Chess with 1k of ram

Backpack wobble anyone? (only a zx owner will understand)

My first computer.

Insert audio cassette tape wait 25 minutes and if it didn’t crash I could play SpinDizzy, if it crashed just rewind the tape and wait another 25 mins.

CPU running at 2 megahertz and a massive 1k of ram. 1K OF RAM!!!

It came with a cassette containing a chess game, how on earth it managed to play chess with 1k of ram I’ll never know, I think uncle Clive must have gotten help from the Greys.
Chadwickus that was just a joke, I don’t need to prove it

Hacking games was easy, just search the ram for the instruction 169, 3 (Lda,3)
Once found change the 3 to 255 and you got 255 lives

It had FAST MODE too, what a joke that was, every time a key was pressed it blanked the screen so it could work faster, just the thing for people sensitive to flashing lights

Impressive colour capabilities too, black text on white or white on black.

There was a massive range of software too, it came in the form of a magazine. Yep, that’s right, all you had to do was type it in, thousands of numbers, all typed by hand and the really annoying part was the people who wrote the magazines would deliberately include a few typo errors to ensure you bought the following mag which always had an even better game to be typed in and away we went again.

Then came the Spectrum, WITH COLOUR

Then it was an Atari XE followed by an Atari ST520 that had this funny thing on the side called a floppy drive.

Then came my first pc, a DX 100 with 8 megs of ram, I thought I was in heaven, it had everything, mouse keyboard and a 30 meg hard drive with dos and windows 3 installed on it.

Many years have gone past and I now have a 4 core amd running at 3.7 ghz and 8 gig of ram. Compare that with the zx’s 2 mghz and 1k of ram ;0

So what’s your computer history?
I’m sure some of you can go back further than me, and no, an abacus does not qualify.

I've seen some old stuff but holy cow, this is beyond oldschool...

I can't quite believe people used to type the whole code for a game into the damn thing just to play it.

Science be praised

Ace 1000 here

in '88 had an IBM (can't remember which model)

current - iMac

reply to post by VoidHawk


Let's see, my first PC had Windows that used blocks you navigated through instead of icons...

I remember when you had to load your games through ms-dos.

I remember when Wolfenstein 3D was considered the latest and greatest in graphics.

I still have my Powerbook 100. I still play Paper Plane and some weird alien air-hockey game with my nephew on it.

I remember Oregon Trail taking up way too much of my time.

That's about the extent of my personal experience with the technology of yesteryear. I've played around on all the old goodies... I just didn't exist back then to see them when they came to market, heh.

Commodore 64 in UK is what got me in there. Spectrum users would always try and convince me that theirs was better and I would say; "shut it and look at what those Atari machines can do".

reply to post by VoidHawk

Proud ex-Sinclair Spectrum (successor to the ZX-81 for those that don't know) owner here. You forgot to mention it had a (from memory) black and white display and no sound. The ZX-80 was the predecessor and I think it only was sold in kit form. And ah yes, ram pack wobble, what fun.

i started with one of these bad boys




then went to tape loading atari then with amiga. i have to say that amiga had the best ganes and music ever/

reply to post by VoidHawk


I had a TI 99/4 as a teen. In college I got an IBM clone that had a 20MB hard drive. At the time, I thought that was HUGE

Originally posted by Swizzy
I've seen some old stuff but holy cow, this is beyond oldschool...

I can't quite believe people used to type the whole code for a game into the damn thing just to play it.

Science be praised

Ha, if you think that's bad and laborious I used to get my Mother to read pages and pages of Basic code to me as I would type. It took hours and at the end of it it would rarely work due to either a typo I had made or a typo in the listing in the magazine you had to buy containing the code. I swear that woman had the patience of a Saint.

I still have a Sinclair in my closet...

Loved it!

This is hilarious

1k of RAM is pretty intense, I am sure I could take it

Originally posted by LightSpeedDriver
And ah yes, ram pack wobble, what fun.

:up

For those who dont know.
They had a black box that plugged onto the back that contained 16k of memory. The problem was a loud noise or vibration was enough to cause momentay disconection and when that happened you lost everything. imagine after you've spent 8 hours typing in numbers your neighbours dog barks and its all gone. Sometimes you'd want to save your work to tape but simply lifting your arm to press the button would be enough. I'm glad those days are gone

Originally posted by YouAreLiedTo

I remember when you had to load your games through ms-dos.
.

LOL I'd forgoten all about that bit. putting your sound card settings in the Autoexec.bat file to make Wolfy or quake work properly.
Mention Dos now and people think your talking about an attack on a server

I had an old Texas Instruments computer that had to be plugged into a televsion screen. I'm sure it used cassette tapes to hold the data. It was pretty archaic and slow. Then I graduated to something more state of the art, an Apple 2e:


Apple 2e Personal Computer by HaarFager, on Flickr