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Ha ha! As soon as I saw her name I knew that song. Great song thanks for sharing!
The tape drives. The one problem that seemed to be shared by the cassette tape drives was tape stretching. It didn't take all that long before a tape became unusable. Ah so THAT is what the "Data Refresh" function was for, and no wonder it took so long to complete. sigh. We continue to persue perfection constantly, do we not?
I just wanted to add my thanks for this set - like others here I dropped it into the basket as soon as I saw it.
My old BBC Model B no longer works, but is on the wall of my classroom as I use a version of BBC BASIC for teaching intorductory programming principles, so this set will be very useful for creating images to decorate teaching resources.
Also, as others have said, I too would snap up a further set if it included an Amiga 1200 or even 500.
i, foolishly, sold all my Atari 800 stuff.. I bought a second real cheap from a farmer in Iowa..his son was off to college and told him to get rid of it. Landed manyy duplicates of everything and a lot of games... I was already buying a ton of games. Electronic Arts had some really great ones..M.U.L.E, Archon, 7 Cities of Gold I really liked..and of course all the arcade do overs..Space Invaders, etc.
Bought a Tandy 1000 XL from Radio Shack as my 2nd system, way advanced compared to atari 800. I needed a new drive. Went to Radio Shack..asked the store guy if they had a drive for a tandy 1000XL. He asked, "Who makes that"? . That was the end of it and I bought a Gateway 2000 which cost me 2 arms and a leg..it was like $4000 or something crazy. Then got into building my own. Built quite a few systems up until the prebuilts were as cheap or less. Plus they worked without messing around for many hours. I did get fairly good at DOS though. Also did a lot of beta testing ..for America Online and Windows.
The years with the Atari were grand. I read all the magzines..subscribed.. Analog, Compute, Antic, and a couple random ones. Had the books from Atari ... the machine language book, how to program the sprites and all that.. pc board configs .. and a ton of Atari 800 books. A book or two from a guy that programmed a war game..what was his name..he was famous in those times ..Chris Crawford. He did a lot of the early programming for the Atari stuff.
WOW...
I had a Texas Instrument TI-99 4A but no tape recorder so I'd have to type in the program every time I wanted to use it. Taught me Basic. Improved my typing and debugging abilities too. LOL.
That computer went to my cousin after I got an Apple IIc. Still have the Apple IIc and the Atari 2600 gaming console at my parents's house. Guess what I'll be doing at their house on Christmas.
For those interested, they're still making new games and accesories for the Commodore 64, available via sites like http://www.indieretronews.com/2017/12/c64-goty-we-take-look-at-very-best-of.html ; Sounds crazy, but that's what you get when you're the number one selling computer of all time...
@ Daveso, yup on the computing magazines, those and a few more. Like one that leaked right into the Internet, a Ziff-Davis Publication: Creative Computing. Often they had 'self entry' programs for several different systems. It was interesting to me that no single language managed to cover an entire program without resorting to some form of "Peek & Poke", with a page or two of numbers. Most in hex, some in octal, and for some pure binary. Only two of the 1984 versions of "Higher Languages" were presented with only a couple paragraphs worth of ML. C and Basic.
!984 did I say? Uh Huh. I kept some pages from the February 84 issue of Creative Computing. Every page with any part of the article, Audio Animation for the Atari systems, by Kent A. Multer. He wrote a very informative, interesting article. It was more about composing and playing music, color and movement together. Ken used the dancing line routine, the ghist of which resides in the screensaver "Mystify" that most of us have somewhere in our systems. The rest, he added as he went I think. The program is short and sweet, It's all of two typed pages of type. It is in the Atari ROM Basic. He didn't name the language so that had to be it. BASIC. I own Quick Basic 4.5 and it won't run on my rig now. But then, I don't have any floppity drives any more so...sheesh. I did scan this article, however. And I did find an Atari emulator for Windows that worked in XP Pro 64 bit. Replacements to floppy being optical disks, I'd have that around here some place.
Y'all do know I can do a fair imitation of Grumpy Ol Wizard guy nowdays, right?
I was late to computers but I do own a portable floppy disc USB drive and a few packets of floppy discs I bought to use with an electric keyboard I once played, cannot say I have needed it since
Oh yes, i recently found a converted Version of "Wing Commander 3" on a store, that you can play on nowadays Computers. I just spent a whole evening gaming trhough that again, like in the old days... Wow. I sstarted my Computer Adventures with an old NCR computer my dad brought from his office...
Those were the days! I had used Commodore PETs at uni for research, so the C64 was a natural fit. Subsequently I wasted many happy hours/days/weeks playing the original Elite on a BBC B. Never did use an Amstrad, until the cut down PC clone came out. Later, it was Amigas and Atari STs, until I finally settled on the Mac as my machine of choice.
Mit spitzensparken unt popencorken?
ACORN?? Acorn was a for-real computer? Remember the old 1984 movie "Electric Dreams" ?? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087197/?ref_=nv_sr_2] at IMDB
I think Miles computer was either a Pinecone Acorn or Acorn Pinecone. I didn't think it would actually exist
Who'd have ever thought the 80's could be, no *WERE*, so much fun?
My first 'working' computer was something I built just to see if I could actually do it. The clock circuit was built with two 741 Op Amps and odd components, the actual clock frequency was set by the TMS 555A controller chip for the Zilog Z-80. Keyboard was a telephone keypad. Display? Well I wasn't advanced enough yet to grok the video stuff, so I just used a string of 8 alpha numeric displays. The 555 was useful for that too. That was a Texas Instruments chip designed FOR I/O interfacing with the Z-80. Memory was 8 64 bit STATIC ram chips, which the 555 also managed. Gee that chip sure made life easy for this rank beginner! LOL! The Z-80 was really advanced for its time, being a true full 8 bit machine. Coding it, for me, was pure ML. Later I used the slightly elevated language, Z80 Assembly. Much better because we handle mnemonics way better (brain stuff) than strings of 1's and 0's. I also hadn't grokked long term storage yet either. I dreamed of a DISK drive! Way before I got one. I had to settle on Static RAM retaining state through power off. Sometimes it messed up. But just 64 bytes wasn't that big a deal.
64 Bytes. Sigh. Once upon a time . . .
ACORN?? Acorn was a for-real computer? Remember the old 1984 movie "Electric Dreams" ?? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087197/?ref_=nv_sr_2] at IMDB
I think Miles computer was either a Pinecone Acorn or Acorn Pinecone. I didn't think it would actually exist
Acorn was a manufacturer - they began with the Atom (which is what I had), then the proton (which was the original name for the BBC Micro, before the licensing deal) and the Electron (which was a cut-down BBC Micro in effect), then they went on to a RISC-chip machine as the home-PC market was consolidating around Macs and "PCs" - the machine faded out, the CPU was a success (Acorn is the A in ARM - Acorn Risc Machine).
So the whole computer didn't last, but their CPU's are a success story. Cool! I guess Edgar could exist, unless that bubbly Miles knocked over into it was just an electric Dream. Heh!
I'd also like to say a huge "Thank You" too.
I started out with an Amiga playing UFO: Enemy Unkonwn and Alien Breed, happy days of computer gaming.
Yes. I suppose there's no hope of an Acorn Atom, with it's little power brick?
Oh heck yes!
YES!
Heck yeah, especially if you add an Amiga to that list. And make sure that the Sinclair is translucent so that light can shine through it like the original. :)
the first computer I bought was the Amstrad 6128 a model above the one here.. thought I'd spend the extra dollars for it and it wasn't cheap though a few thousand cheaper than an IBM or clone which I couldn't afford.
Before that I played on my brother's Commodore and Amiga and Apricots at college!
I think I'd <squee> if you did a Sinclair Spectrum or an Atari 520; they were my first computers before I got on the Windoze bandwagon.
BTW, I haven't installed it yet; does the set include 5¼" floppies and their even floppier envelopes?
Oh another vote for an Amiga!
Yeah, T/S 1000, Timex 2068, Atari 400/600 ? Pop Top & 600/800 XL, Amiga, Amstraad, Apple 2C, Ti 99 4A, original Compaq, TRS-80, CoCo, Ooh the Atari ST's! Gosh the popular ones in the Houston, Tx area amount to about a dozen I think. There was the Adam, not so popuar anywhere else I guess. Then there were the Luggables. The big thing missing in those days (that nobody even thought up yet!) was LCD flat panel displays. Nope, LCD's were Mood Rings at the time.
I also had a Commodore +4, which was pretty neat. All of these seemed to come with a branded version of Basic. Even Windows came with Basic for a while. I kinda miss that some.
There have been a few "Break Points" in technology along the way. Points where I'd drop older tech entirely, knowing it would not be so useful in the future. The first thing, honestly, that I actually dumped was CRT monitors and televisions. They are hard on the eyes. Fluorescent light is hardER on the eyes than LED backlighting. Not a full point break, but still something to shy away from. Magnetic Media, all forms. I find it to be way less reliable in the long run than optical storage. The Jury is still out on SSD and 3DNand SSD. Not enough time with product to deterrmine how much more reliable it may turn out to be. Yet.
I'll not argue with Amiga enthusiasts. Too man excellent hardware and software innovations have sprung from the Amiga FIRST. Toaster was one, another I dearly loved for many years was Deluxe Paint II Enhanced. The very poor mans photoshop? Nah, but it sure had useful tools. I moved on to Paint Shop Pro, now at 10.1 and also Photoshop CS4 Extended. Photography.
That wouldn't have happened if Adobe hadn't scarfed up Pixmantec's RAW Shooter, which I'd bought and used constantly. Their tech is now in Camera RAW 4 and 5, so that's what I use for my photography now. I shoot only in Olympus RAW. And just think, the AMIGA spurred ALL of this! When the Amiga was popular, was there even an Adobe yet?
Does anyone remember Adobe "Atmosphere"? Now that was a brilliant bit of world-building and exploration software. They hosted it for a while on their server and then abruptly just shut it down with no explanation. The whole thing evaporated within a few days, effectively killing a worldwide community that had developed around it. :o(