Hi... um... is this thing on? *tap tap*
Can everyone hear me? ... Oh... sorry. My bad.
Yeah, well, .... er... I was never very good at these introduction thingies.
I started with computers in the 80's home computer era with a ZX81 and then a BBC Micro... model B... tricked out with twin double sided 40/80 switchable hard drives... as you do.. Or rather.. as you did.
My first work experience was in a place that shipped clone PCs. We assembled them. 8086 processors. The only I/O on the MB was the large din keyboard. Ha ! Remember them?! You had to put an expansion card in even to have a serial port for a mouse. Oh yeah... roller thingies that picked up all the fluff on the desk and deposited it around the rollers, so you spent ten minutes every week with the thing upside down, scraping at the roller with a jewelers screw driver.
The hard drive was a 5meg Winchester unit. Two cables between the hard drive and the card. It was formatted by entering some black magic at a DOS prompt to kick in some program in ROM on the card. Then you low level formatted. That's another thing you don't do these days.
We were pushing the envelope even in those days. Putting a meg of ram in when it could only address 600-ish. We'd use the extra 300 as a RAM drive. Oh, and how we enjoyed games... Leisure Suit Larry 1. Spent ages trying to guess the answers to the security, "adult," (ahem) questions before the game would play.
Not that Turbo mode did anything. It wasn't really overclocking. It was actually doing the reverse.. restricting the clock from 8mhz to 4. Wow. And we thought that was fast.
This is me with the machine that I assembled and bought myself. The red switch on the side of the monitor is the one I had to install because the original push button gave up the ghost. And look at that mouse !!! Yeah... excuse the mess.
These days, everything has changed, and keeps changing. Rapidly. I can't keep up. It's enough to do what I do for work, and when I get home I just want to kick back with a game... or else there's house work to do or something.
So I rely heavily on other people's advice. You know... the people who are as enthusiastic about tech now, as I was back then. I think I still have Peter Norton's book on the VGA sub system. Or maybe not.
But I do have three BBC B micros, still functioning.. tricked out even more bad ass than when I first had one. I can even read Fat 32 USB sticks on one of them... and compact flash cards mimick the old Winchester drives.
*sigh* those were the days....
Can everyone hear me? ... Oh... sorry. My bad.
Yeah, well, .... er... I was never very good at these introduction thingies.
I started with computers in the 80's home computer era with a ZX81 and then a BBC Micro... model B... tricked out with twin double sided 40/80 switchable hard drives... as you do.. Or rather.. as you did.
My first work experience was in a place that shipped clone PCs. We assembled them. 8086 processors. The only I/O on the MB was the large din keyboard. Ha ! Remember them?! You had to put an expansion card in even to have a serial port for a mouse. Oh yeah... roller thingies that picked up all the fluff on the desk and deposited it around the rollers, so you spent ten minutes every week with the thing upside down, scraping at the roller with a jewelers screw driver.
The hard drive was a 5meg Winchester unit. Two cables between the hard drive and the card. It was formatted by entering some black magic at a DOS prompt to kick in some program in ROM on the card. Then you low level formatted. That's another thing you don't do these days.
We were pushing the envelope even in those days. Putting a meg of ram in when it could only address 600-ish. We'd use the extra 300 as a RAM drive. Oh, and how we enjoyed games... Leisure Suit Larry 1. Spent ages trying to guess the answers to the security, "adult," (ahem) questions before the game would play.
Not that Turbo mode did anything. It wasn't really overclocking. It was actually doing the reverse.. restricting the clock from 8mhz to 4. Wow. And we thought that was fast.
This is me with the machine that I assembled and bought myself. The red switch on the side of the monitor is the one I had to install because the original push button gave up the ghost. And look at that mouse !!! Yeah... excuse the mess.
These days, everything has changed, and keeps changing. Rapidly. I can't keep up. It's enough to do what I do for work, and when I get home I just want to kick back with a game... or else there's house work to do or something.
So I rely heavily on other people's advice. You know... the people who are as enthusiastic about tech now, as I was back then. I think I still have Peter Norton's book on the VGA sub system. Or maybe not.
But I do have three BBC B micros, still functioning.. tricked out even more bad ass than when I first had one. I can even read Fat 32 USB sticks on one of them... and compact flash cards mimick the old Winchester drives.
*sigh* those were the days....