Micro Men

[Peter Venkman]

The old ZX81 was my first machine which I got for Xmas 82 (which Mr TalkTalk now owns or did own for his Computer museum)

I then went on to have a career from 84 in programming which lasted for 18 years and I would not have gone into it if I hadent got that first Sinclair ZX81 with 16k expansion pack. Sir Clive has a lot to answer for with me!

I met Sir Clive Sinclair on the Tube in 1983 and had a little chat with him, he seemed a really nice bloke but the word geek does not even come close to this man "SuperGeek" is closer.

He was wearing a Tee Shirt that just had the word "Sinclair" emblazoned accross it, which I thought a little modest at the time!

[pauld]

I will await your 'Oh my God, I can't believe you actually persuaded me to watch that ballacks' post over the weekend!

Almost inevitable now, I'd have thought

[yeo]

Did Americans use Acorns and Sinclairs or was it a British thing?

[Ardiles]

Dragon 32, Commodore 64...computers had much better names in those days.

[suttonred]

I was a mid-1980s ZX Spectrum child geek.  (We were many.)  I bought a book from the school bookshop in 1983 or 1984 that taught you the rudiments of how to program in BASIC, and I used to write programs in my spare time...which was a little obsessive because I didn't actually own a computer at the time (just had sporadic use of a few ZX 81s in the school computer room).

A year or so later, I bought my first Spectrum with pocket money savings, second hand for £70.  It was then that I became a turbo-geek.  My favourite programming areas involved puzzles (continuing in the 1980s geek mode, one of my favourites involved a Rubiks cube simulator, complete with graphics) and creating fractal-like images with trigonometrical functions and the rudimentary 256 x 192 pixel display.  The rest of the time, I used to play car chase games with the volume turned down and Jean-Michel Jarre or the theme to Airwolf playing on my ghetto blaster.

Happy (pre-STFC) days.

I got an O Level in computer studies, which basically was me getting "Fuck Off" to run in a loop on the screen. Mine was a comprehensive education...

[Peter Venkman]

Dragon 32, Commodore 64...computers had much better names in those days.

I had both of those!

Don't forget the Oric & Jupiter....ace names!

The old Commodore Pet you could type "poke 1,0" and it overwrote the basic eprom.....sweet!

[suttonred]

Vic 20 was naffly named though

[pauld]

Vic 20 was naffly named though

But the name really suited what was a pretty naff product even back then. I had one and was bitterly jealous of my Spectrum-owning mates who could load Donkey Kong from tape in less than 20 minutes.

[Peter Venkman]

But the name really suited what was a pretty naff product even back then. I had one and was bitterly jealous of my Spectrum-owning mates who could load Donkey Kong from tape in less than 20 minutes.

Less than 20 mins! wow turbo load! My C64 used to load "the Hobbit" in 38 mins and then used to crash regularly after 5 mins of play!

[Barry Scott]

I used to have a Amstrad cpc464 and was always jealous of my mates with their C64s. They could get loads of Mastertronic and Codemasters games from boots for £1.99, and i could only get one or two.

My cassette deck broke as well, so begged my Dad to buy a C64 so we could swap decks if it broke again. His solution was to just use a paperweight to hold it closed, although it stayed down once play was pressed. Then one day, years later, he came home with a 386 for himself. It was like all my Christmases at once.

[Simon Pieman]

I know someone who still insists RISC OS is the best thing since sliced bread. He swears blind it's the most efficient operating system on the market and to be fair it could be, but he's hard to listen to.

RISK OS was class

I think I might watch Micro Men on iplayer at some point this weekend.

[Peter Venkman]

I have Sky+'d it so I will watch it later, theres a whole series on Leaders of Technology apparently.

[Ardiles]

Ah, nostalgia...

[Batch]

The 80's were great for us geeks, the birth of home computing for the masses. Who can forget buying a monthly computer magazine, typing in the 1000's of lines of code that they used to contain and then spending fookin' ages debugging/correcting your typos.

BBC and BBC Lite (Acorn Electron) - OK the BASIC was pretty good but lets be honest, for most of us games was what it was about.  And that was Speccy v C64. And of course the Speccy was more popular given it was cheaper, you could use a standard tape deck and games were easily copied.  But the C64 was better, obviously. Better graphically and the SID chip provided sound well in advance of its competitor.

Yoof of today, it's all graphics and generally gameplay suffers. But they'll never get the same sort of enjoyment we got from our simplistic games of yesteryear.

[Peter Venkman]

I have to agree Batch, even now I have a PC that can play any game available really fast but I still download C64, Speccy & Amiga emulators and play the games from them because the gameplay was and still is much better, yes graphically pretty shit but games seemed to put so much more emphasis on gameplay than graphics anyway.