OMG, I have found my people! Such memories, not only from the OP, but from reading everyone’s responses!
I distinctly remember my 8th birthday, March 13, 1980. Our family had a TRS-80 computer, very rare at the time for a family to have a home computer (at least, so it seemed) but my dad is also a computer geek, he had for the longest time the parts for an LNW-80 strewn in the basement from the time he tried to build one from scratch before he got the TRS-80. Anyways, for said birthday, I got as a gift from my dad a book on how to program in BASIC (geared for kids, I remember it was illustrated with an anthropomorphic TRS-80 in it and the humour was definitely at my age level), I devoured that thing and was not only copying the programs from my dad’s magazines, but also trying to debug my favourite games and programs that I’d run - sometimes successfully!
Floppy drives, tape decks, monochrome screens, I remember it all. VIC-20s, Commodore 64s, I lusted after both of them in the same way I lust after iMacs currently. My kids are 5 and 8 and have been using computers for years, so they started at a younger age than I, but they couldn’t write a program, or even debug one, if their life depended on it (and they can’t call Daddy to help!) I think that kids would have a much better appreciation of computers nowadays if they all had the same experience we had growing up, learning how to use your computer as a true operator, not just something that can play games for you.
My 8 year old daughter and I were just talking today about how different computers were back when I was her age.
I remember when I thought 300 baud was blazing fast (and was so excited when we upgraded to a 2400 baud modem). It was less than 20 years ago when we were all using them, now even remote tribes in New GUines connect to the 'net faster than that!
It is amazing how fast technology progresses - we all have front-row seats and we barely even notice.
I know that I used to connect the cassette player to the TV with a couple of jacks and a wire. I don’t know if I used a board or not. This was the TI99/4A, and I’m pretty sure that we didn’t buy any additional stuff for connecting the cassette to the computer, other than the wires. The wires might have even come with the computer. Remember, most programs for the TI were on cartridges, sort of like the old NES and SNES cartridges. I do remember that I eventually color coded the TV inputs with page protectors, I’d colored on red and left the other one white, as those were the wire colors.
Sitting through ten minutes of the ZX Spectrum loading screen only for it to fail, and you’d have to start again, was eternally frustrating. Especially when you’d knock the power cable out during a particularly active game session.
10 minutes? That was a short tape by Atari standards.
I had a few which took around 40 minutes!
Oh and one memorable game which loaded off tape for around 20 minutes. Then the game played a three second voice sample saying the game’s name. Then it started to load the game proper over the next 20 minutes or so. The first 20 minutes were just to load the sound sample >_<
The first time I got a disk drive, I was amazed! 180k on one disk, and it could load an entire 64K game in just two minutes. Amazing xD
I also remember typing in games, or more precisely getting my parents to type them in for me =)
I remember wiring up switches to my 1541’s so I could switch it between device 8, 9, 10, and 11. I had a reset button wired in the back of my c-64, and when I got a Fastload cartridge (and you weren’t a serious C64 user if you didn’t have a Fastload cart), I wired a reset button into it so that I’d have one on whatever computer I used it with.I had a Covox Voice-Master with which I could digitize voice and sound. I made a cool boot menu I could customize for whatever programs were on a given disk, that incorporated some voice.
I never knew another computer half as well as I knew that c64.
I never heard of that magazine. Is it American? Somewhere out there, I know I’ve come across an archive of Computes! Gazette or Run magazine (both American C64-oriented mags.)
edit: I guess reading more carefully would clue me in that this was a Canadian publication.
I dunno–some of those late 80s C64 games looked pretty damn good, but for 1984, that’s really nice. (And another game I’ve never heard of.)
I don’t remember where I came across the plans, but when I found the stereo SID mod I just had to build me one. I bought a copper clad board and bottle of etchant at Radio Shack as well as a packet of dry transfer component patterns. Built it up in a cartridge case for some lame game I picked up for a quarter at a garage sale.
I spent hours listening to songs on the 64 and there are songs that give me flashbacks to this day. Most notably “A Teenager in Love”
Just in case there’s any confusion, this is an actual archive of the entire magazine in PDF format, not just the covers and table of contents. Commodore 64 owners should have fun with it.
Funny you bring this up, right now I’m going through some boxes that my parents dropped off over the weekend. They’re cleaning out the attic and the boxes are all full of my old stuff, and I found a bunch of old issues of Byte with code in them. This one here has a program that calculates the effects of a nuclear blast. Another one has a program that I found very useful, it shows the positions of the Galilean moons of Jupiter for any given date and time.
Yes, I noticed some of those covers you linked to had hotlinks inside the ToC. (But it looks like mostly text-based HTML pages with a random image or two pulled in.) The PDFs are kinda fun to go back to–you can see all the old ads, the old prices, everything. Complete scans of the magazine. Total time warp.
I learned 6502 assembly language by reading the assembly listing of a game in A.N.A.L.O.G. Magazine (Atari Newsletter And Lots Of Games). I didn’t have any reference material. I just read the code and deciphered what each opcode did from context. I learned C the same way from listings for Atari ST programs. It was all the education I needed to get a job programming computers, but I went to college anyway. It was a waste of time and money, as I was already a better programmer than most of the professors.
Yeah, *Transactor *was a Canadian magazine, but it was available in the US, in some places at least. I lived in Pittsburgh at the time, and it was home to the Pittsburgh Commodore Group (PCG) which was the second largest Commodore user group in the world, I believe. That might be one reason why I could find it, though it wasn’t easy to find even there.
