OT: Did a little bit of grave searching and there is 9 years between me and you Grom We share a december birthday. Mine is the 21st. And paperboy was a nightmare. If i remember correctly, it had a weird diagonal sideview that made it really difficult to judge where you should throw the paper.

Back on topic: Everthing before i was 19 is a bit blured. I must have been between 4-9 when i first came across the speccie *closes eyes to try and remeber further back than yesterday*

Ok, timeline to try and get date of spectrum playing:

1)I was in middle school when i first got my megadrive and sonic so that puts it in the region of me being 7-11
2)Got my PS1 in secondary school so i was between 12-16
3)Got my N64 in 1999 or there abouts followed 2 possibly 3 years later with my PS2 and Gamecube.

Right, spoke to my grandad cos this is really bugging me. He says it wasn't a speccie after all, it was one of the first Atari systems. Did they ever release a console?

Sorry for going a bit OT

Amstrad? No can't say I remember the 3". Then again , I also remember an old IBM Displaywriter (if we are talking about flops) that used something like an 8" monstrocity of a flop. And it held maybe something like 32K... or was it 64k?

I started beleve it or not on a Comador 64. Brand new cost me a bundle. My EX still has and uses Pentium 486, it still runs.


Fun Stuff............................AZAR

I was running an RJE -- it is a computer about as big as a desk with 7'' floppy drives and 900 baud modem. I was writing programs in RPG to create reports of a logging company. Then the school I was going to got IBM 8086's with 8 color monitors (the latest and greatest Microsoft DOS 1.6 I think can't remeber). We build a programs to catalog the schools library, attendance, etc. in BASIC and ran BBS that other schools with computers could phone us and we would share programs.
Then I went to work for a bank that was attempting to set up a network so the branches could send there daily reciepts into the main processing center. However I was fired when I took a program that a friend made on a amiga of a girl lifting up her skirt and made it the logo screen for the communications network. I thought it was funny as hell and it took my manager having to hire my friend to get the script removed.

OH man an I old or what

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BTW Paperboy rocked - but how hard was it??!!

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I remember Paperboy, fookin kick arse game!

@nottheslacker - its ok, if it makes you feel better I did my computer science O-level on a punch card machine that was the size of a wardrobe. Punch 21+32 into a crappy piece of cardboard, shove it in the machine, switch on, pull a couple of levers, wait for 5 hours, come back, wait for the machine to spit the card back in your face, translate the answer....57. Doh! Must have punched it in wrong

@bret - I bought the amstrad CPC464 when I was about 11 (savings from work, which I started when I was 10, and a little help from my mum). The Speccie (rubber key thingy) was already out - they came out about 6 months apart. By the time I was 13, Spectrum had been bought up by Amstrad, so they now had the tape deck built into their models just like the Amstrads already did. By the time I was 14 the whole lot went bust. I first played a PS1 about 2 months after they came out - I was at my 3rd student house, so I was either 20 or approaching 21.

@indy - I remember those monsters!! Those were the days where you had to carefully feed in the ultra-bendy floppy (when floppy reeeaaally meant floppy!!) and then lock them into the drive with a 2" latch!

Tell ya what though - some of the most addictive games came from that era because of their simplicity - not to mention the old style text based "adventure" games....remember this sort of thing...??....

>NORTH
You go north. On the floor is a :
pen
>EXAMINE pen
Its long and inky
>INVENTORY
a crusty loaf
a piece of paper
an old sock
>PICK UP pen
I'm sorry but I can't do that to the pen
>LIFT pen
I'm sorry but I can't do that to the pen
>GET pen
You pick up the pen
>WRITE ON paper
I'm sorry but you can't do that to the paper
>WRITE WITH pen
I'm sorry but you can't do that to the pen
>USE pen
What would you like to use it with?
>USE pen WITH paper
You scribble your name on the paper, but as you do the ink mysteriously disappears as if by some magical force. This may be the fabled pen of antioch.
>INVENTORY
a crusty loaf
a piece of paper
an old sock
the fabled pen of antioch

lol. it took some getting there, but it was bl**dy addictive

Ah yes, text-based games. They were classics. Anyone remember "Zork"? Now THAT was a classic! I also remember playing lemmings back in the old days. Anyone remember that?

Well the fact that they played games. My best friends dad worked for Sperry Univac and bought a C64. I watched as the wonder that is Zork appeared and then they took out the cassette and put in Sword of fargoal (actually still play it today fans made an updated remake) Thats really the only reason I am in the IT field at all, video games!! it started with the coleco telstar at home and pinball at the arcades. Computers to me have allways been a means to an end, to play

Well, I was always into video games, so when I played Call To Power 2 (a Civ spinoff), I began to love computers, then I discovered the internet, Civ3, and Freelancer. And now I'm hooked.

___Corsair~MMIV

Ever wanted to discuss politics, war, religion? Ever wanted to discuss Civ3? Then go here!

LOL - Yes yes yes. The thing is that the text based game was/is just as absorbing.... if you have the gumption to play.... as anything today. Plus there was an added thrill in being forced to try to picture what was happeneing. Sort of like what the WW2 generation will tell you about listening to old time radio adventure shows and important sports games.

And yeah, those flops were FLOPPY! There was a procedure we had to follow when handling them and it included wiping your hands first and then grounding yourself before even touching the thing

Well things improved dramatically with the introduction of the 1.44 disk. Those 5.25's... ugh.

Oh god... wow, I can't remember the name for the life of me...some sort of hybrid graphics/primitive word processor program in Windows 3.1. Main character was some tall purple guy with a huge nose and the same, dumb expression everywhere. It was set in this building and you did something different on each "floor", using either an elevator or fire poll to get around... good times, good times.

Then came TIE Fighter followed by Red Alert and well, I was hooked for life.

Ahhhh yes I remember the old text based adventure games, bloody hell they were frustrating. I remember spending hours trying to open a door, until I discovered I had to "Turn door knob" to get the bloody thing open.

warcraft 2 my first computer game of the merorys that game was a classic and when warcraft 3 came out..... god i love blizzard


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we must have waffles forthwith