ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Remember Your First Computer?

Zork

I've spent many hours playing Zork years ago, about '84... With help from friends, we managed to solve it. This was way before the 'net where cheats and walkthroughs are plentiful!

Return to Zork was fun, but Zork Nemesis has stumped me. That darn sliding puzzle!

Myst just blows me away... I can't solve it when using the cheats!

My favorite basic "trick" (verrry basic)...

10 x=x+1
20 print x
30 goto 10

run

How far will an Apple IIe count?

Gee, I must be getting past it!

I remember a time when for some BASIC interpreters that first line would have to have been:

10 LET X=X+1



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-28-2002).]

That looks more familiar...
I remember LET,GOTO,10,15,20,etc.
I wasn't a pro, just copied what others wrote. I am still a programmer wannabee, and only know hack html. Does anyone else remember talk being about AT or XT computers? What was that all about? I was 16 in '84' and was esthatic when we went from ATARI 800XL to a HP with a printer and 5.25 Floppy.
(ps)Thanks.I Downloaded Zork & played again for the first time in 17-18? years. Fun & Funny.

My first attempt at becoming "puter literate" was a used 486 in '96..... it was a contraption with wires going everywhere, that I knew absolutely nothing about. I mostly played boring things like solitaire and black jack. Finally gave up on learning how to do anything with it. Donated it to a domestic violence shelter,they needed one and I didn't want to dust the one I had anymore!
Then in '98 one of my room mates introduced me to the internet on a PB 486 - and things started making more sense. Helps to have a geek in the house, isen't that right '66?

My first computer was very similar to the one in Joe's image. It was a TRS-80 which had a 9" CRT [Monochrome, of course!] and used a Cassette tape [typical Audio Cassette] driven on an external player for loading Basic Interpteter and the OS [What our modern machines do at bootup]. Also, Applications could be saved to and read from the tape drive.

It was a nice little machine! Display and Core [the actual Corn-Puter] were in a common case, and the keyboard plugged into it via a DIN-5 setup. Tape deck used 3/16" Phone plug / jack.
The machine was [I believe] Z-80 CPU based and had a whopping 4K memory!

One of the first things I did on it [besides playing the included games] was to hack up a simple For-To-Next loop
10 P AT 80:[some rude text usually ]
20 GOTO 10
run

Then I got into some basic BASIC , and altered a few of the App's included with the machine.

My second machine was another TRS-80, but this was a Model II [2]. It was Z-80 CPU based, with a "HUGE" DRAM of 64K!. Also sported a Low Density 8" Floppy Disk Drive [A:], with ability to connect an external Floppy Disk Drive via SCSI port. Had a 12 or 13" Monochrome CRT and QWERTY keyboard built in to the common case.
Also had a Daisy Wheel Tractor Feed Impact Printer.

All work had to be written in BASIC code, then saved to a floppy. Booting required [of course] the bootable floppy disk - which contained the interperter and the operating system [TRS DOS]. Needless to say, if that bootdisk became corrupted or lost, the machine refused to do anything after POST [AKA IRQ 80h - non system diskette. reboot system, or the even older "Cannot load Cassette BASIC, Restart"].

What a giant leap it was to go from the Model II, to a PC! My first was an 80386SX based machine with a 14" color EGA display and a Hard Drive!!! 1 MB of DRAM [30 pin 100 ns type].
That machine got upgraded as time went on and $$$ became available. I still have it and will never get rid of it, because it was my hands on self teaching tool. Very sentimental to me.

Used an 80286 based PC in conjunction with the 386, then moved up to an 80486DX2 for about 2 months prior to buying my first Pentium based machine, which was a P5-166 Mhz, purchased in late May of 1996.

Wow, my life story again!

Scott S.E.T.

I still love the old 8-bit CPUs like the Zilog Z80. The fact that it's survived so long and become used as a secondary processor for disk controllers, keyboards, etc. just shows what a great CPU it was. Full credit to the 8080 for starting it (the Z80 was designed as an "extended 8080" and will run 8080 code).

The Acorn machines I mentioned above were based on the 6502, which was also used in a lot of the Commodore machines of the time. A teacher at my old school had a homebrew 6800-based system which I played around with sometimes as well. Each of these CPUs had slightly different register combinations and addressing modes.

Lance, you mentioned the XT and AT. The original IBM PC (model 5150) was launched in 1981 with the 8088 processor. The XT (eXtended Technology) came out a little later and I believe had a hard disk fitted as standard. There were many clones of course, and some of these used the 8086 CPU. The later AT (about 1984?) went to the 80286 processor with its full 16-bit data lines.

I have a Pentium system loaded with WWW browsers etc., but I still have an old Tandon XT clone that I use for simple word processing, accounts, and so on. It has MDA video and I run it with an original green-phosphor IBM monitor. For hours working on documents, I still believe that today's Super-VGA color displays can't hold a candle to that old mono system for clarity.

It has only a 20MB hard disk (remember when they were commonly called Winchesters? ), yet with word processor, accounts software, SuperCalc, Turbo Pascal, assembler/debugger, and a whole load of other things it still has only half of the disk in use most of the time.

The installation routine of some modern software wouldn't even load into that space.

Paul,

Like your reply! I have some older Bunko-Ramo Controllers which were used at Teller Lines for connecting the Terminals to the LAN. These were used all the way upto 1998 and contained a Z-80 CPU. They worked just fine, and probably would still be in service to this day - except for the Mandated "Y2K" Compatability upgrades which caused all the older equipment to be tossed.

IBM's system 4700 used the same approach [4702 Controller running Teller Terminals], but I am unsure of the CPU type [likely to be an Intel 8088, since the 5.25" diskettes contained PC DOS and the Controller's code].

IBM equipment at the branches still boots with 3270 Emulator as a TSR, and now include support for NTFS, FAT / FAT32 [MSDOS] and lately has support for Ethernet 802.3 [10 / 100 Base] within the OS/2 enviroment and on-board. Previous versions only supported 802.5 [4/16 MB Token Ring], so installation of a NIC in the bus was required for Ethernet LANs.

I agree with you 100% about using Monochrome Monitors for Word Processing [when hard copies will be printed only with black fonts - kind of gets hard to have multiple colored fonts end up the way you want them hard copied when viewed on Mono VGA, or Mono EGA / CGA / etc.]. Using simple pixels on the screen isn't such an eye strain!
My first CAD application [on my 386] looked much better on a monochrome display, as opposed to color [My EGA monitor could be switched from color to Mono].

Hey, was that 6800 / 6502 CPU a Motorolla IC??? [class 6xxx]
Just curious.

As to the IBM PC / XT, I seem to recall the PC 5150's bus architecture had 8 bit ISA bus only, and the XT's started using 16 bit ISA slots with the 8 bit ones. Possibly a few more instructions in the ROM BIOS to deal with the 16 bit. Think the PC came with 64K of DRAM, and the XT came with 256K. Also think the XT had an adapter containing 16K BIOS extensions [XT Hard Disk BIOS Extensions].

Speaking of Intel CPUs predating the 386 class, wasn't the reason for the 80186's quick demise due to IBM ignoring Intel reserved interrupts? That CPU combined an 8086 Processor with several Peripherals into one IC [DIP???].

I remember the Winchester drive term from my 286 and 386 time period. Was that drive a 30 sector / 30 MB SCSI drive??? [hence the 30/30 term fitting the Winchester Rifle].
On that subject, anyone remember MCA? The first Plug-and-Play Architecture. If IBM wasn't so "IBM-ish", that architecture might have been used for a few more years, at least by the Clone Builders here and there, instead of only found in Big Blue's machines like PS/2 or System 70.
A friend brought me an IBM PS/2 80486DX2 based PC which used MCA only, and wanted me to put in sound, SVGA adapter and an Internal MODEM. Took me almost an hour to explain why I could only connect an External MODEM [Via DB-9 Serial Port], but nothing else! This was around 1997.
He wasn't too happy when I suggested it was a really good Word Processing machine or something for simple Internet use.

Ahhh, feels good to talk like this again!

Scott S.E.T.

Scott35--5150, eh? A true-blue insider! I don't want to nauseate anyone, but HTML sure reminds me of WordStar.

My first pc was a Macintosh 512K with an external disc drive and daisywheel printer way back in 1985. I remember going to a software store and buying a word processor program made by some company called Microsoft...who knew? We had the old TRS-80's at school in the so called computer lab. I dont think two TRS-80's really constitutes a computer lab anymore.

[This message has been edited by arseegee (edited 06-30-2002).]