Old computers did it better...

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Awesome. Bring back the 1980's!

 

I remember playing Doom and a monster would be around a corner and I would just about jump out of my skin. Then a friend of mine and I played co-op over dial-up modem. Ha!

 

Yeah, I had an Amiga 500 at the time, and my friend worked at a computer lab with PC's and we played all night long. He had a data backup job to tape at a local college. We'd just play for four or five hours at a time every Friday night with Doom and other PC games. That was before you needed a 3D card and a basic relatively powerful PC would work with pretty much any game.

Where it all started for me was with TRS-80 MC-10 and Tandy Color Computer 2 and Color Computer 3. I found this archive site with all the magazines called "The Rainbow" for the Color Computer (aka "CoCo"). I'll have to sift through since I know I had a couple letters to the editor as well as some programs published there, lol. http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Magazines/Rainbow, The (OCR)/

 

Seems like a lot of people missed the satirical nature of the video.

Although I will say I do wonder if computers becoming much more commonplace (and indeed, a necessity) has something to do with the trends we're seeing. It just occurs to me that back then a higher level of technical savageness was required if you wanted to have a frustration free experience using a computer. I started using a computer when I was 6, and I distinctly remember getting frustrated with some of the older DOS games since I wasn't any good with DOS prompts, and I'd probably have quit using the computer if not for Win 3.1

 

I remember being impressed with the sound system on that one.

 

What is wrong with the 70's - In High School We use to have to go on a 20 minute bus ride to Widener College in Chester PA to use a computer. Punch cards were the norm. Games? I do not think so.
My first game was a golf game written in BASIC. Some wizard created it at the local community college
I like the accent of the current tech support guy in the video (of course after all these years it is still a guy). Good thread idea HT!

 

If you mean us, nah, we get it, but also nostalgia creeps in with us old folks. Although I did like the idea that you more or less had to be a hard core geek to really understand and use these machines to their fullest. I remember taking programming in high school on the old green tube TRS-80's and I finished the whole 12 week course material in 2 weeks. I got in trouble because then I started programming games and everyone was playing those instead of doing the course material. Programming games using BASIC and C was a lot easier back then too, well because the systems were so limited. But it was a lot of fun. Wish I had gone to college for programming instead of engineering, but it was just before the internet started taking off and programming wasn't nearly as lucrative a career as engineering.

I remember saving and loading programs to cassette tape and a 2K program would take like 10 minutes to save or load, lol. And I did enjoy buying computer stuff and games and programs because they did come with thick and detailed manuals about everything about them. Those were the days.

In any case, oh the nostalgia. Times have changed for sure. It's good that computers are mainstream, but then again, it's a bit sad because they cater to the least common denominator.

 

I remember my dad left me a piece of paper with the DOS prompts written out for me to start any of the (two? three?) games he inexplicably had: bomberman, home alone 2, and maybe one more?


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Software installation is so amazingly easy nowadays! Agree with other points, though.

 

I'm nowhere near that old school but I miss the days of Baseclock overclocking. Buy a Celeron, overclock the hell out of it. Overclocking actually involved a lot of tweaking instead of just simply multiplier adjustments and voltage offsets. Gosh, I would spend a whole weekend going to work on a Pentium 4, burn it out and try again next weekend (I had a small pile of P4 CPUs from discarded school PCs)

 

Yeah I had an Amiga 500 then 600 with a whopping 20mb HDD

John.

 

haha! Yeah I remember spending $240 for an 80MB hard drive and a whopping 1MB RAM expansion for a total of 1.5MB. LOL. Capacities have increased over a thousand-fold.

 

The Amiga 500 memory upgrade with a built in clock that could not keep time, i had to replace a few of them

John.

 

oh dear by "a lot of users" I meant the people commenting on the Youbute video not you guys sorry

 

Yeah, YouTube comments are funny. You realize how many people actually have no sensibilities or a sense of humor.

 

I just realized the spellchecker autocorrected technical savviness to technical savageness in my original post ROFL

 

My first home computers were:

Commodore VIC-20 (3.5K usable RAM!) with cassette tape storage
TI-99/4A (16K RAM!) with cassette tape storage
Atari 800xl (64K RAM!) with 5 1/4" floppy drive (110K storage)

All of the above were using a black and white TV as the cheapest colour TV was $500+ for 14".

 

That video is awesome! And a great mix of both in fun, and some legitimate points too, like having useful manuals. I'm too young to have had a Commodore 64, but that manual looked awesome. Programming instructions, schematics... that's a real manual. Even when you do get a service manual nowadays (a must-have for me), it's nowhere near that good.

The point about new computers being exciting and being able to do new things is also spot on. These days, it seems like reading about old hardware is as exciting as reading about new hardware, and if I bought a similarly-priced replacement for my late-2011 desktop today, I probably wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Even just a decade ago, the differences between generations were much more breathtaking and exciting.

In some ways I think I would've enjoyed joining the computer industry in 1981 or so a lot more than 2011. Then you still had a chance to change the industry; now it's a lot harder to do that outside of catering to the least common denominator, as HTWingNut mentioned.

Backwards compatibility is still there on Windows, though. Just a couple nights ago I was testing LAN play for Age of Empires II between my 1999 Pentium II and my 2011 Core i5, with some success (until it crashed on the Core i5). So I have to give Microsoft props on that.

Yeah, I remember the same thing. A few DOS commands written down on a Post-It for the DOS games, and then Windows 3.11 and OS/2 installs as well. The Windows 95 came out, and I didn't use the others very much after that.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCQNstjSbjg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v7cFGneuaw

 

Ooh, those 120x80 16 color graphics were to die for!

And those 5.25" floppies were super rugged. Unbelievably rugged. I remember taking the disc out of the protective sleeve and throwing it around like a frisbee and putting it back in the sleeve and in the drive and it still worked just fine.

 

Just don't stick them on your refrigerator with a magnet.

 

Hey HT, have you read the book, "Ready Player One"? I think it would be right up your alley.

 

Read book? What's that?