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Childhood Computing

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Re: Childhood Computing

#51

Post by rhyperior »

GuB-42 wrote: post #39

> These are expensive machines Impressive how that part changed. Today, many computers are cheaper than the desk they are sitting on. Many companies pay over $2000 for office furniture, and that's not even fancy. A $1000 laptop sits on top of it. Furniture made by an actual cabinet maker will easily get to $5000+. About the price of a maxed out gaming rig, or an enterprise level workstation.

I don’t know… if the top of line PC cost $3000 30 years ago, it seems like we’re pretty close to that today for class-equivalent hardware (without going absurd - 32GB of DDR5, game playing video card, 4TB SSD…)

Re: Childhood Computing

#52

Post by s1mon »

I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud. The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the literal teletype - a keyboard and a clunky printer.

Re: Childhood Computing

#53

Post by erikbye »

My childhood was PCBoard, POV-Ray, then later Lightwave, 3ds Max, Bryce. WADs, Hammer Editor, GTkRadiant, both of the scenes. Sierra and Lucasarts games... Turbo Pascal!

Re: Childhood Computing

#54

Post by qsera »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #36
qsera wrote: post #28

One thing that was nice about the graphics programming those days was that when you drew something on the screen, it remained there until your program erased it. This means that you could create cool looking graphics easily. For example, you can just compute the points of a circle and draw the points one by one, and in the screen it will show a full circle being drawn. "Modern" graphics libs (even SDL I think), made…

Both so-called "retained" and "immediate" mode graphics libraries continue to exist for most platforms, and you can choose to use whichever one you prefer.

I have looked it up in the past, and I have looked it up now, but I cannot find a reliable documentation that describes it.

For example, do you know what combination of flags listed here https://documentation.help/SDL/sdlsetvideomode.html would do the trick? Or anything that is not listed there would also help.

Re: Childhood Computing

#55

Post by joak »

Actually in 1982 I was able to store my programs on standard audio cassettes. Hardware needed: a modem and a cheap tape recorder. My apple II modem would chirp the ascii binary like Starwars' R2D2, I'd record that and when needed I'd play it back to the modem.

Re: Childhood Computing

#56

Post by joak »

s1mon wrote: post #52

I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud. The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the literal telet…

You could use this audio at 300 baud by recording it on a standard audio cassette. Then play the audio back as input to the modem to retrieve the data

Re: Childhood Computing

#57

Post by RiverCrochet »

safety1st wrote: post #30
TrackerFF wrote: post #15

At school we had a bunch of older machines with windows 3.1, which had some touch typing program installed - it was the only thing we were allowed to use Our first family computer was bought back in 1995. IIRC it was a 166 MHz Pentium / 16 MB ram machine with Windows 95. It cost around $3500-4000 back then, and that's not adjusted for inflation. EDIT: As a side note, 3 years later I managed to get my hands on a copy…

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck. The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with. The second was attending a high school with a reaso…

A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.

Re: Childhood Computing

#58

Post by RiverCrochet »

joak wrote: post #55

Actually in 1982 I was able to store my programs on standard audio cassettes. Hardware needed: a modem and a cheap tape recorder. My apple II modem would chirp the ascii binary like Starwars' R2D2, I'd record that and when needed I'd play it back to the modem.

You really used a modem instead of the tape out jack?

Re: Childhood Computing

#59

Post by yason »

I got my C64 in 1985. Obviously, I can revisit the graphics and sounds of that machine online now, via emulators and youtube videos. But one thing I always remember is the smell of warming circuit boards that oozed from the casing soon after you turned on the computer.

Anecdotally, the cassette player that came with the machine had a misconfigured tape head. Because there was no internet nobody knew why it didn't load most of the games I got with the machine. However, saving and loading programs did work. So, I started writing programs from the user manual and game listings from some programming books I found in the library, and saving them on my cassettes. Because the user manual covered not only some tutorial BASIC but also the machine's graphics, sprites, sounds, and what other features I eventually, after getting some hang of writing BASIC, did also realize that what I could create with the machine hardware itself was virtually unlimited. I didn't necessarily know what the commands did with the underlying hardware but I knew if I poked certain numbers into certain addresses I could make my sprites appear on the screen and make them move around.

By the time I got the cassette player fixed by some computer repair shop, learned about tuning the tape head, and I could finally load all the games bundled with the machine, I was seriously hooked with programming and the highly desired games no longer seemed that interesting in comparison. I knew someone sat down and wrote all those games and instead of playing them I could learn to do the same myself.

Been programming ever since.

Re: Childhood Computing

#60

Post by xboxnolifes »

rhyperior wrote: post #51
GuB-42 wrote: post #39

> These are expensive machines Impressive how that part changed. Today, many computers are cheaper than the desk they are sitting on. Many companies pay over $2000 for office furniture, and that's not even fancy. A $1000 laptop sits on top of it. Furniture made by an actual cabinet maker will easily get to $5000+. About the price of a maxed out gaming rig, or an enterprise level workstation.

I don’t know… if the top of line PC cost $3000 30 years ago, it seems like we’re pretty close to that today for class-equivalent hardware (without going absurd - 32GB of DDR5, game playing video card, 4TB SSD…)

Inflation adjusted, those particular specs would be much cheaper. At least prior to recent price changes due to AI demand.

You can definitely go much higher if you really go for TOP of the line though.

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