As a kid, my stepdad purchased the v2000 home video recorder.
Our first family PC was the Radioshack (Tandy) TRS80.
Not surprisingly, none of my mates ever wanted to come to my house. Why would they when they had Sinclair Spectrums and VHS at home?
Oldest (operational) appliance?
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Our first family PC was the Radioshack (Tandy) TRS80.
Not surprisingly, none of my mates ever wanted to come to my house. Why would they when they had Sinclair Spectrums and VHS at home?
Not quite appliances, so please forgive me - (maybe the appliance of science! 
)
This is just part of my (currently) working collection, with a slightly bigger pile of items waiting to be repaired!
...I'm sure there are a couple of engineers on here that will still have their first calculator!
)This is just part of my (currently) working collection, with a slightly bigger pile of items waiting to be repaired!
...I'm sure there are a couple of engineers on here that will still have their first calculator!
Forgot to mention the commodore 64 bought in 1987 and still working.
The games on cassette tapes...
The games on cassette tapes...
I'm so annoyed (well not really but sometimes) that I didn't keep some things from my youth, my ZX Spectrum being one of them.Not quite appliances, so please forgive me - (maybe the appliance of science!
This is just part of my (currently) working collection, with a slightly bigger pile of items waiting to be repaired!
View attachment 278473
...I'm sure there are a couple of engineers on here that will still have their first calculator!
I'm pleased I grew up during the time when computers were in their infancy. I had a Time computer, anyone remember them? It was actually pretty good.
To this day I can remember the sound of ZX Spectrum games loading, my mum moaning about the noise and me and my sister saying in unison 'MUM!, IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO THAT!!!'Forgot to mention the commodore 64 bought in 1987 and still working.
The games on cassette tapes...
Happy days
An explanation of how the loading screens work here, if anyone's interested!
:...and while I'm at it
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A bit older, but yes I really enjoyed being there a the start - it was a fun time, something very new to explore.
I didn't so much play the games, as mess with more serious software, but I began with tapes, managed to help devise an higher speed tape format, then moved to what were called floopies. These were a specialised continuous high speed data tape, later adopted by Sinclair for their failed business machine. Then onto 5.25 floppy discs, and having to devise my own interface and software. Finally onto second hand hard disks with a massive 20Mb of storage - before eventually giving up on my entirely home built system and moving to more capable commercially built BBC's.
Having bought one, I then ended up with a second BBC, the fancy multiprocessor design, a design intended for the university's computer science departments, which originally cost many thousands of pounds. It used a BBC B, as a basic interface and display, to the much faster high spec. processor with lots of memory and very expensive. Acorn didn't sell many, they were too little, too late. I managed to eventually sell that on to a BBC Acorn collector, museum for more than I had paid for it.
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Where’s my post gone?
Forgot to mention the commodore 64 bought in 1987 and still working.
The games on cassette tapes...
You were lucky, I had to buy computer magazines and type the code in and save it to compact cassette. Naturally, I had so many typos that it wouldn't run. From memory, we managed to find 2 games for the Tandy TRS80 on cassette. Whilst my mates were playing Defender and Jetset Willy, we were playing the equivalent of Pong.
I don't know about this.
We just bought the games on cassette from the newsagent.
Have you tried switching everything off, wait for 10 secs, then turn back on again
Yes, whilst all things tech of course continue to develop at pace, I like the fact I lived through the early years of computer development for the masses. It's all very slick nowadays, fine, but I enjoyed the times when we were all mucking about with our devices, adding better cards etc. Yes folk still do that today, however possibly not to the same extent. We buy, use, throw away.
I remember when I was at college, I told one of my lecturers I had a flatbed scanner with OCR (I'd got it as part of a bundle from Time.) She point blank refused to believe me, I can only assume because that feature wasn't widely available at that time.
She was well fit, ah happy days ...
She was well fit, ah happy days ...
Which really, was when I lost my interest in it.
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See if it landed behind the shoes by the door.
