Place is full of kids.....

[oldfartuk]

The first computer game I played was 1978, a nuclear war sim, run on a DEC VAX 11/750 mainframe. This was four years before the internet was invented, and the days when computing was an arcane art, and Black Magic. We woudl play against other University mainframes, connecting over JANET, the Joint Academic Network. Mostly it was played in real time, on either green screen monitors, or teletypes.

We also played a Microcomputer game based on The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Mainly that ran on a BBC micro, (BBC micro's were one the the worst dead ends in computing, ever), because we couldnt port it to the sole IBM PC sitting in the corner, which ran QDOS.

See THATS what you call OLD memories.

[Arran]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

Anybody who really knows about PCs will know that they are a computer that:

1. Should never have been invented.

2. Should never have become industry standard.

When the PC was first released it was quite a lousy computer for its time and definitely overpriced for what it was but businesses in the US bought them like hot cakes because it was from IBM. The world would be a much better place if the PC used the Motorola 68000 instead of hideous junk from Intel.

[Richard1978]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

Also IBM managed to make enough loopholes for lots of other companies to reverse engineer them.

I'm not sure what else would have become an industry standard though.

[Arran]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

It's a good question what would have become standard. There were countless computers around at the time the original PC was released and new models continued to be developed. I'm tempted to say that it would have been some Unix machine. Interestingly enough Microsoft sold a version of Unix for the PC called Xenix but it never caught on. Microsoft was also a key player behind the MSX.

Any computer from the early 1980s was easy to reverse engineer.

[big kid]

Re: Place is full of kids.....



still got a bbc model b. my aunt was going to throw it away a number of years back, but i saved it. lol. also used to enjoy playing games on this old grandstand system what i have, although it's been a while since i used it.

[Mulletino]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

We also played a Microcomputer game based on The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Mainly that ran on a BBC micro

Was it Escape From Moonbase Alpha? I remember playing that round a mate's that had Marvin, the Paranoid Android in it.

[Richard1978]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

Was it Escape From Moonbase Alpha? I remember playing that round a mate's that had Marvin, the Paranoid Android in it.

I remember that game, it had a few other sci-fi characters in, such as Dr Who & the Tardis, & the Daleks, renamed Metal Maulers.

[Finnthedude]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

I never understood the BBC Micro. When I was at school (80's) every kid who was a computer fan had C64 or a Spectrum, maybe 2 or 3 kids in the entire school had a BBC Micro. The school decided to have a BBC Micro as its adopted computer. WTF? It was 4 times the price of the Speccy and C64 and nowhere near as well supported. If it hadn't been for Elite it would have died a death.

Finnthedude.

[Richard1978]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

The BBC Micro won a competition to be the computer to be used for a government computer literacy scheme, who would chip in for some of the cost.

I admit they weren't brilliant as game players, but a lot easier to program BASIC in than the C-64, from personal experience.

There was quite a lot of companies writing educational software for the BBC Micro in the 1980s, so hardly unsupported, & many parents were wary of buying computers at the time just to be "game players".

[Arran]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

The BBC was intended to be an educational machine, not a games machine!

Take into account that hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money was spent installing computers into schools back in the 1980s. It was of utmost importance that the company supplying them would be willing to take on the contract by providing products that met the requirements of schools and are very unlikely to go bust. If the company went bust then it would most likely mean that money invested in computers would be wasted because new computers and support for existing computers would no longer be available. Presumably Commodore and Sinclair were unwilling to take on the contract or were too risky companies to deal with. Commodore was American and the government would have strongly favoured a British company at the time. The only other alternatives to the BBC would have been the Memotech MTX 500 / 512 or a British MSX clone. Dragon Data went bust and both Amstrad and Enterprise arrived too late with their products.

[staffslad]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

I don't think I saw a computer in an educational environment until 1984, when I started an engineering degree. I remember that in the first year we used BBC Micros to program various bits of kit and mainframe terminals to write programs in BASIC, FORTRAN and PASCAL. For assembly level programming we used a Z80 processor based briefcase-sized device. By the final year the BBCMicros had been discarded--or at least we no longer used them--in favour of lots of PCs. For my final year project I remember using an Olivetti PC and a 5.25 floppy containing a software package to design printed circuit boards. I don't think that Olivetti had a hard drive--or perhaps access to it was restricted for students--as I had to save PCB designs on a blank floppy.

[zabadak]

Re: Place is full of kids.....

I started my 'A'-Level Computer Science course on a PDP-8 in 1979 at the local sixth-form college