Remember when this was state of the art?

by Chris Garrett on December 14, 2007

Aaah, the good old days. 8-bits of raw computing power, and we knew how to use them! Of course we had the Commodore Vic20 (which was still being paid off after we were enjoying the world of 16-bit computing …)

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{ 8 comments }

Adam Snider December 14, 2007 at 3:21 pm: Ah, 8-bit computing. What an innocent time…LOL!

Seeing this kind of makes me yearn for the good old NES. Not just an emulator, either, but the actual old school system.

I may have to raid my parents’ basement this weekend.
Chris Garrett December 14, 2007 at 5:52 pm: I am sad to say we never kept hold of any of our old game systems or computers

Well, I still have the game and watch nintendo somewhere and my “astro wars”, but the vic20, spectrum and st all drifted to better homes
gillian December 14, 2007 at 9:28 pm: My parents wouldn’t get one but we had a few of these at my elementary school. Ah, the good old days. I remember playing some great games on those.
Chris Garrett December 14, 2007 at 9:35 pm: The only time we got to see the computers at our school were to move them from one room to another for another class. Even at high school I don’t think we got to see one switched on. My parents took a risk getting us the Vic20, and at the time they were always having to tell me to shut it off (“get off that bloody computer and come eat”), but it is a good thing they did buy it
Benjamin December 15, 2007 at 11:50 am: Ah… the glorious sounds of the SID chip! Mmmm… Memories! 6502 machine code programming, now that was coding!
Chris Garrett December 15, 2007 at 12:20 pm: Heh, I didn’t touch machine code until 6800, even then it was a challenge to fit what I wanted to do into memory, I don’t know how the 8-bit guys did it! Of course I did my BASIC programs (I never did finish writing that text adventure), and would copy bits of code from the magazines – remember those long listings with reams of data that made no sense and you had to trust they had printed it all?
Small Business Marketing December 20, 2007 at 10:10 am: Ah well!! Some of us started way before that and are still going strong. I remember when 16K was a lot of memory and you had to write your own paging routines to disk which was a couple of meg. Oh the good old days.
Darren February 16, 2008 at 11:23 am: Ahh, Christmas of the long, long, ago time. God, I’m old!

The snowman reminded me of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man fom Ghostbusters. Almost expected him to stomp all over the dancing guys on the bottom of the screen.

At school, my first experience of a computer was a BBC Micro back in 1982. First time I ever played a video game was Space Invaders on it. Watched the other kids play it then it was my turn, where I promptly owned it! The teacher took me off thinking I was getting an extra turn replaying it, rather than blowing away level after level.

It was the only time the other kids thought I was cool.

The first video game I ever had of my own was an FL Zaxxon, still at Mum’s place. A Grandstand Star Force followed it a year later, then my first computer, an Amstrad CPC 464 on my 11th birthday in 1985.

Unfortunately, I was hardly ever allowed to use it as Mum was worried about how much electricity it consumed.

Video games in the arcade (which was small) I drooled over, but never had the money to play:

Road Blasters
Salamander
Outrun

Like I said, it was small.

Another game I badly wanted to play was one I saw on WarGames: Galaga. The most perfect shoot-em-up ever!

Now I get to play arcade games and use old computers using emulators on my PC as much as I want.