Wow, yeah seems like we come from a similar place. my first machine was a Tandy trs80. My family couldn’t afford it, but someone as church (they were all about church) had one as a prestige thing, didn’t know what to do with it, and when we visited, toddler me figured out how to make smiley faces etc on the screen. So they lent it to us. At that time, as I’m sure you remember, computers were ‘the thing of the future’, and they wanted to encourage me.
Next someone gave me a ZX81 with a mighty 1k RAM. Couldn’t do much with that. But when the 48k Sinclair spectrum came out with its weird version of basic, I was right on track! Me and my little brothers, all of us under 10, going to the only shop in town that sold computer games. On cassette.
Then I got into the BBC B. That fucker was an amazing machine imo. Basic interpreter, but you could code in assembly and compile. What a learning tool. It was about then I started getting curious about AI and artificial life. When I was 14 I wrote a chat bot in turbo Pascal, that was supposed to learn from responses, build a database of associated nouns. Actually the grammar was the most challenging bit. Fuckin tight code too, if I do say so myself. It was the basis of my a level project in computing. I got a B, partly because the examiners couldn’t understand it, but partly TBF because it didn’t really work. Couldn’t pass the Turing test. Based on an Eliza, but I pushed for general.
Anyway, then I got into girls and drugs and now I empty dog shit bins in the parks for a living. Ho hum. Had a lot of fun tho so not complaining.
Haha, wild story! The 99/4A was made to program, but how could anyone with that keyboard. Next we got a PC, a monochrome Panasonic ‘laptop’ with 2 5 1/4 disk drives. A little bit of turtle there but I never really caught on and was mostly gaming.
And while others had the cool stuff like c64 and later Amiga we always only had a pc, but we know how that turned out.
Heh, I actually had an Amiga later on. My parents were proper broke, in hindsight they bought me computers when I was young because they prob thought I’d be a high earning computer guy someday. Didn’t turn out that way, but I was lucky. First computer I bought with my own money was a 386, I think it was 33mhz.
Yeah I remember those 5 &1/4 inch discs. I think they must be where the term ‘floppy disc’ comes from. Heh, lotsa ppl these days grew up on cloud storae
Yeah I was into gaming when I was a little kid (jet set willy on Lisa lot the spectrum!), then into coding, then into other shit for a long time. I’m only recently getting back into gaming again (got a steam deck a year ago)
And yeah, PC gaming. Ideally on 0linux - I’m not one of those linux evangelists but it’s less stress and I feel like games run better.
I’ve actually got a mate who has made a kind of music career using an Amiga. Like, it’s part of his setup just like the decks.
If I may ask, in which field did you end up working?
For me it actually turned out to be IT, and being in the field of specialists that are actively recruited. Gaming always stayed.
There were even bigger floppies before then where the term might have started but the 5 1/4 were those I first knew, with the low capacity (360kb?). It’s still crazy how the amount of memory/storage rose and I sometimes lose track because of that (MB? GB? TB!) as well as my own age (mostly because I don’t care.
Wow, yeah seems like we come from a similar place. my first machine was a Tandy trs80. My family couldn’t afford it, but someone as church (they were all about church) had one as a prestige thing, didn’t know what to do with it, and when we visited, toddler me figured out how to make smiley faces etc on the screen. So they lent it to us. At that time, as I’m sure you remember, computers were ‘the thing of the future’, and they wanted to encourage me. Next someone gave me a ZX81 with a mighty 1k RAM. Couldn’t do much with that. But when the 48k Sinclair spectrum came out with its weird version of basic, I was right on track! Me and my little brothers, all of us under 10, going to the only shop in town that sold computer games. On cassette. Then I got into the BBC B. That fucker was an amazing machine imo. Basic interpreter, but you could code in assembly and compile. What a learning tool. It was about then I started getting curious about AI and artificial life. When I was 14 I wrote a chat bot in turbo Pascal, that was supposed to learn from responses, build a database of associated nouns. Actually the grammar was the most challenging bit. Fuckin tight code too, if I do say so myself. It was the basis of my a level project in computing. I got a B, partly because the examiners couldn’t understand it, but partly TBF because it didn’t really work. Couldn’t pass the Turing test. Based on an Eliza, but I pushed for general. Anyway, then I got into girls and drugs and now I empty dog shit bins in the parks for a living. Ho hum. Had a lot of fun tho so not complaining.
Haha, wild story! The 99/4A was made to program, but how could anyone with that keyboard. Next we got a PC, a monochrome Panasonic ‘laptop’ with 2 5 1/4 disk drives. A little bit of turtle there but I never really caught on and was mostly gaming.
And while others had the cool stuff like c64 and later Amiga we always only had a pc, but we know how that turned out.
Heh, I actually had an Amiga later on. My parents were proper broke, in hindsight they bought me computers when I was young because they prob thought I’d be a high earning computer guy someday. Didn’t turn out that way, but I was lucky. First computer I bought with my own money was a 386, I think it was 33mhz.
Yeah I remember those 5 &1/4 inch discs. I think they must be where the term ‘floppy disc’ comes from. Heh, lotsa ppl these days grew up on cloud storae
Yeah I was into gaming when I was a little kid (jet set willy on Lisa lot the spectrum!), then into coding, then into other shit for a long time. I’m only recently getting back into gaming again (got a steam deck a year ago)
And yeah, PC gaming. Ideally on 0linux - I’m not one of those linux evangelists but it’s less stress and I feel like games run better.
I’ve actually got a mate who has made a kind of music career using an Amiga. Like, it’s part of his setup just like the decks.
If I may ask, in which field did you end up working?
For me it actually turned out to be IT, and being in the field of specialists that are actively recruited. Gaming always stayed.
There were even bigger floppies before then where the term might have started but the 5 1/4 were those I first knew, with the low capacity (360kb?). It’s still crazy how the amount of memory/storage rose and I sometimes lose track because of that (MB? GB? TB!) as well as my own age (mostly because I don’t care.