>It's important to note that the Commodore 64 incorporated graphics support hardware (aka the first "graphics card")
Hardly the first. The Atari 800 had hardware support for:
Horizontal/Vertical scrolling
Sprites
Display List Interrupts (extra colours)
Redfinable character sets, both mono and colour
Yes, the C64 had better sprites and slightly better audio BUT was several years (800 previewed 1978, released 1979) after so ought to have been.
As others have noted, modern history seems to completely bypass several machines which were immensely popular and influential. When I first got into computers, it was TRS80/Atari 800/Apple II/Pet etc yet only Apple gets remmebered.
Those who get dewy eyed about their B&W soundless ZX80/81s would be surprised to find say the Atari 800 came out in 78/79 and offered colour, high res (at the time), sprites, hardware scrolling, display interrupts and most of the hardware features the Amiga built on later). The C64 was approx the equivelent of the Atari 800 but came out nearly 4 years later and only improved upon it in a few areas and in many ways was inferior.
I used to like text adventures and back then, the TRS80 got pretty much all the new ones first, witness Scott Adams et al.
For me, by the time the 64, Amiga, Atari ST etc came along, all th exciting and interesting stuff had happened. The only thing the ST did for me was offer a proper C compiler so I could write Unix/C code for work at home and at least check it compiled OK before bringing it in and properly building it.
Maybe 10-15 years ago I worked with an American (then working in the UK) who formally worked on a Boeing Stealth plane design that never came to fruition. He struck me as pretty much lacking any imagination so I couldn't imagine him making this up but here goes...
He said there were several planes, mainly on the Navy side that no one knew anything about (we had been discussing the Aurora i.e. did it exist or not). Bizarrely, he reckoned one was only armed with high energy weopons. He wouldn't say anything more than that though.
Just seemed curious that all those years ago someone reckoned it was the Navy playing with lasers and now this turns up.
(And yes, I know pretty much all the military has been playing with them but in this instance, there was allegedly something actually flying with them)
>Thank you internet news groups for documenting these old discussions.
And another good reason we should stop relying on web boards and get back to Usenet. You can bet if a discussion like this happened 5 years ago on a forum, it's gone now. We're such a throw away society, we even throw away stuff like this.
>along with a discussion group posting made by an Amiga fan, known only as Natuerlich!
That'll be the 'Amiga' fan posting in comp.sys.atari.st about the ST's OS options will it?
When I grew up, everyone I knew as music mad, we spent every penny we could on vinyl and later CDs. It was the soundtrack to our lives and it meant something to us. We bought the best HiFi we could afford to play it and would just sit in each others bedrooms playing our new stuff and reading lyrics etc.
Fast Forward to 2012. All my nephews, nieces and they friends barely care about music. It's just something they dance to in clubs or listen to on a tinny mobile phone speaker. None of them have a HiFi, none buy any music, none care. As someone said, in the rare case they want to hear a track, they'll fire it up on YouTube.
Most older people have all they want, having bought the same albums on LP, CD and maybe SACD. They rarely buy anything new.
IMO, the reason music sales are down is because the world has changed and NOT because of piracy. Music habits have changed.
The bad guys in Ender's game are called Buggers aren't they? In the UK, a bugger is someone who indulges in anal sex. Anal sex being called buggery in some circles (as it were). Just wondering if the mum in question picked up on that? More likely she's just barking mad though and frankly more of a danger to her kid's mental wellbeing that this book.
One common thread is that nothing is ever really "new" in computer science / IT
Totally. I don't think I've seen anything really new since maybe the mid eighties if not before. Sure it's faster/cheaper/smaller but pretty much everything new and trendy is something that has been here before under another name, had it's day and fallen out of fashion.
It's quite painful, especially in younger IT guys seeing them reinvent the wheel over and over and feeling so pleased with their 'innovation'
Paul talked about this in Romans. Basically, he said that we all know what's right and wrong. It doesn't matter whether you are a believer or a non-believer.
Which is fine and thanks for the quotation. However, the main point was that I am always being told by Christians that morality comes from God and as a horrible agnostic, I have no moral compass.
As others have said, it's not yours to mess about with and that crap about 'I just can't not surf the web' - jeeze, grow up already. Use your own kit for your non work related computer activities.
>Of course then you needed like 15 minutes to start anything useful.
Not always, on the Atari 800 you could use carts for Word processing, comms, programming and other tasks. If you had a floppy drive you could use spreadsheets, databases etc within 30 seconds or so.
I used to have that problem on a Burroughs B80 mini computer. I used to work in a bank back office and we used these to enter cheques, credits etc into the mainframe. Every 100 entries or so it would 'take totals' and print about a page of summary data. If you were on a roll and banging in cheques at speed during this process, it would overflow the buffer and reboot the machine which didn't make you wildly popular.
>In the early 90s I used to connect to Bank of America with my Apple ][e
Around 1985 a friend in the UK was on a pilot for a Barclays home banking system based on Prestel type graphics and the old split baud rate modems. He used his Atari 130XE to view statements, change standing orders etc, It only lasted a year or so and didn't go fully live as far as I know.
>Depends. A 386 might boot in a second. A late XT definitely won't. It takes several minutes.
The XT came first, the 386 much later.
I think he's talking about Atari's, C64s etc where you switch it on and it's readsy to go immediately, no OS to load from anything other than a ROM.
Not sure what country you were in but in the UK everyone went Micro mad in the early eighties. There were dozens of magazines, books and although 4-5 machines dominated, there were perhaps 20 different ones available. I knew all sorts from teens to people in their 50's - 60's that bought computers and started programming or using them for various tasks.
There was also the Alpha Syntauri - an Apple II based system that was pretty awesome (and expensive) for the time. Atari 800's had digitised audio in games well before the C64 too and I'm pretty sure some Apple II games did too as one of the early Atari games with digitised audio was an Apple II port. Hardware synths prior to MIDI used CV/gate for syncing and playing notes so even in the 70's there were hardware sequencers, some pretty awesome synths, drum machines etc.
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>It's important to note that the Commodore 64 incorporated graphics support hardware (aka the first "graphics card")
Hardly the first. The Atari 800 had hardware support for:
Horizontal/Vertical scrolling
Sprites
Display List Interrupts (extra colours)
Redfinable character sets, both mono and colour
Yes, the C64 had better sprites and slightly better audio BUT was several years (800 previewed 1978, released 1979) after so ought to have been.
As others have noted, modern history seems to completely bypass several machines which were immensely popular and influential. When I first got into computers, it was TRS80/Atari 800/Apple II/Pet etc yet only Apple gets remmebered.
Those who get dewy eyed about their B&W soundless ZX80/81s would be surprised to find say the Atari 800 came out in 78/79 and offered colour, high res (at the time), sprites, hardware scrolling, display interrupts and most of the hardware features the Amiga built on later). The C64 was approx the equivelent of the Atari 800 but came out nearly 4 years later and only improved upon it in a few areas and in many ways was inferior.
I used to like text adventures and back then, the TRS80 got pretty much all the new ones first, witness Scott Adams et al.
For me, by the time the 64, Amiga, Atari ST etc came along, all th exciting and interesting stuff had happened. The only thing the ST did for me was offer a proper C compiler so I could write Unix/C code for work at home and at least check it compiled OK before bringing it in and properly building it.
Maybe 10-15 years ago I worked with an American (then working in the UK) who formally worked on a Boeing Stealth plane design that never came to fruition. He struck me as pretty much lacking any imagination so I couldn't imagine him making this up but here goes...
He said there were several planes, mainly on the Navy side that no one knew anything about (we had been discussing the Aurora i.e. did it exist or not). Bizarrely, he reckoned one was only armed with high energy weopons. He wouldn't say anything more than that though.
Just seemed curious that all those years ago someone reckoned it was the Navy playing with lasers and now this turns up.
(And yes, I know pretty much all the military has been playing with them but in this instance, there was allegedly something actually flying with them)
>Don't be so negativistic
I think you meant negative...
>Thank you internet news groups for documenting these old discussions.
And another good reason we should stop relying on web boards and get back to Usenet. You can bet if a discussion like this happened 5 years ago on a forum, it's gone now. We're such a throw away society, we even throw away stuff like this.
>along with a discussion group posting made by an Amiga fan, known only as Natuerlich!
That'll be the 'Amiga' fan posting in comp.sys.atari.st about the ST's OS options will it?
>and ate themselves
Each other, surely? Or do things get *really* bad?
Who will see the name and want to buy it for the nostalgia fix. There's going to be some.
When I grew up, everyone I knew as music mad, we spent every penny we could on vinyl and later CDs. It was the soundtrack to our lives and it meant something to us. We bought the best HiFi we could afford to play it and would just sit in each others bedrooms playing our new stuff and reading lyrics etc.
Fast Forward to 2012. All my nephews, nieces and they friends barely care about music. It's just something they dance to in clubs or listen to on a tinny mobile phone speaker. None of them have a HiFi, none buy any music, none care. As someone said, in the rare case they want to hear a track, they'll fire it up on YouTube.
Most older people have all they want, having bought the same albums on LP, CD and maybe SACD. They rarely buy anything new.
IMO, the reason music sales are down is because the world has changed and NOT because of piracy. Music habits have changed.
The bad guys in Ender's game are called Buggers aren't they? In the UK, a bugger is someone who indulges in anal sex. Anal sex being called buggery in some circles (as it were). Just wondering if the mum in question picked up on that? More likely she's just barking mad though and frankly more of a danger to her kid's mental wellbeing that this book.
Totally. I don't think I've seen anything really new since maybe the mid eighties if not before. Sure it's faster/cheaper/smaller but pretty much everything new and trendy is something that has been here before under another name, had it's day and fallen out of fashion.
It's quite painful, especially in younger IT guys seeing them reinvent the wheel over and over and feeling so pleased with their 'innovation'
Had found its way back to Apple HQ?
He's reminding us what female pubes are supposed to look like.
http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/stpad.html
Which is fine and thanks for the quotation. However, the main point was that I am always being told by Christians that morality comes from God and as a horrible agnostic, I have no moral compass.
Doesn't have to be fat criminals though.
Who are always saying fundemental morality comes from God and nonbelievers are all evil types itching to go on crime sprees.
As others have said, it's not yours to mess about with and that crap about 'I just can't not surf the web' - jeeze, grow up already. Use your own kit for your non work related computer activities.
In 1972 it was still Arpanet.
>Of course then you needed like 15 minutes to start anything useful.
Not always, on the Atari 800 you could use carts for Word processing, comms, programming and other tasks. If you had a floppy drive you could use spreadsheets, databases etc within 30 seconds or so.
I used to have that problem on a Burroughs B80 mini computer. I used to work in a bank back office and we used these to enter cheques, credits etc into the mainframe. Every 100 entries or so it would 'take totals' and print about a page of summary data. If you were on a roll and banging in cheques at speed during this process, it would overflow the buffer and reboot the machine which didn't make you wildly popular.
>In the early 90s I used to connect to Bank of America with my Apple ][e
Around 1985 a friend in the UK was on a pilot for a Barclays home banking system based on Prestel type graphics and the old split baud rate modems. He used his Atari 130XE to view statements, change standing orders etc, It only lasted a year or so and didn't go fully live as far as I know.
>Depends. A 386 might boot in a second. A late XT definitely won't. It takes several minutes.
The XT came first, the 386 much later.
I think he's talking about Atari's, C64s etc where you switch it on and it's readsy to go immediately, no OS to load from anything other than a ROM.
Not sure what country you were in but in the UK everyone went Micro mad in the early eighties. There were dozens of magazines, books and although 4-5 machines dominated, there were perhaps 20 different ones available. I knew all sorts from teens to people in their 50's - 60's that bought computers and started programming or using them for various tasks.
There was also the Alpha Syntauri - an Apple II based system that was pretty awesome (and expensive) for the time. Atari 800's had digitised audio in games well before the C64 too and I'm pretty sure some Apple II games did too as one of the early Atari games with digitised audio was an Apple II port. Hardware synths prior to MIDI used CV/gate for syncing and playing notes so even in the 70's there were hardware sequencers, some pretty awesome synths, drum machines etc.