For someone whose first computer was an Acorn BBC Micro in 1984, I have never felt older than I do today.
Childhood Computing
81–90 of 133 posts
Re: Childhood Computing
#82I was 4 when computing entered my life. My father was exploring some engine design ideas and used a succession of devices, each more powerful than the last but all proving futile. First it was a scientific calculator, then a programmable scientific calculator. Then he got one of those devices originally made by Sharp but badge-engineered by Radio Shack which they called a "pocket computer"; very calculator-like, but had an alphanumeric keyboard and could store and run BASIC programs written on it with a one-line display.
Ultimately he bit the bullet and went back to Radio Shack to buy the most powerful computer they sold at the time: the TRS-80 Model 16. It was a variant of their TRS-80 Model II business-class computer but with a 68000 daughtercard with a quarter to half a meg of memory. He used this to finally write the engine simulations he'd been planning in his head all along, replete with graphical curve plots and an animation of the piston turning the crankshaft. It ran at about four seconds per frame, but it was still spectacular to behold. I was fascinated. I sat there and watched him type in the programs line by line. I so desperately wanted to poke at it myself, so to keep my grubby mitts off his very expensive machine, my dad went down to Crazy Eddie's and got me a Commodore VIC-20, cheap, for my fifth birthday.
My world had changed.
The VIC-20 came with an easy-to-read manual that introduced new users to the basics of programming with the machine's built-in BASIC, including POKE and PEEK commands that could be used to control its display and sound capabilities. One of the example programs displayed an animated "PETSCII bird" flying across the screen. Even though it was nowhere mentioned in the book, I knew what had to be done: I had to make that bird controllable with cursor keys.
And so I did it. It took me a couple days? few days? But I bent the machine to my will, and I've been chasing that high for 43 years now.
Re: Childhood Computing
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's give it a try. I'm going to make two assumptions based on your screenshot: 1. The large circles A and B are touching each other 2. You know the radius (a,b,c) of each circle and want the third one (circle C) to touch both of the first two. What I'd do is place the center of both circles A and B on the same horizontal line and choose a frame of reference such that the center of circle A is the origin, and the ce…
Thank you for that! I am going to make a link to your comment from the forum post in question: https://community.carbide3d.com/t/knapp-joint-with-cnc/19723 (scroll all the way to the bottom) and will hopefully be able to translate that into Open(Python)SCAD code so as to make a generalized solution for my current project: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
Hey you made my day, I can now say that I contributed to a CAD project. Had never heard of a "knapp joint" before!
OK so your bottom circles are identical, so the y-position of the center of the top circle is easy as pie.
What does your code need to do?
Re: Childhood Computing
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that jumped out to me, when I read that line I could instantly remember the smell of my school’s computer lab, like a time warp in my brain. More than 20 years later I can picture the lab from high school perfectly, I could draw a little map right now of which computers were where.
I still remember getting that Pentium as a graduation present, and my room was suffused with the "new computer smell" for a day or two afterward. Ah, glorious.
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Re: Childhood Computing
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
AFAIK, SDL does not provide both modes. I don't know which mode it is designed around.
Re: Childhood Computing
#86I got my first computer when I was 26. It had taken 30 days to arrive and when I got word I could pick it up, I left work an hour early, rushed to the computer store, and was into my apartment by 4:30 or so. I unpacked and set things up on my dining room table. The next thing I knew it was 4:30am.
Things have been pretty much the same in the 48 years since.
Re: Childhood Computing
#87One of my earliest memories is when I and my family draw and created black and white pictures via a word processor on our C64. There were characters which were different forms, like triangles, or small rectangles. Nowadays there are similar ones in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_Shapes_(Unicode_bloc.... As a few years old kid, that was already magical for us at that time.
One of my nieces, could find an input field on my iPhone's lock screen, and she played for quite long, just by typing emojis. Since, then my "frequent emojis" list contains a lot of hearts, unicorns, horses, and other animals. But of course, the difference compared to the old times, that our C64 was probably the only computer in the whole small village in Eastern Europe at that time, while my nieces encounter electronic devices all the time, so they will probably not remember these as starkly as I do.
Re: Childhood Computing
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SDL retains everything you've drawn to the screen in backing store. You need to do an SDL_Flip (1.2) or SDL_RenderPresent/SDL_UpdateWindowSurface (2.0) to commit what's in the back buffer to the screen.
Re: Childhood Computing
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
People forget how locked down the systems were until Borland and finally GNU gcc entered the market (Unless you went Masm or Pascal.) I remember the MS visual C++ and VB manuals with compilers were over $8k/seat at one point (would be almost twice that in today dollars). People sometimes underestimate how important search engines are to build applications without official documentation. Supporting FOSS is more than a…
Most people either pirated Visual C/C++ or got GNU/Linux with tons of devel packages and amateur books (Learn C as if you were a freshman in College) or something like that.
I was very lucky that once I'd outgrown QBasic, my father could get me a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 while it was current, because he worked at the major University in our state and could access it through their campus-wide MSDN subscription.
I played with Visual Basic at the start but was keen to learn C++ because I had heard it was used in systems programming (I had the dream of developing my own operating system). A bit later on I did stumble on homebrew OS dev and started using DJGPP (a Windows port of GCC) but having access to Visual C++ was a very important step!
Re: Childhood Computing
#90Actually 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?
The tape jack is a modem.