General Computer Thread

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Some-one must have been suckered by those Prime ads with Tom Bake and Lala Ward

I think it was actually a Pr1me 9950 minicomputer. It really struggled to handle more than a dozen or so concurrent users on dumb terminals with the course applications we were using.

Never saw the ads back in the 80s. Perhaps they were only shown in the US.

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[Gingerbread Demon]

Some-one must have been suckered by those Prime ads with Tom Bake and Lala Ward

And K9 K9 was in those ads too.

EDIT: the ads ran here in Australia a lot

The only fond thing I remember of Dos was doing batch files and making menus for some of the old hard disks I had which had lots of stuff (usually games) on them. I wrote nice little menus where you pick a number off a list and that program would load and that was the most fun I got out of learning basic stuff in there. Didn't do much else with it. Oh and who remembers CPM commands?

 

[John Clark]

You guys are proper silicon heads and I'm not being derogatory. I barely remember the configuration of my previous system (or even the current one), never mind the first one I bought twenty-six years ago.

Only because I didn't really get a PC til a couple of years later. I had been given one of the old XTs around that time, but the first real pc I used much was a 386 sx25 laptop. I didn't pay that much attention to the innards though. My first one I bought was the dx2-66 and that I'm more familiar with.
(the 386 was one my dad had for work that I got to play around on a bit)

 

[Marc]

Oh and who remembers CPM commands?

CPM commands weren't much different from the basic commands in the earlier version of DOS.

First computer I used was a Kaypro II which ran CPM, used Wordstar on it had a Star Trek game on it and Adventure but I kept getting stuck in the maze of twisty passages all alike.

 

[XCV330]

CPM commands weren't much different from the basic commands in the earlier version of DOS.

First computer I used was a Kaypro II which ran CPM, used Wordstar on it had a Star Trek game on it and Adventure but I kept getting stuck in the maze of twisty passages all alike.

My sister had one of those, though I think it was the Sanyo copy of it, so it was a copy of a copy of a copy. I was still using a Tandy CoCo with a tape drive and my dream computer was an Amiga, so I didn't really see why PC was the real future of things.

 

[Santaman]

I never got into Apple of Amiga.. I do have two Atari ST machines that I should dig out again someday..

 

[John Clark]

I never got into Apple of Amiga.. I do have two Atari ST machines that I should dig out again someday..

I only had a little experience with the ST (one of my friends at the time had one) but I did love my Amiga (500+).

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I now recall that I had a BBC Micro model B and a cheap, remaindered Sinclair QL back in the mid 80s. The BBC micro was superb although a bit pricey - you could even buy an add-on expansion that would allow you to run UNIX if you wanted. The QL was frankly a bit rubbish - its BASIC didn't have an EVAL function. I sold it on at the same price I paid for it.

 

[Santaman]

We had a BBC computer back in school, mainly used for a program called LOGO IIRC, can't remember what it did again, I do remember its error messages: LOGO Doesn't know this or that.

Of course we did play games too.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

We had a BBC computer back in school, mainly used for a program called LOGO IIRC, can't remember what it did again, I do remember its error messages: LOGO Doesn't know this or that.

Of course we did play games too.

Elite for the win - yay! A great example of how one can program procedurally to extract a quart (in fact, much much more) from a pint pot. I think the art of programming minimally and efficiently has been sadly lost in an age of stonkingly huge code libraries.

The BBC micro was also great for platform and adventure games if those were of interest. Much better graphics than the Spectrum and its ilk.

I also built my own joystick, light pen, speech synthesiser, and quite a few other electronics projects using the provided input bus and A2D converters, and wrote a graphics library to drive a Tandy 4-colour pen plotter. I recently got back into this hobby using Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards but it's almost too easy now. Almost always the project works first time!

BBC BASIC was quite advanced as BASIC goes and I think there was a 6502 machine code assembler included or it was relatively cheap to purchase as an extra. I even bought a floppy drive, which was a real time saver compared to using cassette tape storage.

There was also a fairly boring spitfire simulator with very simplistic wireframe graphics. I got bored after killing the pathetic alien and flying inverted under the suspension bridge a couple of times.

 

[Marc]

We had a BBC computer back in school, mainly used for a program called LOGO IIRC, can't remember what it did again, I do remember its error messages: LOGO Doesn't know this or that.

but did you ever get a chance to play around on an Archimedes?

my high school had a BBC lab (and a couple of Macs) and there was demonstration to the Archimedes to staff (saw it being carried in to the staff room) but never saw one live.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I now recall that I had a BBC Micro model B and a cheap, remaindered Sinclair QL back in the mid 80s. The BBC micro was superb although a bit pricey - you could even buy an add-on expansion that would allow you to run UNIX if you wanted. The QL was frankly a bit rubbish - its BASIC didn't have an EVAL function. I sold it on at the same price I paid for it.

Did you have the microdrives? What did you think of those?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Did you have the microdrives? What did you think of those?

I think it came with a microdrive. It seemed to work ok but it wasn't anything like as fast as floppy discs, unsurprisingly, given the use of a tape-based medium. I didn't have the machine long enough to evaluate the long-term reliability of the microdrive or the cartridges.

 

[Santaman]

but did you ever get a chance to play around on an Archimedes?

my high school had a BBC lab (and a couple of Macs) and there was demonstration to the Archimedes to staff (saw it being carried in to the staff room) but never saw one live.

No, unfortunately I never got my hands on one, just the BBC Micro, long time ago that was..

 

[John Clark]

Our school had a load of BBC's and they were fun to try out.. We did later get PC's, but those were for when you took your options and picked IT. (I didn't get the chance at those as the tutors thought I'd already picked a too science based set )

For my home ones, before I got into PC's, it was an Oric48k, Sinclair Spectrum 48k, Spectrum 128k (a little later on)m then the Amiga A500+. It's been mostly PC's since (though I do have a ps1, 2 and Wii)

 

[Guy Gardener]

Our school had a load of BBC's and they were fun to try out..

In porn, that means something different.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/tags.php?tag=bbc

 

[Santaman]

Big Beige Casing, yes we all know..

I seem to have a whole bunch of Socket A chips, so far I've identified a Duron 700 (in use) a Duron 750, 800, 850 and a damaged Duron 1000, several Athlon chips too and at least three Socket A Sempron chips, I can remember how I obtained some of them, others I am not sure how they ended up in my collection, strangely, while I never bought any Pentium 4's I have a whole heap of them now ranging from 1400Mhz Williamette (Socket 478 though) up to a Prescott 630..

 

[Santaman]

Had a Sempron 145 machine lying around, I needed the powersuply for another machine, obtained a Asus OEM PSU for little money, it is a modern unit from a Asus PC, 300 watt is more than enough for the Sempron, that's a 45 watt chip, there's no discrete graphics card, one HDD and two old DVD/DVD Writers fitted so I guess it won't even break 80 watts.
The PSU is from AcBel, not the most reputable OEM but it is an Asus OEM, it is a modern unit so I assume ripple and noise will be low at the wattage the machine asks.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Had a Sempron 145 machine lying around, I needed the powersuply for another machine, obtained a Asus OEM PSU for little money, it is a modern unit from a Asus PC, 300 watt is more than enough for the Sempron, that's a 45 watt chip, there's no discrete graphics card, one HDD and two old DVD/DVD Writers fitted so I guess it won't even break 80 watts.
The PSU is from AcBel, not the most reputable OEM but it is an Asus OEM, it is a modern unit so I assume ripple and noise will be low at the wattage the machine asks.

So how much power did it draw? Can you measure that?

 

[Santaman]

I've got a powermeter somewhere, just that somewhere part is unknown..