What Do You Use to Access The Forum?

[Guest]

They had an OS in order to work but not in the same way as Windows and the like with desktop icons. So when you turned it on you were just met with a blinking cursor.....

That’s what he meant BBCs had no proper OS, like nearly all other home computers they used the built-in BASIC interpreter as a rudimentary operating system.

I only ever got to use a BBC in secondary school, which had a classroom full of them and that we got to do Logo on for a few weeks or months when I was 14. By that time I already had about eight years more computer experience behind me than most of my classmates, as my father had bought a Sharp MZ-80K as our first computer. That got replaced by an Apple II clone some years later, my brother and I got a Spectrum+ later again, and from there it all went on to an MS-DOS PC, Windows, Linux and since 2005, I’ve been mainly using iMacs. And I’ve got a modest collection of things like a Commodore 64, a couple of Amiga 500s, a Macintosh Plus, a Spectrum 48K and some other items.

[adt70hk]

Not at all - I had a Spectrum 48K+ - which had a proper full sized keyboard, and I had a Microdrive with it!
Must have bought it in the Mid 80s - I seem to think it was around £200 - not cheap, but that was my intro to computers. To think, I bought a 400Gb Windows 10 machine as backup last year for £75!
Dave

Whilst it is understandable how much the price of IT kit has come down, I do still find it amazing at what is now possible.

[Tworrs]

Reading all this, it makes me smile that when "older people" interact with "younger people", it is assumed that we are not computer savvy, when we were using the very first PC's, before they were even born.
Bless the naivety of youth.

[Tworrs]

Whilst it is understandable how much the price of IT kit has come down, I do still find it amazing at what is now possible.

I agree Andrew it is quite mind boggling what IT is capable of now.

[Dave Ward]

After my Spectrum, there was a long gap - I was using a mainframe computer at work, but in the early 2000s I built my own PC. A friend & I started a sideline building computers - my mate had contacts & he could get older machines ( without hard drives ) from offices, which used to get new machines every year. I used to get new cases, add a hard drive, dvd/cd drive, maybe a sound card, and Windows XP ( at that time you could get cheap genuine builders licenses ). Clean up old monitors, add new keyboard & mouse, and that was it - we used to make a pretty good profit, although it occupied evenings & weekends! The business began to fade, as people got more savvy & prices of new computers began to drop, and we eventually gave up.
I sat down & priced up building my own PC recently, and I found it was impossible to source the components cheaper than a brand new machine. I bought a 2nd ( or 3rd ) hand Dell, as a back up, £75 but you can't upgrade it, because all the parts are bespoke and being a slimline case you can't add anything. It's there as a backup, I usually run it up every month, update everything, then put it back in the cupboard!
Dave

[Bobby Conkers]

Whilst it is understandable how much the price of IT kit has come down, I do still find it amazing at what is now possible.

BBC B was £399 when it came out. Any operating system as such was contained in ROM, which loaded on turnon. It had its own BASIC, Assembly Language and "Machine Code", which the bigger programs used. Quite amazing what it could do with 32k RAM (and the Speccy with 48k).

I remember BBC Micro User and Acorn User magazines (with the TV program). My old boss used to send programs into it when he was 8 for people to type in.

In the end, it got used for a text to speech program where we'd type rude words in...

[adt70hk]

BBC B was £399 when it came out. Any operating system as such was contained in ROM, which loaded on turnon. It had its own BASIC, Assembly Language and "Machine Code", which the bigger programs used. Quite amazing what it could do with 32k RAM (and the Speccy with 48k).

Indeed...i was luck enough to get one for Christmas when I was 12.

I dabbled with BASIC but never got the hang of machine code......

And then of course there was ELITE!

[Andy the Sheep]

My first computer...

got it second hand in the very early '80s from a friend who could afford a new C64 :money-face:.
Lot's of fun with "Tornado" (but just after having fought against a C60 cassette to upload the SW :cold-sweat .
Andrea

[Dave Ward]

My first computer...
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got it second hand in the very early '80s from a friend who could afford a new C64 :money-face:.
Lot's of fun with "Tornado" (but just after having fought against a C60 cassette to upload the SW :cold-sweat .
Andrea

AAhhh the Microdrive! When it worked, it was brilliant, but reliability was not a strong point! The Sinclair needed an expansion/extenson module to run them AND it had a joystick socket!!
Dave

[Guest]

We had a Microdrive too, and it was far better than tapes, but the real upgrade to our Spectrum was a DISCiPLE disk interface with a proper 3.5 inch drive. That one was especially fun when a unsuspecting Commodore 64 owner was around: because of the way the C64 loaded from disk, it was just as slow as from tape, so you would spend five minutes or so waiting for a game to load. The Spectrum, though, loaded at normal disk speeds, meaning you’d be playing your game in 20 seconds or so. A school friend of mine once walked away as I had just typed the [ICODE]LOAD[/ICODE] command, saying “We can go do something else while we wait.” The look on his face when the game was running almost instantly was priceless

[stillp]

Oh Lordy, you're all making me feel very old! I was working with microprocessors in the late 70s! I was developing automotive electronics just as the big manufacturers were starting to think about incorporating a measure of 'computing' in their cars. I remember automatic mixture control for a carburettor, and a digital fuel gauge. All programmed in direct machine code, in hexadecimal. Also, a chap with whom I'd been a student in the mid-sixties had, by a pure fluke, acquired the UK concession for the Commodore PET, which has a good claim to be the first all-in-one PC. I made several customised peripherals for the PET, including a spectrum analyser and an x-y plotter, and later built a load of automated test equipment for a load cell manufacturer, which raised and lowered weights onto the load cells in a variable temperature chamber, all run by the PET.
I still have an Acorn System 1 in the attic, that was used to develop an automated assembly table for making potentiometers..
Pete

[Dave Ward]

Final Bump!!!!!!!

[wotan]

I was one of the 5 people worldwide who owned an Amiga computer back in the 80's. Complete with cassette player and I think there were about 8 games available for it. Oh how I was jealous of the Sinclair owners.

John

[Dave Ward]

My original thought behind this poll was - are the recent wonky photo problems appearing through more people using a phone to access the forum?. Of course I realised later, it would a much more complicated poll, to find any correlation! I was surprised at the tablet access - my only experience was with ancient Jelly Bean android devices, obviously modern tablets ( let alone iPads ) are much more capable.
ps I reckon the wonky photo problem is a function of landscape/portrait ( as has been suggested before ) format on phones/cameras. I only ever use a digital camera in landscape to take my piccies, and I can't recall having problems. There isn't a universally used app to take pictures on phones, so I guess differences in software can have odd effects!
Dave

[hirschberg]

Laptop, don't have a smart phone.