What Do You Use to Access The Forum?
- Thread starter Dave Ward
- Start date
I have an old outdated HP PC on my desk, however over the past couple of years I have moved my whole tech across to Apple, so now my iMac M1 24" talks to my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air via the cloud.
I think you might say, I love tech :smiling3:
I started using computers with a ZX Spectrum back in the 80's.
I think you might say, I love tech :smiling3:
I started using computers with a ZX Spectrum back in the 80's.
G
That’s better than around here. I looked it up, and until 2008 it was required by law that there be at least one phone box per 5000 inhabitants (which, at the time, would have meant a minimum of about 3200 phone boxes nation-wide), and it was generally a fair number more. The village I live in, for example, with about 1500 people 30 years ago, had at least a dozen distributed over three or four locations.
In 2015, there were apparently 440 phone boxes left in the entire country, and you can bet many of those have since been removed too.
A long time ago already (pre-smartphone, I think), I was watching Have I Got News For You on which Paul Merton commented that he didn’t have a mobile phone. “Why not?” he was asked. Because, he said (and I paraphrase), if you need one, there’s always someone nearby anyway that you can borrow one from
I had a BBC Model B
I still have one, and it works perfectly!
I never had the opportunity to use a BBC, A or B, did they have an operating system or was it all code?
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..... You then either entered the code for whatever program you wanted to create or loaded them in from cassette tape or large floppy disks (very expensive). The BBC published a series of magazines on a monthly basis that taught you how to programme alongside their accompanying TV programme.
Dave.... Apologies for the slight tangent.
Thanks Andrew, I remember the black screen with the flashing green cursor as well.
Sorry Dave, I'll stop now :flushed:
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
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
Desktop PC for interacting with website. Ultrawide screen, need it for my eyesight these days.
Phone for checking it sometimes when out and get a notification that a thread I am watching has been updated. The phone presently has a 100GB limit per month, and is used in tether mode for most of my internet as the home connection manages approx 2.5mb/s due to distance from exchange.
Tablet ( which to me is just a big phone or small laptop ) once in a blue moon.
Tangent thread: Started with a Spectrum16k with rubber keyboard (1982, one of the launch models, bought directly from Sinclair Research, saved a lot of money to get it), learned to write basic programs on that, then proceeded thru Spectrum 48k ( microdrive added later ), Sinclair QL, Atari 800xl/130xe plus disk drives, Atari STM, Northern Telecom Vienna desktop with 20meg HDD ( IBM PC AT Clone ), and then numerous self build PC's.
Phone for checking it sometimes when out and get a notification that a thread I am watching has been updated. The phone presently has a 100GB limit per month, and is used in tether mode for most of my internet as the home connection manages approx 2.5mb/s due to distance from exchange.
Tablet ( which to me is just a big phone or small laptop ) once in a blue moon.
Tangent thread: Started with a Spectrum16k with rubber keyboard (1982, one of the launch models, bought directly from Sinclair Research, saved a lot of money to get it), learned to write basic programs on that, then proceeded thru Spectrum 48k ( microdrive added later ), Sinclair QL, Atari 800xl/130xe plus disk drives, Atari STM, Northern Telecom Vienna desktop with 20meg HDD ( IBM PC AT Clone ), and then numerous self build PC's.
G
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.
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.
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.
Bless the naivety of youth.
I agree Andrew it is quite mind boggling what IT is capable of now.
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
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
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...
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!
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
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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
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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!!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"
Andrea
Dave
G
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
LOAD 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 Legal Notice
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