What is your earliest computer related memory?

When I looked for the H2G2 game it also had a link to a "Candy the Naughty Cheerleader" game . . .

Pep ( . . . is waiting for his boss to go to lunch.)

I knew it had something to do with trees and axes. Seriously. Or do I mean Luton instead of Bletchley?

Yes, I was. The mind is a wonderful thing but mine is shagged out after a day and a night of what I do.

I'm still wondering when I wrote teh satyr-unicorn thread. I dont remember it at all. M mind is a blank over that one.

Yup. Actually, I probably know more about my car than my computer. The computer is just another useful aplliance in my house, like my television, dvr, or microwave oven. All nice to have, but I could live without them. But my car is an absolute necessity for me, and I spend so much time in it that I have a decent grasp of how it works. I can go into the repair shop and not get bamboozled by a mechanic just because I am a woman. You won't find me under the hood giving it a tune up or changing the oil, but I have a good idea of what those tasks entail.

From some of the equipment mentioned...... some folks here are old enough to fart dust.

TVs: First one I remember is a big old wood cabinet one made by Zenith, color, with only 4 buttons on the remote. It still used the old sound method as there were 4 metal bars inside. The remote was a "clicker".

TV shows: Capt. Kangaroo, Everything Sid & Marty Kroft, All In The Family, Soap, MASH, BJ & The Bear, The Incredible Hulk (Bill Bixby).

OH! And 8 Tracks.

Just stay away from the axes. Seriously

Probably Luton. Dr. Beeching was responsible for pruning the rail network, to make it more financially efficient - hence "Beeching's axe".

Why do they teach us this stuff in school?

I agree with all of that - whether it's correct or not

Back then, an indivdual could design, produce and market an entire computer in a relatively short space of time - including the ROM. The manufacture and marketing would need money, of course. But not any more if it's to compete with later machines.

Since you mentioned memory to TV screen, it was a puzzle for me at one time. It wasn't the technical transfer that puzzled me - it was how a binary number in memory turned into a coloured pixel on the screen. I asked all sorts of people, even the head of a university computer department, but nobody knew. And then it dawned on me - 111/RGB, 101/R-B, etc. - which then made me realise why all the different computers 'coincidentally' had the same set of colours, and in the same order.

I continued programming into this century, mostly in Visual Basic, and sometimes a VB/assembly language hybrid, but it's faded away now and, if I do anything at all, it's just basically tinkering - like with the bots programme for SL (modifying the libSL TestClient to suit my needs). The languages have moved on a lot - even VB is now a strange language to me - and I've no desire to keep up.

It's no good asking me. Maybe your teacher was still miffed about it because his station or line was axed.

I hated those. If you didn't choose the exact right words that the writer chose, you couldn't do anything. I never got into them for that reason.

The only scrolling text adventure that I got into was a UK MUG called Shades. I was addicted to that.

My first computer game memory is an ASCII star trek game. Only we didn't have screens, so every turn it would re-print the map, and we eventually got in trouble for going through ungodly amounts of that green-bar paper our terminals used.

As for cars, my high school required us to rebuild an engine in freshman auto shop (they didn't work because they had been "rebuilt" by freshmen for 20 years before my class got to them). My wife's car is impossible to work on...there's just a mass of stuff crammed under the hood with no room to work, and the ECU controls everything, so there's nothing to set. My car is a trusty English model from 1977 (MGB roadster), which was non-functional when I bought it. Needed a whole new electrical system, plus all of the rubber suspension parts had rotted. But I can rebuild it on the side of the road with hand tools if I have to.

First computer game I wrote was an implementation of a simple frictionless racing game described in Martin Gardner's column in the Scientific American. Each turn you could accelerate your pip one unit per second in each of X and Y. You had to successfully negotiate a simple course before your opponent. My "brilliant" innovation was to use the numbers 1-9 to describe both the X and Y acceleration in each turn, based on the layout of the digits on the (programmable) calculator keyboard. It printed out the course on the attached printer each turn, by printing 16 16 digit numbers, something like so:

8888888888888888
8000000000000000
8000000000000000
8000100008888888
8000002088888888
8000000888888888
8000008888888888
8000008888888888
8000008888888888
8000008888888888

8 = rock
0 = open
1 = player 1
2 = player 2

If someone got across the finish line it rang a bell. If someone crashed it printed the numbers out negative so the map came out red. It was popular at the school science day because people could take the printout (on cash register tape) with them. We had to shut down after a couple of hours because we ran out of tape.

Color and a remote, you must have been rich. Until I was 9 we had a 10 inch B@W. Even after we got the big wooden color model, changing the channel meant Dad saying "Get up and put it on channel 12."

Dang, some of you are oooooold.

I missed the prehistoric computer days and my early childhood was dominated by consoles. My parents had an Intellivision that I grew up on — Triple Action, Bomb Squad, Nighstalker, etc. We had the little module you could plug in to hear the synthesized voice. That was mostly in the late 80s.

Then we had something called Socrates, which was one of those attempts at making consoles about education. My mom loved it...

I remember when my uncle — who was a software engineer — first got a 286. I use to love visiting his place for the weekend so I could play this putt putt golf game on it. My dad later bought it off him for $800 and it was our first actual PC in the house.

Just before windows 95 came out I was in middle school and I remember how pissed my mom use to get when I'd tie up the phone line connecting to BBS's. I use to play L.O.R.D. religiously.

I didn't learn programming until '97 in high school which was in our "computer science" class and we learned BASIC. Nobody in my school knew anything about computers and we didn't really have funding to have any other such classes. I ended up having to do independent studies and buying my own books to self teach myself C++ over the next 3 years of high school.

My first memory (home use) from the early 1980s was the BBC Model B Computer:



My favourite games were the text-based games where you had to type in the commands, eg:

You are sitting on a sofa, in an undecorated room. Besides you is a table with a bunch of keys, a flower in a vase, some matches, and a beermat. There are exits to the North, West and East, what do you want to do? I alsways seemed to get some guy rushing up to me, handing me a ticking box (containing a bomb) and the box was sticky and I couldn't drop the damn thing. Can't remember if I ever succeeded in completing any of those games. You made maps as you explored NSEW and Up/Down. Dem were de days.


My first memory in a professional capacity, again in the early 1980s, was learning to fix PDP 11s,




with their magnetic memory cores.



Rock

The better written adventures had parsers which overcame the get-the-exact-phrase problem. But yes, those that required exact wording could be a pain.

But it was the whole concept: exploring, and interacting, with a world created by someone else. Hmm, wait a minute ... that sounds familiar somehow.

> You log into SL. A Noob approaches.
> Noob: WNT teh SeX!
>

> GET AXE
> KILL NOOB WITH AXE
> GO NORTH

And the magic word (did that rez a bridge across a chasm?) was...

xyzzy

Rock: I predate your bi-magnetic cores experience by a loooong way Same job though - learning to fix the machines.

An aside:
The computer-controlled rockets that went up in the 60s used bi-magnetic cores with wire through them for the programming. The wires that went through them *were* the programmes.

It's not all that different today, but we think of programmes in memory on a higher level. At the lowest level they are still wiring and components but not as fixed, except for the microprogrammes in the CPUs.

xyzzy took you to the east-west crawlway with the iron rod.
plugh took you to Y2.

I have a core plane from a mainframe on my cubicle wall here.

You've been keeping notes. Nobody old enough to have played that could possibly remember those details