Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: guest7146 on September 05, 2010, 10:03:29 PM
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...you can have an adult conversation with a person who wasn't even born when Commodore (the real Commodore, I mean) were still about.
This happened to me just the other day, and I instantly realised I'd finally crossed the threshold of youth.
AH.
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...when you start opening threads about the issue? :D
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Indeed. But I suppose I can take comfort in the knowledge that I'm not completely past it until I start losing my mind and believing in strange irrational things. Things like giant green broccoli that glow in the dark... :afro:
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Things like giant green broccoli that glow in the dark... :afro:
It's a broccoli cloud. Like a mushroom cloud, only made of broccoli instead.
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It's a broccoli cloud. Like a mushroom cloud, only made of broccoli instead.
:roflmao:
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:roflmao:
Seriously! See here... (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=566829&postcount=148)
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... when your first computer ran on less than one MHz.
@Karlos: Love that Broccoli cloud! How long do they take to harvest 50 Mt of that vegetable? Boy, I knew cabbage can produce gas but that's just another level! :D
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... when your first computer ran on less than one MHz.
My first computer was a ZX81 which ran at about 3MHz, if memory serves...
@Karlos: Love that Broccoli cloud! How long do they take to harvest 50 Mt of that vegetable? Boy, I knew cabbage can produce gas but that's just another level! :D
Obviously, that's highly refined and enriched Broccoli. Normal computer-repair grade broccoli is perfectly safe.
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My first computer was also a zx81, I still have it too! :) it might have run at 3mhz but it only had 1k :o
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My first computer was also a zx81, I still have it too! :) it might have run at 3mhz but it only had 1k :o
I got mine second hand from my uncle who'd rehoused it in some 3rd party case that had a proper keyboard. It also had a 16K ram pack which fit inside said case where it was _almost_ protected from the "wobble" problem.
When we got a ZX spectrum to replace it, the first thing that struck me was just how much faster it was despite being being all of 250kHz faster. The reason, of course, was that we used to run the zx81 in "slow" mode for the most part. The flickering display when editing was not conducive to productivity.
Of course, when I started learning z80 assembler, I realised just how slow ZX basic was, period.
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...When your nephew has no knowledge of the games you liked as a kid and now HIS Playstation1 and Sega Megadrive are considered 'retro' too :)
My first computer was a VIC-20, nice enough but it was swiftly swapped at full retail value trade-in 3 months later for a C64 that just came out. Both ran at 1mhz, but had radically different abilities. Still if it weren't for the C64 BASIC and sprites I would never have learned how to do binary maths in my head as a kid haha.
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... when you can remember programming on punch cards... and memory was a pile of wires strung through a bigger pile of little iron donuts.
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... when you can remember programming on punch cards... and memory was a pile of wires strung through a bigger pile of little iron donuts.
Sounds like about 60.
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I won't feel old until they stop carding me for alcohol and tobacco products, and the 20something bartender chicks stop looking disappointed when they notice my wedding ring.
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You remember carrying a laptop would leave you in a sweat.
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When you can't recall or work out what age you were Commodore bit the dust... :confused:
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I was 13 when Commodore went bust, hard to forget really as was same year, month my Granda died.
I realize am getting old when my niece keeps referring to my youth as the "olden days" !
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I went back to uni last year/this year to study and some of the remeniscing other students did made me feel old. They'd talk all nostalgic, laughing at how low spec thier earliest machines where, and to me the systems they mentioned seemed more new than old. Talk of things like nintendo64 and playstations as though they where relics, and laughing at the fact they used things like p3's @ only 500mhz with only 128 meg ram, 8 meg voodoo3 cards and so on.... what I found strange though was when I mentioned the specs of my earliest computers (tandy coco1, 0.8mhz/16KB ram and so on) they'd just look at me blankly, not being able to comprehend and assuming I was making it up 'cos computers where obviously never that slow/low spec and so on :) They actually wouldnt believe me that the Amiga had a 7mhz cpu and typically only 1/2-1 Meg RAM.
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When i look back and still see the A600 and the A1200 as modern and new.
I was 11 when i got my A500Plus and i remember having total hatred towards the A600 because barely 6 months after i got my A500Plus i saw an article on Amiga Format saying that the A500/Plus is dead and the A600 will replace it.
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(Sorry misvoted. -1 >30; +1 16-25.)
... when your hair is graying faster than your amiga is yellowing.
Staf.
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I'd say I'm middle of the road when it comes to age, but at least I knew what the computing world was doing at every age. Sometimes I talk to people older than me who have no clue about computing history, and while I do understand that it's not everyone's thing, there's so much in that history which can inform people today.
I started with the Sinclair ZX80 - 3.25 MHz, 1K of RAM, upper-case black and white 32x24 display, no floating point, and no ability to see what was on the display while the computer was running.
Going from that to a ZX81 / Timex Sinclair 1000 (they were the same except the ZX81 came with 1K and the TS/1000 came with 2K) was a dream - I had floating point with a rather excellent range of mathematical functions (Sinclair employed mathematicians to help write their BASIC, which was an excellent idea - Sinclair's BASIC kicked Microsoft BASIC's inconsistent ass), SLOW mode so I could see what was on the screen while the program ran, and a better design that made it easy to upgrade the system internally to 8K of RAM because the 16K RAM pack was prone to causing crashes if you moved the system.
This naturally led to the Amiga because Sinclair came out with the QL, which was neat - it had a 7.5 MHz m68008 processor (8 bit external bus version of the m68000), preemptive multitasking, bitmapped graphics, device abstraction, structured BASIC, and some halfway decent software which came with it. It was a poor person's machine for getting into the Amiga strata. Later, when Amigas were cheaper, I naturally got one.
The 1980s were significant for computing because it brought us from the tiny 8 bit worlds (CP/M, Apple, Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, PC-DOS, et cetera) through to the arbitrarily large 32 bit world. Learning about how each of the separate 8 bit worlds lived or died presents important lessons about growth and death - after all, everything nowadays is either some form of (free)Unix, Windows, or small.
This matters today because even the Amiga world, which is small, still exists and this is partly because of a very smart decision at the beginning to encourage people to write software for it. It was truly a programmer's machine. The fact that it's not too hard to port software from (free)Unix certainly helps.
People who don't understand the Amiga are usually people who don't remember history.
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And you know you're getting old when...
... you try to explain to a young colleague how math works on a 6502:
"You've got one all-purpose register, two index registers, an ADD and a SUB command - all 8 bit and integer only, of course."
"And you could actually do calculations with THAT? Where's the FPU???" :lol:
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... when your hair is graying faster than your amiga is yellowing.
:roflmao:
My hair's staying nice and dark, no grey for me, but unfortunately it's all falling out!!!
AH.
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...and memory was a pile of wires strung through a bigger pile of little iron donuts.
Good old core memory, AKA LOLRAM (Little Old Lady Random, not Laugh Out Loud). You know, it wasn't particularly slow, either.
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You know you've gotten old when...
Gee, where to start?
2 of my children were born after Commodore's demise. My favorite computer (c64 - 1982) was released almost exactly 1 decade before my first child was born.
Then there is the whole gray hair thing, the shoddy memory thing.
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Good old core memory, AKA LOLRAM (Little Old Lady Random, not Laugh Out Loud). You know, it wasn't particularly slow, either.
I actually installed a machine like that back When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth (tm) . The B6700 mainframe used magnetic core memory. A whopping 6MB... It came as modules of 32k x 20bits. Two boards sandwiched together - like the A1000 & WCS daughterboard on steroids. One had the memory cores and the other the electronics. All for the low low price of $32,000. ;-) I managed to repair one in the field, but they didn't approve of it. Fun Stuff..
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And you know you're getting old when...
... you try to explain to a young colleague how math works on a 6502:
"You've got one all-purpose register, two index registers, an ADD and a SUB command - all 8 bit and integer only, of course."
"And you could actually do calculations with THAT? Where's the FPU???" :lol:
6502? My son asked me several years ago what computer I used when I was in College. He looked amused when I pointed to my head. haha
There were calculators, very expensive and not allowed. Slide rule was allowed.
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6502? My son asked me several years ago what computer I used when I was in College. He looked amused when I pointed to my head. haha
There were calculators, very expensive and not allowed. Slide rule was allowed.
Actually, I think there's a lot to be said for banning calculators in the class room. When I was a kid calculators were plentiful, and we were allowed to use them even in Junior school. We had to learn our times tables and stuff like that, but all our basic maths work was done using the calculator.
As a result, my mental arithmetic skills are absolutely dreadful. I can do maths, even quite complex maths, but if you ask me to do anything without a calculator... forget it. I think that's a bad thing.
AH.
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Actually, I think there's a lot to be said for banning calculators in the class room. When I was a kid calculators were plentiful, and we were allowed to use them even in Junior school. We had to learn our times tables and stuff like that, but all our basic maths work was done using the calculator.
As a result, my mental arithmetic skills are absolutely dreadful. I can do maths, even quite complex maths, but if you ask me to do anything without a calculator... forget it. I think that's a bad thing.
AH.
fully agree - kids today working in my local supermarket or newsagent can't add 1+1 in their heads anymore :(
(yap.. I'm old... I can still do mental arithmetics)
Tom UK
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As a result, my mental arithmetic skills are absolutely dreadful. I can do maths, even quite complex maths, but if you ask me to do anything without a calculator... forget it. I think that's a bad thing.
Absolutely. I think the kids need to be able to do the calculations in the head first. Only then can they be allowed to use machines.
I'm glad my old math teacher forbade calculators in lower classes, I think we were allowed from 9th grade on.
You need to be able to 'feel' if the results you get are realistic - many times my head's faster than a colleague of mine with Win calc and 50% of the times he's even wrong. :lol:
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Yeah, I agree. I was never interested in math (I like computers though, strange...), but on the other hand I don't actually remember ever extensively using a calculator in elementary or high school (and I'm 28) and I can do basic maths pretty fast in my head. Even my friends who need maths for living are sometimes surprised by some quick calculations/guesses. The advanced math they work with everyday makes them rely on their calculators a little too much, I would say.
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My first computer was a ZX81 which ran at about 3MHz, if memory serves...
Correct, but only ~25% of that computing power was used to actually process user programs, the remaining ~75% was used to generate the video output. A "turbo mode" where the video was disabled was also available, IIRC.
So... yeah. I'm also old.
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And you know you're getting old when...
... you try to explain to a young colleague how math works on a 6502:
"You've got one all-purpose register, two index registers, an ADD and a SUB command - all 8 bit and integer only, of course."
"And you could actually do calculations with THAT? Where's the FPU???" :lol:
Try to explain kids today how we did 3D graphics on the Amiga.
We had to do it manually, without any libraries. 3D objects were often written directly into the code, due to the lack of a decent editor. Each point in the said 3D object had to be multiplied several times in realtime for the 3D-to-2D conversion, shaders and texture mappers were coded from scratch. All this were done in assembly language, and oh, you had to double buffer everything and watch the CPU usage so you'd have everything run at 50FPS, and... and...
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Oh god, what was this about anyway?
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... when you can remember programming on punch cards...
And you still have said punched cards, as well as blank ones.
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... when your first computer ran on less than one MHz.
Ha! My Jay Miner 800 ran it's 6502 at 1.8 MHz. And I still have it.
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hi,
You know you have gotten old when you look at the President of the U.S. and you say what is that kid doing running the country.
When you see all the kids talking about the new droid phone and you are wondering what is so special about a phone.
When you come to Amiga.org, because they are the only ones that understand about what kind of computer you like and use.
smerf
getting old isn't permanent, I hear you feel young again right before you die.
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hi,
You know you have gotten old when you look at the President of the U.S. and you say what is that kid doing running the country.
When you see all the kids talking about the new droid phone and you are wondering what is so special about a phone.
When you come to Amiga.org, because they are the only ones that understand about what kind of computer you like and use.
smerf
getting old isn't permanent, I hear you feel young again right before you die.
I'm feeling ya man!
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When, like yesterday I was standing in the queue at the post office waiting to buy some stamps. After waiting for nearly 45 minutes when I finally got to the counter, I had forgotten for a moment what I'd came in for. Then the spotty little nerk behind the counter said 'sorry mate, pension day was yesterday'... :o
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I won't feel old until they stop carding me for alcohol and tobacco products, and the 20something bartender chicks stop looking disappointed when they notice my wedding ring.
tone, you are the man. I don't ever remember bartender chicks looking at me at all.
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when you still think that you can get everything you need to do on a PC done on a 8 bit computer:afro:
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when you remember BG swore that you would never need more than 256Kb !!
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when you remember BG swore that you would never need more than 256Kb !!
...and when you forget that the correct amount mentioned in that quote is 640 KB (and BG apparently never even said stuff like that). :-)
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I would have been 5, but remember some people know about the Amiga from their older siblings having one, and then it being passed down for them to use... I have a pic somewhere of me playing on the Amiga when I was about 8, so Amigas still got given to people after C= died. ;-)
I never knew the Amiga had such a following until I googled it about 5 yrs ago. And the rest is history ;).
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You know you've gotten old when...
Gee, where to start?
2 of my children were born after Commodore's demise. My favorite computer (c64 - 1982) was released almost exactly 1 decade before my first child was born.
Then there is the whole gray hair thing, the shoddy memory thing.
Let me cheer you up then. Gray hair is better then NO hair. ;-)
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You know you've gotten old when...
Gee, where to start?
2 of my children were born after Commodore's demise. My favorite computer (c64 - 1982) was released almost exactly 1 decade before my first child was born.
Then there is the whole gray hair thing, the shoddy memory thing.
Well my four boys were all born before Amiga was created! :(
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...and when you forget that the correct amount mentioned in that quote is 640 KB (and BG apparently never even said stuff like that). :-)
of course....640KB :lol:
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"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943
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April 29, 1994 I was 17.
You know you've gotten old when...
you don't have any more tomorrows to live for, so you have graduated, you had a good career, met a woman/man your married to and growing old with.
I have seen it all from the first C64's here in the Netherlands to the last Amiga 4000T here (wish I would have bought that one).
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It's important to place in the thread that Commodore "officially" bit the dust in 1994.
You're the only person in the room who remembers what Hi-Torro was and enjoyed their
"board" product.
Bonus "you're old when" You know the where "GURU meditation" came from
SandGunner
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You know you've gotten old when...
You remember flipping the switches on one of these:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Altair_8800_Computer.jpg/664px-Altair_8800_Computer.jpg)
When remembering it, I wish I had the hundreds of $$$ in 1975 to buy the kit and play with one. Who knows, maybe I would have beaten Bill gates in development.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/Altair_Computer_Ad_May_1975.jpg/450px-Altair_Computer_Ad_May_1975.jpg)
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You know you've gotten old when...
You remember flipping the switches on one of these:
I had a homebrew version of the Altair... I got so bored with flipping switches that I went out and and bought an Atari 800. I sometimes wish I'd sprung the $666.66 to buy the Apple 1 when I had the chance... I heard one sold on ebay for $30,000