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Re: Computers and personalities

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"mm0fmf" <none@mailinator.com> wrote in message 
news:URjGx.532034$vz7.54341@fx07.am4...
> On 04/09/2015 11:13, James Harris wrote:

>> I wondered if, in the future, people would be as nostialgic for the
>> Raspberry Pi - in, say, 30 years time.
>
> My first job out of university in 1983 was writing games and games 
> development software for Spectrum, Vic20, C64.

That sounds like a fun first job. Better than writing report-generation 
and accounts software!

I worked for a bank. Perhaps the most fun work I did there was 
programming the cheque sorters. We had so many milliseconds between the 
MICR or OCR characters being read to decide which pocket they should be 
routed to so as well as being distincive machines the programs had to 
work within a specific timing budget, making the task a bit different to 
the usual mainframe work.

> I didn't think they were great machines when they paid my wages and I 
> certainly am not nostalgic for them now.
>
> Nor for the Amiga and its godawful OS software. I did think the Atari 
> ST was OK. Awful OS but the hardware was cheap and powerful for the 
> time.

Machines were awful at the time. All of them I remember had serious 
limitations. For example,

* The Commodore Pet's Basic allowed only single-line functions. Its 
graphics were all blocks that you had to put together (and they didn't 
always juxtapose as they should have).

* The ZX Spectrum's screen had hi-res graphics but the attributes 
covered an 8x8 square so you had to account for that.

* One machine (I think a Nascom 2 but am not sure) refreshed the screen 
at 60 Hz and that could play havoc with a monitor run on 50 Hz mains. I 
remember one screen wobble so bad that it quickly felt like your eyes 
were being fried!

No one, I think, seriously wants to go back to those days.

By the way, the ZX Spectrum's keyboard was almost universally derided so 
it is suprising to hear that it has been recreated, in part, as a 
Bluetooth keyboard!

The machines of that era were bad in different ways. I find it odd that 
people want to recreate some of them but they do.

> What I did enjoy was that people thought about the games and there 
> were many excellent games that were fun to play

Then why not recreate those games today? Has the market moved on?

James

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Computers and personalities "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-04 11:13 +0100
  Re: Computers and personalities mm0fmf <none@mailinator.com> - 2015-09-04 17:42 +0100
    Re: Computers and personalities The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2015-09-05 07:33 +0100
      Re: Computers and personalities David Taylor <david-taylor@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid> - 2015-09-05 11:43 +0100
        Re: Computers and personalities Folderol <general@musically.me.uk> - 2015-09-05 12:06 +0100
        Re: Computers and personalities Rob Morley <nospam@ntlworld.com> - 2015-09-05 14:37 +0100
        Re: Computers and personalities "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-05 14:45 +0100
    Re: Computers and personalities "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-05 14:41 +0100
    Re: Computers and personalities "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-05 15:02 +0100
      Re: Computers and personalities Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-09-05 15:46 +0000
      Re: Computers and personalities druck <news@druck.org.uk> - 2015-09-13 12:02 +0100

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