Digital Art Zone

... like in the old days…

...you mean when we had to actually write code to do everything we can accomplish today with a few mouse/tablet moves/clicks using pre-made meshes, texture maps, and light sources on a desktop PC (or even a notebook) instead of a huge mainframe buried in the bowels of some university campus math and sciences research centre.

...ahh, those were heady days.

Kyoto Kid - 07 September 2012 11:52 PM

.... instead of a huge mainframe buried in the bowels of some university campus math and sciences research centre.

...ahh, those were heady days.

the days when PCs didn’t have a hard drive and everything was stored on 740 Kb floppy disks
and there was no Windows UI, just DOS

I remember them well

The first floppies, as I recall, were 180KB - I had to buy a couple from the University computer lab when I took a course on Pascal. They were at least more reliable than the cassettes on my own machine. Edit: on reflection, they were at least 5.25” discs so they may have been 360KB - I think I was able to reformat them and use them on my first real PC five years later.

Staffa24 - 08 September 2012 04:31 AM

Kyoto Kid - 07 September 2012 11:52 PM

.... instead of a huge mainframe buried in the bowels of some university campus math and sciences research centre.

...ahh, those were heady days.

the days when PCs didn’t have a hard drive and everything was stored on 740 Kb floppy disks
and there was no Windows UI, just DOS

I remember them well

DOS.  that was new fangled, our first computer had basic, and had to be coupled up to a TV and a casette recorder to work.

Richard Haseltine

“5.25” discs so they may have been 360KB”

you’re quite right, I forgot. Then the “hard” floppies with 7nn Kb and HDD with 1.4 Mb WOW !

chohole

“our first computer had basic”

you definitely started with computers before me

chohole - 08 September 2012 04:50 AM

Staffa24 - 08 September 2012 04:31 AM

Kyoto Kid - 07 September 2012 11:52 PM

.... instead of a huge mainframe buried in the bowels of some university campus math and sciences research centre.

...ahh, those were heady days.

the days when PCs didn’t have a hard drive and everything was stored on 740 Kb floppy disks
and there was no Windows UI, just DOS

I remember them well

DOS.  that was new fangled, our first computer had basic, and had to be coupled up to a TV and a casette recorder to work.

Yep! mine too! And when he noticed how much fun I had rewriting a bit larger programs for my small computer, well, it was a VIC20 actually…. , my husband took interest in programming and ended up as the IT man in his work!

Well, I have to say, when you want to do things on a computer it’s a bit easier these days.

Love, Jeanne

I remember those days..starting out on an Atari 400, upgrading to an Amiga, then finally one day upgrading to a ‘puter that actually had a monitor and the keyboard wasn’t attached- the elite IBM x386. My life was doomed to being behind a keyboard since the day I first played Sid Meyer’s Civilization on that beast, and was wiped out by barbarians. I swore I would not rest until I got revenge.
The barbarians won. Someday, though..someday….

Oh, you kids and your hippity-hoppity music. I remember when making an image actually meant using this flimsy stuff called… uhm… oh, right! Paper.

Oh I remember that stuff, used it myself until my eldest son wanted a Spectrum for Xmas, and I never looked back. He upgraded to an amstrad a couple of years later, that was even more fun.

I still play tetris on my original nintendo gameboy. But my son has absconded with it. So whenever i find it, it’s game on!

Sean Martin - 08 September 2012 07:06 AM

Oh, you kids and your hippity-hoppity music. I remember when making an image actually meant using this flimsy stuff called… uhm… oh, right! Paper.

You mean that stuff which doesn’t have ctrl-z and you gotta use… hmmm… eraser, right?

Staffa24 - 08 September 2012 04:31 AM

the days when PCs didn’t have a hard drive and everything was stored on 740 Kb floppy disks
and there was no Windows UI, just DOS

I remember them well

...then there were those “blisteringly” hot 8bit CP/M rigs…

chohole - 08 September 2012 04:50 AM

DOS.  that was new fangled, our first computer had basic, and had to be coupled up to a TV and a casette recorder to work.

...we had one of the the old Apple ][ s with the external single sided HDDs almost as big as a shoebox.

To connect to the usenet at the local college campus we needed an acoustic handset modem (thus tying up the phone) which had a “ripping” 600 baud transfer rate.

At the college where I first took courses in that “mystical” subject known as “CS”, We still used teletype terminals, punched tape. and punched cards.  Only the SYSOP was privileged enough to have one of those fancy (monochrome) CRT terminals. You know those refrigerator sized tape drives you see in all old the SciFi films and television programmmes? I’ve loaded tapes on those.

Sean Martin - 08 September 2012 07:06 AM

Oh, you kids and your hippity-hoppity music. I remember when making an image actually meant using this flimsy stuff called… uhm… oh, right! Paper.

...I used to do that until Arthritis decided to take up residence in all my joints. I used to not only draw and paint, but lay my own paper,, stretch my own canvas, and even mix my own pigments.

If I were still into programming (and up on the latest lingos) I’d probably be scripting my own morphs if not writing my own software.

Staffa24 - 08 September 2012 04:31 AM

the days when PCs didn’t have a hard drive and everything was stored on 740 Kb floppy disks
and there was no Windows UI, just DOS

Some of us are pre-DOS

My first computer was a ZX-81, with 1K RAM and (often only theoretically!) the ability to use a tape recorder for storage. Though by then I’d already used an Ohio Superboard and a Research Machines 380Z at school.

The first year of my degree course was done with batch-processed punched cards on an ICL 1906 mainframe that only worked intermittently in the summer (soldered joints cracked every time it got too warm).

And to totally wow people’s minds, a friend’s first job on joining the company we worked for was wiring RAM - not wiring RAM chips together, wiring RAM bit by single bit from transistors.

My first job after leaving school I was operating a National ledger posting machine, that fed stuff on to this punched tape, which was taken once a week to the big IBM place to be processed.  Once I got to visit the IBM place….them wasn’t the sort of pooters you could have had at home.

When I learned to code Basic on a TRS-80 which was the height of technology… unil the Coco came out… IT HAD COLOR!