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How far back do your computer memories go

My first fond computer memories date back about as much back as I can think back - tetris in ASCII graphics on an old computer with a green monitor. Don't remember the exact model, it belonged to my dad. Among the first "proper" games I played on a 486DX2 were "Stunt Island" (which was far ahead of its time imho) and Commander Keen 4.


bill5 said:
"Remember?" I still use MS Paint. :)

And while I'm not into gaming any more, I would rather play DOOM than most of the games out there today. I hate that they never came out with a legit DOOM 3 (what they called DOOM 3 was a joke, nothing at all like the orig).
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In case you missed them, after Doom 3 there were Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, which both were much better than Doom 3.
 
pixel said:
No it was actually a game called... "Castle" :D I just googled it https://dosgames.com/game/the-castle/
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That reminds me of an old-time favorite: Scorched Earth. Simple and yet creative in how many diff kinds of weapons you had.


MartinH. said:
My first fond computer memories date back about as much back as I can think back - tetris in ASCII graphics on an old computer with a green monitor. Don't remember the exact model, it belonged to my dad. Among the first "proper" games I played on a 486DX2 were "Stunt Island" (which was far ahead of its time imho) and Commander Keen 4.




In case you missed them, after Doom 3 there were Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, which both were much better than Doom 3.
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ugh. Agree to disagree. DOOM 2 will never get a worthy sequel. That company so screwed up.

But the first game I spent a crazy amount of time on was its predecessor, Wolfenstein. The first person perspective was ground-breaking.
 
wahey73 said:
. . .and funny enough the Trumpets haven't been too bad back in these days
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I was gigging with--and playing horn parts on--a Prophet VS (rack) for a while when I bought a Proteus, and I agree that the brass did not sound too bad at all. Back then, our front man was a really good sax player (he would bring a tenor and a soprano) and people told me/us that when we played lines together, the two instruments actually sounded pretty darned authentic (i.e., the live sax and the sampled brass) as if the Proteus became "real"-er.
Same effect with the super-silky strings in the VS when played along with the Emu's strings.
Thanks for the memories, @wahey73
 
In France, there was a deal between public education administration and French manufacturer Thomson back in the late 80’s
TO-5 and TO-7 were the models, totally proprietary but shipped with a optic pencil.
IIRC TO-16 was then released which was half compatible with PC programming.
The company was then sold and stopped producing these machines.
I guess you can still find some in schools basements.
 
Mike P. got the first VIC-20 in my elementary school. I went to his house, the only time, just to see it. He later got a Commodore 64 and bragged about it a bit, dropping here and there his superior knowledge on its workings. I wanted one so much. From the newspaper, I had cut out a Commodore 64 ad, and I kept it in my room, asking for one for birthday, then for Christmas. My dad never got me one.

My friend John had a Radio Shack Tandy 1000 (IIRC), and we played games on in. One was a Star Trek game, but it was more like choose-your-own adventure, and some visuals that were basically ASCI art. The text on the screen was green. We also played a James Bond type game, and maybe something like Asteroids.

I did a summer class through our rec department on Basic, when I was in eighth grade.

Honker, a friend, got an Apple IIe when we were in junior high school. He soon found out he could print out very small font text, and he sold compact and dense cheat sheets for a dollar.

In the '90s, I remember having a group of search engines that I would use, Webcrawler being my favorite. Some time before 2000, give or take a few years, I remember when I first heard about Google. This guy in my group in a National Writing Project program pointed out how it was a way better search engine. It was.
 
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pixel said:
No it was actually a game called... "Castle" :D I just googled it https://dosgames.com/game/the-castle/
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That looks advanced... I remember that screenshot:

ballerburg.gif

It was in Holland in a living community of music students... they had a Commodore with a soccer game and "Ballerburg" on Atari.
I didn't live there but they told me that one day there was a truck passing the house in that cobblestone street and dropping a beer barrel directly at their door. Instant carma.
 
KIM-1, given to me by my uncle in a gift crate after he quit electronics.

TRS-80 that I first learned at the library, then became a pest typing in programs at the Radio Shack.

TI-994A. Thanks, Mr. Huxtable. You fooled my dad into getting one, but it could do a lot, especially with the massive floppy drive rack and programs I typed in from magazines. Through hundreds of "CALL SOUND pitch, dur" lines, I could make a tune. Extended Basic, yeah.

PC's from 5150 up to the present day, always Macintosh for photo, design, and then video. Until the PC world caught up.

Good trip with you all remembering. I'm agog, but not surprised at many of the responses.
 
Gerbil said:
The ZX81 was the first computer I used. My mum's friend ran a kid's chess club at her place and her son had one with a dungeons and dragons type game on it. I had zero interest in chess but every interest in his computer and used to lose the games as quickly as possible so I could get on it.

Oh and our school band was called GOTO10.
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Spinal Tap was originally GOTO11. :geek:
 
puremusic said:
It always surprised me that the IBM clones won the computer wars to take over the market back then. The Commodores and ATARIs were far better machines out of the box at the time and I figured they'd just keep upgrading as time went by and keeping ahead.
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Quite a few years ago, I read a history of Atari and if I recall correctly, it involved a lot of self destruction inside the company to lose the considerable technology lead they had at the time.

That reminds me of an episode in my 80s working life: I had an Atari 1040St as my home computer, using it mostly for music and gaming. At work there were only IBM PCs with MS DOS (without graphics cards) and some VAX/VMS servers. I worked as a DBA (database administrator) and was charged with developing a relational database for a new in-house system. So naturally I wanted to create a diagram (boxes with text and arrows) summarizing how the various database parts related to each other. Since none of the work computers could create even such simple graphics, I bought a diagramming program with my own money for my trusty Atari 1040ST at home, printed it on my Roland DG (yes Roland also makes printers!) dot matrix printer and brought it to the office (at least they had copy machines!) My boss was blown away - nobody had ever created a diagram with a computer at that place before. -- Soon thereafter I left for a company where I got a Mac SE on my desk and graphics creation was an every day occurrence.
 
Before I entered elementary school in the early 70's my mom took me to her place of work. She worked for a government contractor. The Reel to Reel Data tapes were taller than I was. The first computer I ever used was the infamous TRS-80 by Radio Shack. It was in my schools computer club. I was hooked. But then I became a Commodore person with the Vic-20, 64, 128D, then the Amiga. I DO reemmber going to the local military base and in the shopping center computer section, I was floored by the LISA. Ah...memories.
 
Computer memories eh? In fact I remember it all :) (* denotes machines I still own)

*TRS-80, one 32k and the other a 64k, I was mostly doing programming on that green screen

Atari 800XL, here too, mostly programming, felt nice to switch from green to blue

*Zenith Data Systems XT 8Mhz, Monochrome 12" Orange, 20MB ST-225 hdd, mostly programming and some games

Zenith Data Systems AT 286 12Mhz, 40mb hdd, came with 512k ram, bought an addon card to get to 640k, came with an ATI EGA Wonder and..an orange EGA monochrome 12" screen, played games, programming and started some music composing on it using Adlib Visual Composer and Voyetra Sequencer Plus. Oh also spent a LOT of time on Deluxe Paint fiddling with gradients for some reason.

Custom 386DX40, didn't keep this one for long

Custom 486DX33 with 4MB of ram, 170Mb HDD, 14" VGA monitor hooked on an ATI VGA Wonder, later upgraded to 8mb, all sorts of HDD sizes. Used for composing music and programming mostly

*Custom 486DX266, 5 1/4, 3 1/2, 16mb, 250mb HDD, S3 SVGA, AWE32 with 4mb x2 simms

The rest I consider too modern for my era but here goes:

Custom AMD DX4-120
Custom Pentium 66, 133, 200MMX, 233MMX
Custom Pentium II 350, 400
Custom Pentium III 800, 1000, 1333
Custom Pentium IV 2.0, 3.0, 3.2, 3.4
Custom AMD Athlon XP3000+
Custom Core2Duo E6700
*Custom Core2Quad Q6600
Custom i3-2100
Custom i5-2400, i5-4570, i5-6400
*Custom i7-2600, i7-3770
etc, etc, etc

Edit: Oops, forgot the Macs haha.

*iMac G3, 650Ghz, 512MB, 40Gb
*PowerMac Dual G5 x 2
iMac Mid 2001, i7-2600, 16Gb x 2
 
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Wow!! I was in tech support for an insurance company in 1988 and I remember having to load Word Perfect from 10 or so 3.5 discs. Also did backups every night on those big reels you see in 70s sci fI films. 1 hour in you might hit a bad sector of tape and have to start over.
Also our mainframe was a data general computer that would break down a lot and the reps would have to drive in from 2 hours away at midnight to get it up and running with spare parts before the insurance sales guys would come in at 9 am and yell at us if the machine was still down.

good times. Good times.

ps. Wolfenstein was huge!!

pps I remember when aol started with chat rooms and it was so new and exciting we didn’t even get upset when someone disagreed with us about things.
 
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