tape OS for him so he could pick applications and data files to run off of his tapes (no disc drive) from a menu. We used the embedded BASIC to do that! Since I was a professional software engineer at the time, I guess you could call it a "bus man's holiday".

[elija]

3.5K RAM. Ah those were the days! Mine really came to life when I got the 8K RAM PACK! Unlike the ZX81 RAM Pack it didn't fall out so often that you needed a rubber band to hold it in. Until it melted the band and fell out anyway!!

Another hero of mine was Scott Adams

And another one. I can't believe that the article glosses over his routing algorithm like that. Ah well that's Wikipedia for you

Those were my heroes at 13 years old. Which explains a lot about me

[Rubberman]

Another hero of mine was Scott Adams

And another one. I can't believe that the article glosses over his routing algorithm like that. Ah well that's Wikipedia for you

Adventure! "It was a maze of twisty little passages, all alike... PLUGH!". It will live on in the annals of gaming until the stars grow cold!

[TaZMAniac]

Ahhhh... Those were the days.
Built my own cassette tape interface so I could use my home cassette player rather then buying the Datasette. Needed the money to buy the 8k expansion card for the Vic 20. Then the 1540 diskette drive came out. That was another $400!

Wrote a database program to run on a TI-99A for a local video rental store.
Took me a couple of weeks to learn that foreign language. LOL!!
And those wonderful days of time shares on a 'super' computer.
Now I have more programming power in my DVD player.

All this brings back fond memories but I'll stick with my 3+ TB's of storage space and dual core cpu.

At my age I don't have time to waste.