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[dave.m]

Should you(  sorry!) Should your computer stuff be in the Science Museum?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7303288.stm

dave

[kitz]

I'm afraid I missed out on that era
- I do recall my bro having a commodore 64 and locking himself away for hours "making programs"... then him proudly playing the [now very basic] game he'd spent days and days copying out the code for.

I was a bit of a late comer to the scene in some respects and didnt get my first PC till about 95.
It was my bro that introduced me to the internet in 97 when he bought me a modem for my birthday.

[soms]

We had a about three of those BBC computers along with a couple of Acorn's and one PC at our primary school in the mid 90's.

We got a PC at home and dial-up in 1999... how things have changed in the last decade.

[Floydoid]

how things have changed in the last decade.

...and to think it was only 30 years ago we were programming mainframes with decks of punched cards.  I only remember machines such as the micros when my kids were at primary school in the late 80's/early 90's.  My first home PC was an *IBM 286 (with DOS6 & 640 K of RAM), which a friend of mine managed to rebuild as a Cyrix266 based machine with a whacking 16 MB of memory and win95... to which I added a modem to get on the internet in 2000.  I've had 3 more PC's since then, and when I look at the spec of my current machine, I think we've come on a bit since then.

*I remember the hard drive was the size of a doorstep and about 20 MB capacity.

[Floydoid]

I also remember in my uni days we'd just read in New Scientist that Intel had produced the first processor on a single chip (I think it was the 8088), and we suddenly realised that one day it would be possible to have a complete computer that would be small enough sit on your desk top... it was as if science fiction was becoming science fact.

[roseway]

This is turning into an old fogies' reunion, so I'd better add to it.

My first computer predated the BBC Micro by a couple of years. It was a Tangerine Micron, and it had a whole 1024 bytes of memory. I had to build it the hard way - with a pile of components and a soldering iron and wire clippers. The only way to get programs into it was to type them in hex machine code. That was when I taught myself to program - it was the only way to get anything done in those days.

[Victor Meldrew]You youngsters have life easy[/Victor Meldrew]

[graevine1]

Well its good to hear all this history Well I built a Nascom 1 then a Nascom 2 added a winchester disc. God it was big in fact it filled my bedroom and I wrote all my letters and guess what I used a 1K of eprom which held my text editor to do it. Then I wrote my Postgraduate thesis on it. Gee if only the kids of today could see behind all that Microsoft code of today. But before the Nascom I I. I used Algol60 for my HNC and Fourtran for my first degree and Elliot autocode for work projects then Burrows 5500 machines Then came my induction into Z80 and 8080 code. I guess its gone a little full circle with the machine type code in PIC chips of today. Wow Roseway you must have had money to go that route us Nascom guys really struggled with the soldering Iron tooooo! Oh I nearly forgot I used my Phillips tape cassette recorder to initially store all my data on C60 cassetts., for the Nascom.

[oldfogy]

This is turning into an old fogies' reunion, so I'd better add to it.

I heard that. 

I once worked in a insurance office and we had to walk through a "sticky hallway" before we got to the main room which also had state of the art fire and smoke detectors, then we were instructed that if the alarm went of we only had 60 seconds to vacate the room before the (can't think of the name of the stuff now) but basically it ate all the oxygen in the room to extinguish any fire.

Being but a mere boy at the time I never liked that room.

My first PC was one of those Amstrad two disc jobs, then I discovered the programs were about £200 each, not very happy to say the least, (all I wanted was a data-base with search facility).

[Floydoid]

I used Algol60 for my HNC and Fourtran

I also cut my teeth on Algol60 and Fortran... we also had a couple of PDP11's which had to be programmed with SAL (simple assembly language).

[toulouse]

OF - I think you are thinking of HALON gas. At least that's what it was called when I worked in IT at NatWest (21 years)

TTFN

toulouse

[guest]

Heh I still have a 6502 assembler book on a shelf. I really should get rid of that

[oldfogy]

OF - I think you are thinking of HALON gas.
At least that's what it was called when I worked in IT at NatWest (21 years)

Yes, that's the one.
I still shudder at the thought of it.