Members J3RK Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 Anyone else have Journey's video game for the Atari 2600? Yes, and a very sad tale to go with it. I was around 4 maybe 5 when it came out or at least when I got it. It was my favorite game, I played it, Laser Blast, Turmoil, and Yar's Revenge frequently. I put in Journey: Escape one day, and it fried. Toasted right in front of me. I made my dad take it apart to fix it. I think he did it to humor me more than anything, as there was just a single ROM chip in it if I remember correctly. It sat on a shelf in my room for many a year after that. Even after I no longer had a 2600... But, I play it every once in a while in an emulator now. :) I wonder if that's why I'm not a big Journey fan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Crawling Wind Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 I was an early Borland employee. Worked there for 7 years before getting downsized. The Quattro Pro 4.0 release party was memorable! As far as jobs go, it was a high point for me. That was a company that took care of it's people and we were happy there every day. Who can say that now? Keg parties on Friday, swimming pool, gymnasium, jacuzzi after work, sushi chefs... I could go on. As they say, good times... QuattroQuattro ProLotus 1-2-3WordPerfectBorelandISAModem/Dial Up Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members soundwave106 Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 QEMMGravis UltrasoundANSI graphicsTurbo PascalWYSIWYG *add ons*PFS Write Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Spleencage Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 I was Apple all the way back to 1983, DOS commands, 64 k, dot matrix.I didnt even have a hard drive until 1990, 40 meg cost $500 and that was the cheapest one made from Ehman.1 meg of RAM was $200 for my Apple SE. And that operating system, even though vastly easier to run in general than Microsoft at that time , had plenty of quirks and strange maneuvers you had to do to install apps, (the font/DA mover up until OS7) oh and that extensions manager (up until system 10) definitely put some grey hairs on my head. I will say, I never had a problem with any hardware EVER, not one time. ONly had one minor virus called "scores" which attached itself to documents. Favorite early 90's Mac game- Dark Castle- very cool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members carbon111 Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 My first computer was in 1976 when my dad brought home a TRS-80. It had a whopping 4K of RAM that I manually upgraded to 16K...I couldn't imagine a program so big that it couldn't fit in that massive amount of RAM. IIRC, At that time Microsoft only had a few programs - A version of BASIC, A typing tutor and a text adventure game called "Adventure". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Plink Floyd Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members J3RK Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 My first computer was in 1976 when my dad brought home a TRS-80. It had a whopping 4K of RAM that I manually upgraded to 16K...I couldn't imagine a program so big that it couldn't fit in that massive amount of RAM. IIRC, At that time Microsoft only had a few programs - A version of BASIC, A typing tutor and a text adventure game called "Adventure". I had a Timex Sinclair, (my dad's first computer,) laying around at one point with a 16K RAM expansion. It didn't really do much of anything, but it's old, and technically a computer. My first official computer though was the C64. (we had a Vic 20 for a very short period right before the 64 came out, but we traded it in) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members KEB Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 (My TRS-80 was purposely left out of this, as I try to psycologically black out the owership experience.)haha, Trash-80 for the win.(I don't think I've typed the phrase "Trash-80" since 1986. ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members J3RK Posted February 11, 2010 Members Share Posted February 11, 2010 haha, Trash-80 for the win. (I don't think I've typed the phrase "Trash-80" since 1986. ) Did you type it ON the Trash-80 the last time? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Goofball Jones Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 First computer, Apple II. Yes, one of the original Apple II's. Then my parents bought one of the first IBM-PC's and we dealt with that for a while. While in the Air Force I got one of the original Amiga's and was a BIG time evangelist for it...trashing the Mac any chance I could. Of course, Commodore was it's own worse enemy and the Amiga died a slow death. When I was looking at getting the Amiga, it was sitting right next to an Atari ST...which at the time was THE computer to get in terms of MIDI and music in general from what I remember. But I wasn't into it back then (was a bassist). I didn't get into Mac's until right at the change from System 6 to System 7. Now I'm OS X all the way. I'll never go back. I'm more in love with the OS than I am with the actual machines. I mean, they're nice and all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Meatball Fulton Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 Token Ring....I wrote my master's thesis about token ring Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Gribs Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 Memories and stuff - just because... please forgive my self-indulgence. I remember a family barbecue to celebrate that my uncles Don and Al both came back from Vietnam for the final time (alive) - this time to stay. I remember when it was so freaking cool that the astronauts drove a dune buggy on the moon (PS - it is still freaking cool). My Dad bought an Atari 130XE sometime in the early '80's though I can't remember when exactly. I do remember playing Ultima III Exodus on it over Xmas break from college though - I think after my freshman year (Jan 1984). I own a Kodak pocket 110 instamatic camera, though I don't know if it still works. I have a sign from the Silver Halide research laboratory at Eastman Kodak, where I was a summer intern, that says "Dark! Do not enter". The lab was a a physics and physical chemistry lab that studies the electronic structure, charge transport processes, and latent image formation in the silver halide emulsions in photographic film. The labs had interlocking doors that prevented dark experiments from being ruined. I have a 1982 Gibson ES335 Pro that I bought brand new (in 1982 duh!) for $850 including the case. I have two bicentennial glass coffee jars with red plastic lids that my mom bought (with coffee in them) when I was 11. One has a bunch of pencils and stuff in it and the other has my collection of odd coins, mostly wheat pennies (nothing worth a lot). I read the Hitchhiker's Guide books when they were funny and poignant. I met Issac Asimov and have his autograph somewhere. I met Harlan Ellison and rode in a my friend Bill's car with him to bring him back from the airport when he visited University of Rochester to give a talk and participate in a panel discussion at a conference. I had one of the early fat digital watches with red LEDs on it. Xerox bought a scientific calculator for my dad. I saw an ad for it in the paper and it cost over 200 dollars. It had sin, cos, tan, log, ln, and e^x on it. I had a calculator watch in college. My freshman programming classes in college were in Pascal (math department) and Fortran (engineering). I own an HP 41CX Calculator with the Mathematical and Circuit Analysis plugin modules and a magnetic strip reader. I still consider it to be a great calculator but I don't use it anymore. I also own an HP 15C calculator - also great but not as great as the 41CX. I have the Assembly language book that came with the Intel 80/85 series manuals that were issued to me in college. Intel donated 80/85 microcomputers, an SDK that ran on Unix, and chipset and programming manuals to all the EE students for our computer engineering lab. I took both the computer engineering and Electrical engineering concentrations. I still have a Vax/VMS operating system manual - just can't get rid of some things. It is a token of my past y'know. I have programmed on a CDC Cyber, a Digital Equipment Rainbow, various Vax computers (and the amazing micro-vax that you could keep in your office and didn't need a raised floor and an air-conditioned computer room!), early IBM mainframes, PDP-11's, various Cray supercomputers, a Thinking Machines Connection Machine (CM200), a Spark Station, and various SGI workstations. I still program in FORTRAN 77 (Intel Visual Fortran Professional compiler with IMSL and the Intel Math Kernel Library). And yes Intel still supports it actively and it is still a standard language for hard core, die hard numerical methods people. Visual studio makes it possible to make DLL's to hook Fortran code up with Visual Basic .NET, C++, and others. I remember junior year walking back from class to my dorm room and stopping by to see what had drawn a small crowd around my resident advisor's door and was shocked to see on her TV the space shuttle challenger launching and exploding. I think the first thing out of my mouth was that this is a horrible day for science and engineering in the United States. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Plink Floyd Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 I read the Hitchhiker's Guide books when they were funny and poignant...I had one of the early fat digital watches with red LEDs on it. That was back when we still thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea! (And I think HGTTG is still funny...) . . . . . . Baby Floyd was 13 months old when the Reds flew this over his crib: Every kid my age wanted to be an astronaut... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members SoundMuppet Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 Great thread. Anyone else use Wordstar to write assembly code? This was the first method I used to write assembler, later editors dedicated to the task were really slick (Textpad was the last one I used...very cool), but using a word processor package was interesting. I remember when HTML came out. A guy I worked with said how new and revolutionary it was (and I have to admit, it's 'use' was) however I had to point out that 'Superwriter' was actually a markup language(albeit for document editing) and had been around a while! Anyone program BCPL? We had a token ring network where this was the programming language....I never did anything serious with the language, but did play with it. Sharp PC1211 Pocket Computer, my introduction to computing and my long relationship with the Basic Programming language This led me to using Microsofts Quick Basic(the DOS version) as a 'wrapper' to access the PC Bios (remember when that was a lot easier) to do a fully graphical and mouse driven application for a test platform. I even managed to chat to a Quck Basic Developer here in the US (I worked in the UK at the time for a tiny company) by mistake, called the tech line for something and I got passed through and had a great chat (also resolved my problem), that would probably not happen today(Would it?). Remember when the Atari 1040ST was the coolest computer I had ever seen....especially with the graphical interface. We ripped the eeproms out of them and re-programmed them to be dumb terminals to our token ring network. And for the Borland officionado's, OWL.....hands down a better approach to building GUI's even when it was still text based! Was it true that MS would send limo's over to Borland to pick up defectors? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members carbon111 Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 I still have that TRS-80 I was talking about. ...and it still works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ClavAnother Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 I watch movies on teh betamax. can I be in this thread??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Plink Floyd Posted February 12, 2010 Members Share Posted February 12, 2010 I watch movies on teh betamax. Ya mean, still??? I guess it's OK, if you watch on this set: Beta was the first home VCR I saw. Some guy my parents knew had this model, or something like it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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