Our local Secondary had the single ZX80/zx81 setup, before funding gave way to a specialized "Computer Room", where the Economics teacher was propelled into the legendary role of "Computer teacher". We all turned up one day expecting more zx81's to be confronted with banks of Link480z's and a big black 380z at the front, hooked up to a winchester drive running the whole setup. Then a bit later the BBC turned up and a lone Model B took up residence. CP/M was order of the day with limited graphics, virtually no sound, and ooh.. Access to Wordstar! heh..
It might seem bad , but hey it got me into college.. ( bearing in mind this was 1987 ), where we got to use the mighty Honeywell BULL mini computer, where people in white coats flitted round typing in the code you provided on paper because the damn thing didn't have enough runtime to share itself with all the class members heh.. You pretty much got to run your code in sequence.. write the code out, hand it to tech, come back in an hour, run it.. etc etc etc.. Sighhh hehe How we ever got anything done was something else..
Oh and not forgetting the day of the mighty Hard disk crash ( no self parkers on this baby ). A speck of dust or something must have got into the HD caddy..
The thing crashed like a 707, and came out looking like a 33 1/3rd.. heh Ahh the good old days! ( okay sort of.. heh not sure we REALLY needed to 'rediscover' Bresenham's method of drawing lines and circles by ourselves.. Damn you Bresenham, DAMN YOU!!
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But you know what, aside from all of the crappy things we remember, and nostalgia can be a little rose tinted, it truly WAS an amazing time to be alive. Spectrum, C64 became social items, the Xbox/PS3 of it's time.. The kid you never noticed who lived down the road until his parents bought a 2600 for Christmas. Forget Electro!! Their was only ONE reason for a double tape deck with high speed dubbin'.The unwrapping of the C60 ( or the C15's from WHSmiths if you needed it fast ), graph paper and pencil crayons. Returning Mastertronic games back to the local garage saying they didn't work and getting a different game in it's place. The whole kit and caboodle.. Yep.. awesome times.!!
Though I STILL say NOT getting an Oric Atmos for Christmas because of my Uncle who actually DID research was a good thing hehe
Chris Abbott wrote:I went to a private school (paid for by Maggie Thatcher and a reasonable brain!) and they actually had a computer room with 8 Pet 4032s in it, all connected to a single double disk drive. A cut off bit of pipe was called "The Flag" and was used to control who had access to the disk drive. Pet 8 had a hi-res graphics board, so we all used it for creating Moire patterns
Later they bought BBC Micros. Z80 was a dirty word, apparently!
The most impressive thing I ever played on a Pet (apart from Pet Invaders) was the "unofficial" Hitch Hiker's guide to the Galaxy text adventure game (later on this was changed when the copyright holders got wind of it, but we had the "real" version!): my first introduction to hacking was in breaking into this game to change my location. Since games were frowned upon in the computer room, we had to program our own, favourites being "guess the number", and the one where you have a guy at the bottom of the screen and have to get the right key before the increasing lines of text hit you on the head...
Since the Pet had the awesome machine code monitor, it was also fun to hack the interrupts to put message on the screen that couldn't be erased. And I still think I remember the SYS for the reset
(SYS 64738? Actually, is that the C64 one?)
Couple of years later I got my Atari 400 and the fun really began...
