Comment by jackhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackhack | Hacker News Reader

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Similar experiences here, spoonman.

A computer in the 70s/80s was a serious expense, similar to buying a nice used car, or a year of state college.

My folks bought me an Apple ][ around 1980. $2500 bought : 1mhz, 48k of ram, 1 floppy drive, a 9" Sanyo monochrome monitor, and what seemed like an endless universe of possibilities. The next six years were a blur of Assembly (Lazer Systems Interactive Compiler), and Applesoft Basic, trying to unlock the secrets of that machine and write my own games. It was magic! I am 100% certain that $2500 investment by my folks is the reason I have had a career in software.

I remember riding a 10-speed bike downtown to Computerland to buy an individual floppy disc @ $5/each. The university bookstore only sold Gorilla brand, and they were around $7 each.

Imagine the joy when I learned to use a scissors (later, a nibbler tool) to cut a notch out of floppy case so I could use both sides. Like finding free money!

Now a RaspPi Zero is $5 and information is limitless. This is a gilded age.

> This is a gilded age.

That is quite possibly the biggest understatement in the history of humanity. And it's not just because computer hardware has become essentially free. When I was a kid, to get any kind of information meant waiting for the daily newspaper to be delivered, or a trip to the library, or, if you were lucky, pulling out a volume from the encyclopedia on the book shelf (another very pricey commodity in those days). It still boggles my mind that you can buy a full-featured Gnu/Linux server for the price of a hamburger, and Wikipedia is literally free. It's a freakin' miracle.

And your local library often didn't even have any books in whatever interest area you were looking for. Or maybe it had one from 1967 that was hopelessly out of date with the current state of the art.

My parents bought a Commodore 64 when I was a kid and I loved the thing, but I've come to realize over the years that I knew almost nothing about it as a kid. I had never even heard of PEEK/POKE and if it wasn't in the (admittedly pretty good) manual then there was basically no chance that I would. I remember the manual briefly touched on the sprite generator, but not in enough detail that a kid who only knows BASIC could use it. It never even mentioned the SID sound chip. The only "computer" books my library had were talking about CDC machines and IBM mainframes, or extremely general discussions about core memory and them fancy new transistor things. I think they might have had some programming language books too, but since I didn't have any compilers they were useless. This was in the 80s.

Today's kids can get in depth information on almost anything, and have ways of talking with experts if they get stuck. I'm excited to see how they turn out.

Actually, the manual, at least the one I got with my C64, did mention many of those aspects and even gave examples of them.

This is the one: http://www.retrogamingworld.co.uk/images/thumbnails/350/525/...

As a kid I didn't really understand much of it, I remember making a simple sprite move around the screen, and designing my own sprite using the grid example it gave.

However looking back at the manual now, it's amazing how much detail it goes into, from sprite positioning, sprite expansion, drawing multiple sprites ( all via POKE and PEEK) to programming the SID chip (one whole chapter on this).

It doesn't deal with handling sprite collision though, so you would struggle to make a game I suppose. But the manual is surprisingly in depth. It does mention that for more advanced topics you would need the "C64 programmers reference guide".

My father bought an Oric Atmos when I was a kid, and it came with a full documentation of the 6502 instruction set (or so I think, I don't know if it actually came with it or if my father bought it separately, but I tend to doubt the latter).

Edit: found it. Somehow different, but that's the closest to what I remember: http://www.defence-force.org/computing/oric/library/lib_manu... Chapter 10 and Appendixes were invaluable.

> Today's kids can get in depth information on almost anything

OTOH, in the 80's, CPU instruction sets were tractable, and writing machine code was in the realm of possibilities for kids (I should know, I did it ; it was loads of fun).

It is amazing to me how we even learned anything advanced back then. It was almost like we were so "dumb" compared to today's kids. The library and the bookstore at the mall (WaldenBooks) was my main staple as a young pre-teen kid. I'd never pass up a chance to go with my mom to either the library or the mall.

I remember as a 16yo trying to buy my first car (used 1979 Camaro) and how I thought knowing about the NADA guide you could browse through at the library was secret knowledge and used the copied page as negotiations tool. Now that info and more is readily available in few clicks on your portable phone/computer you carry in you pocket when at the dealer.

I remember reading a book around 1970 or so where a kid gets a computer that would answer questions. The one I remember is:

   "What is the main export of Bolivia?"

and it answered "tin". I don't remember anything else about the story. I remember thinking that such a machine was an impossibility. Asking such questions of a computer now is trite.

Google even formats it along with some other relevant information.

Did that inspire you to write Zortech C++? Still have fond memories of that.

I was more interested in rockets at the time :-) Computers didn't exist for me outside of scifi.

My high school acquired a Business Basic 4 computer my senior year. The math teacher decided to teach a BASIC programming class, where we'd use a punch card machine to write our programs, give the card decks to him, and he'd run them. He wouldn't let any of us touch the computer, or even be in the same room with it.

My most advanced program was a quadratic equation solver, just a few lines of BASIC. (The class was more or less a joke.)

But when I got to Caltech a year later, they gave all students an account on a DECSystem 10 timesharing system, and everything went downhill for me after that. I'd go to class in the day, and spent all night in the computer center playing with it.

I had three different TRS-80s. There seemed to be a new computer every two weeks or so in the house. My fondest memories of the TRS-80 were on the Model III and I remember being discouraged by the lack of documentation, multiple operating systems, the quality of instruction I could get, and of course access time. I remember feeling lucky not having to use a tape cassette. Apparently, I also learned to swear and type simultaneously.

It was such a strange time because of all of the different form factors and sizes. I had a DOS computer that looked like a metal waste bin with a monitor embedded. The keyboard would clip onto the monitor: "Portable" The Apple II, Atari 1200XL, and Commie were all short lived, as they are not 'business computers'. There were also countless 'bubble pop' keyboard computers that I only remember because of the feeling of pressing on the keys. The standard IBM Personal Computer XT was my sole computer until the 486 era. The lack of EGA/VGA in that time meant that I increasingly wandered onto BBS systems until I found several that actually had Internet access by syncing with the University. I had two email address in 1986. It took me about a year to discover the difference between electronic mail on the bulletin board that I was used to and e-mail. As for modems, the jump from the TRS-80 Direct-Connect Modem on page 12 of the catalog that connected at 300bps to a 2400bps internal modem on the XT was mind blowing.

I also remember being disgusted by GW-BASIC and being on a programming bulletin board called McAffee's. It was so frustrating because I did not have access to a C compiler and was crushed to find out from the SysOp how much it cost back then. When I finally managed to get a pirated version of Borland Turbo C, I was ecstatic.

Ah, cassette tapes. I remember learning the hard way that leaving one on top of the microwave could make it unreadable to the TRS80...

I had a bunch of floppies in a box fail in a peculiar manner according to the Fibonacci sequence. Luckily the important stuff was clustered in the back.

Riding the bike to Computerland...brings back memories.

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