I don't know if anyone has run an old Apple, TRS-80, VIC-20, or a Sinclair. Those things were practically toys but still fun if you were just starting out with computers. They still show up on Ebay. The old chips were the 6800 and Z80, 8-bit processors that ran at a whopping 1 MHz!. .
I had sinclair zx81 - it cost me £100 in 1983 which is like about £400 now it had 16K of memory - not 16meg - 16k and was about 6 inches by 5 if I remember right and about 3/4 of an inch to 1 1/2 inches deep in a wedge shape
I have a few of those Sinclairs, including a color one. The ZX81 used the Z80 chip. I have a 64K extension RAM pack that clips on the back. .
man i sure remember those days. i remember the days before those days when you had to build them from kits, and then never could find the parts for the not included power supply you would have needed to make them work. my first computer that worked was an ohio scientific c1p, with 5k of ram, expandable on board to 8! gosh wow. program and data storage were on audio casset or paper tape. then i got a vic 20, which over a period of time i upgraded to the equivelant of a c-64. the documentation, when i first got it, was in engrish, and called it a vic-1001. you mention 6800 and before the z-80 there was the 8080 and before that, the 8008, which was in the first kits. before those there were the 4004, first cpu on a single chip, other then bit slice and the chipsets that supported that. don't forget the 6502, quite similar to the 6800 but handled one of the registers and a couple of the flag bits a bit differently. that's what was in my vic. always wanted but never got a comodore pet. remember those? and then there was the transportable version of the c-64. anybody remember transportables? basicly a luggable desktop in a fold up case before there were real laptops. "and it's chin up me boys never doubt never fuss, when your intigratin systems on the s-100 bus" from a filk of that era. "s"-100, the nonstandard hardware standard of cp/m based sysems. when a FLOPPY drive held 100k and cost $1K.00 or more! wow. and remember removable hard disk stacks for the drives on mainfraims and how we all wished we could somehow figure out a way to get one surplus and hook it up to our kim-1 or coco or color sinclare! those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end ... line number basic in rom and "what's an operating system" ... oh yes, THOSE days. yup. before that i built paia music synth modules to play with, at least those came with a power supply that worked. before there were actualy computer stores and you could buy something, take it home, and actualy program on it big square blobs of inverse color text space for graphix. oh yeah, and the first computer stores, before the bussiness of bussiness discouvered and created a wider market for the things, where all the highschool genius wanabees would hand out and play text base trek games, and the store people actualy encouraged you because it made it look like they had real customers! =^^= .../\... (p.s. my interest in apple died when they killed the dragon, but i was AT the FIRST west coast computer show. it was in the cow palace i think. for a lot of years i dragged the program book arround with me from that. anyway when i was there i saw this really neat plain bud box with a keyboard layout that would come to be curesed by apple users everywhere (the hardware reset was a key on the keyboard right next to the enter key! what in the hell insanity every propted that design 'feature' i'll never understand for the life of me). anyway it was wozniac and jobs themselves demo'ing it and it was called the apple one! they had some kind of a paper tape reader set up to load programs into it. i seem to recall there was an outfit called oliver engineering that sold those. and some guy called godbout selling kits for bords that plugged into the s-100) i could go on about this crap untill i ran out of room and keep going. never had a chance to become a real guru but always been a nerd at heart. that's why i was there. bless it, i WAS effing THERE. first west coast computer show and exposition, just geeking at all the neat fun toys. silicon gulch gazette was what they called the program book. used to subscribe to byte, which at least i could read, and occasionaly i'd pick up a copy of dr dobb's at the computer store. when you couldn't afford to by anything, just hang out and play star trek, they had magazenes, and those you could afford to buy, or at least i could, then. =^^= .../\...
I forgot about paia. The older floppies were about 8 inches. The 6502 was a popular chip. You could play around with machine code and Peek and Poke on those old machines without doing a lot of damage. On the Sinclair ZX81 you could sucker it into using RAM for the video graphics character map instead of ROM and put in your own custom graphics for use in games. There were other tricks that could be done with the ROM to read keys pressed and such. You could write the whole game in machine code and it would run fairly fast for a 1 MHz machine. There used to be some journals back then for doing tricks like that but I forget their names. The movie War Games sort of captured the essence of that early computer era. .
"do you want to play a game?" i remember that. i featured an imsi s-100 box as the 'hacker's weapon of chouce. and a penny whistle 300 baud modem! and i DO remember peeking and poking. "10 poke (100), 251" "20 n=peek(300)" "30 if n>20 then gosub 1020" (sintax wasn't quite universal. each machine basic was implemented on had it's own dialect, but they did all require those damd silly line numbers) and so on. yah, and prom burners. that was the beginning of computer gaming after pong and concurrent with text based adventures like zork. burning a prom was probably the best and most cost effective way distrubiting software in those days, before cd's or even hard drives on p.c.'s and a floppy was 8 inches, held 100k, and cost $1k.00 for the drive. oh hay, if you do a google on themnax, yes that was me then too, you might just stumble accross some of my entries on backwater/bwms, a local bbs up in portland oregon where i was living at the time. backwater was actualy something called a diskwriter, connectied to a modem. the whole system was in a couple of roms. and twits would try and crash it all that time not realizing this. it was really bombproof. the only problem of course, is only one modemer could access it at a time. so we were asked to no stay online any longer then it took us to post. we designated ourselves on there, it was basicly one big continuous text file, by making an ascii border that was our signature. mine was *=*=*=*=*=*=* =^^= .../\... dr dobbs jouirnal of computer calsithenics and orthodonta, subtitled running lite without overbyte was the name of one of those 'zenes. byte would sometimes have software as well as hardware features. =^^= .../\...
Here's a java emulator for the Sinclair 1000 computer. Some people will probably have a difficult time figuring out how to use the old Sinclair. The Sinclair used 'tokens' where one button on the keypad was a word. Try typing in a simple basic program such as: 10 print "HI'; 20 goto 10 There are other sites where you can run all the old games on the old computers or old video game machines such as Atari. They look just like they did on the original machines. http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/ts1000/ Search 'java emulator' or simply 'emulator' along with the name of the old computer. You can try them all. .
If you are into PDAs, you can even simulate the old Sinclair computers on your PDA. What a kick in the head. http://sourceforge.net/projects/palmspec/ .
now THAT would be something fun to do with one of those things. 'clive's folly' WAS one of the most compact machines of its era. i didn't have one but a couple of my friends did. i did, for a time, before someone ripped it off, back in the early 80s, have another kind of pre win-tel actual 'laptop'. actualy another 6502 based machine. there were three of them on the market. radio snack called theirs the trs-100 i think. mine was the one by, if forget, either panasonic or toshiba or someone like that, called the 8401 or 8201. pretty much the same form factor as modern laptops other then not being a clamshell. 8 line by 80 charicters lcd. the third machine that used exactly the same board and hardware but with, they each had their own propriatory roms and keyboard arraingement, but otherwise the same board and form factor of case, was the oliveti, which had more bundled software, practicly introduced the concept, in rom of course, still no internal drives in those days, even removable ones, just sockets for saving to audio cassette. the phone company where i live, last time i was at their open house, were still using 8401s with the one under expansion slot and a labtec board and their own custom roms as some kind of field testing unit. some outfit was putting them togather like that for that kind of applications. something i could still have a lot of fun with something like that too. and you could do bit graphics on it directly too. just about everything memory mapped the display in those days, which generaly took the second 32k chunk of address space. i think even the first ibums did that. now adays there's something called the basic stamp that's made by some outfit just up the road from me. whole thing's on a board not much bigger then a cpu chip, with a variety of interface boards of the same form factor for making inbedded controllers. (including a really nice cascadable servo controller interface that is also available in a fire wire interface version to use with more conventional and flexible computing power) which is kind of full circle since that was the first application of the first 4004 chips way back in the late 60s and early 70s that started it all. imbedding them in something like aircraft i.f.f. transponders if i remember right. =^^= .../\...
Those newer chips are great. The Basic stamp is nice and also the PIC chips. There are other ones called System On a Chip (SOCs) that are really nice. They have amplifiers, A/D, and such that can be wired together internally any which way and also erasable using a programmer. FPGAs are handy too. .
Sinclair made clever use of the ROM. There was almost nothing inside that thing, just the CPU, a ram chip, a ROM, and a special function IC by Farranti that handled the I/O and TV signal. I don't think you could come up with anything more efficient and clever than that for that particular era. His micro TV didn't do nearly as well as the Sinclair ZX81. I have one of his micro TVs. It uses the regular CRT but it actually uses a lot less power than my Casio LCD pocket TV. The backlight for an LCD actually takes more energy than running a CRT. My Sinclair Micro TV from around 1980 uses something like 150 mA, whereas my Casio from the mid 90s draws about 500 mA. .
'Atari' & ''Commodore' Computer Games held my interest in p.c.s during the 1980s. The 'internet' was the domain of 'Arthur.C.Clarke'!!!.
I used to own a Tandy 1000. Everything you did on it required a disk, there was no hard drive in it. Wheel of Fortune, Kings Quest, Jeopardy, and Personal Deskmate (typing and paint programs) were all I had
this is a cd cover from a site called 8-bet people, that features cd's of game theme music from 8-bit game machines, however, if you look closely, well i can remember when what's pictured here were the stuff dreams were made of ... =^^= .../\...
I always liked the TI-99. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A In 1980 & 81 I worked for a software company, we were diveloping business apps for the TI-99 & the Sinclair!! Peace, poor_old_dad
is that (a ti-99) the object between the vic 20 and the bsr x-10? i'm also curious about the one between the the c=64 and the sinclare spectrum (it doesn't look like a cocoa and it sure ain't a trasher 80). and what is that beyond the x-10? is that maybe an early gameboy? i didn't think they existed yet. or just some sort of multimeter? "... and it's; chin up me boys, never doubt, never fuss, when you're intigratin systems on the s-100 bus!" =^^= .../\...
No, the TI-99/4, TI-99/4A, etc... were 16 bit. I can't tell what those are in the picture. Poor_old_dad's poor_old_eyes aren't what they once were. HMmmm... guess it's true - doing "that" does make you go blind. Peace, poor_old_dad
I had a sinclair. I also had a TI99 and use to buy TI99 magazine which had basic programs you could copy right out of the magazine and input it into the computer.
