Programming Questions

[ryoder]

True professional, yeah, I guess so I do work for one of those big bad companies everybody hates so I guess maybe i am

I am still a geek at heart though. I have a great amount of respect for the old systems, the old ways back in the day. Deciding whether to connect to a BBS with YMODEM-G or XMODEM1k etc. It was funny how technical a computer user had to be to get some simple pics of your favorite letter turner on a game show on a bbs

Good times. I have written a couple of "games" including asteroids, space invaders, pacman, tank war etc. All total ripoffs but more than a demo, they actually played, had a high score screen, save game, pause etc. I really thought I would be a game developer. That is until I got an internship as one. It was not fun. I worked on Polly Pockets back in 1996 at a local game company and thought I'd kill myself hearing that horrible voice one more time

[scorched]

Thredjack..
Ryoder.. you and had the same first computer.. I had the TI 99-4A as well, but I guess I was spoiled I had the huge PEB external expansion box with floppy drive, serial card, and 32k mem module, and external voice module and a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem!

irnbru - you sound like you grew up on the same stuff I did. That 6502 processor was an oldie but goodie, powering the Atari, Apple and the Nintendo, among others.

My first computer was the TI 99-4A with the external cassette recorder for storing programs. I then moved into a Tandy Color Computer II, then a Tandy 1000HX with a 3.5" disk drive and in 1990 I built my first computer. It was a 286-16Mhz with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB with a VGA monitor. I thought I was super pimpin. I then added a 2400 baud modem and began downloading shareware on BBSs.

When I was 17 I was hired as a computer tech at a local computer store and for $5.50 per hour I built 386 and 486 computers, fixed them, setup networks and sold them. It was a great way to learn computer hardware and software diagnostics.

I actually never did much assembly, maybe some inline assembly here and there for faster BLTing in some optimized graphics code, but recently I am studying for the Computer Organization class and I had to do some assembly. It was fun learning it in a simple to understand way with MARIE. It is a simulated computer with 4K of RAM and about 16 assembly language operations. It is a free download and there are free versions of the book which explains its use online if anybody wants the url.

I have a love for nostalgia and history so writing a 50 line program to add two numbers and multiply two other numbers is fun for me.

[ryoder]

This?
Peb Box


I remember that! Thanks for reminding me! Man you must have been rich
That cassette drive sucked for loading programs. There was no way to make sure the save was good so I would save on 2 cassettes just to be sure. My color computer used the same drive too.

[scorched]

sorry again for the threadjack laoshijeff...

yep that the one.
Wasn't rich at all, as you well know the 4a was released in 1981, my dad shipped me his 4a when he was done with it in 1984-85 time frame.

I remember this because C64's were all the rage, even though most of them still had the cassette player for storage like you mentioned. And shortly there after the C128 arrived and stunned us with with 128K of memory. But I learned to program on my 4a and buddy's C64. We would get those monthly magazines with the code to games printed in it, and sit there and type it in for hour upon hour. Of course you would save that to cassette or floppy but it would never run right the first time. The problem was that until you learned programming you had to wait until next month for them to print the bug fixes!
I was also war dialing on my 300 baud modem before war dialing became famous to all the BBS's around tampa back in the day like steves bbs and just trying to learn everything i could get my hands on.

Cheers!

This?
Peb Box


I remember that! Thanks for reminding me! Man you must have been rich
That cassette drive sucked for loading programs. There was no way to make sure the save was good so I would save on 2 cassettes just to be sure. My color computer used the same drive too.