Life in 8-bits

[Tumbleweed]

Started on ZX81 then a C16 then an A500, then an A1500 and finally an A4000D. Moved to the PC to get on the Net as it seemed so much easier than on the Amiga.

Weed

[SamuraiCrow]

I was slow to jump on the Amiga bandwagon.  My first 8-bit was a C64 in December of 1982.  I used it until it died and then bought a C128.  I programmed in BASIC and Assembly most of the time in those days.  My most notable program was a 300 byte raster interrupt that interlaced the screen sideways to get 320x200 multicolor graphics.  It doubled the memory consumption of the graphics also though so I never published it.

I was starting to get really frustrated with the way that software was dwindling for the Commodore 8-bits when I was in high school.  I made a list of all the features I wanted supported in a new version of GEOS for the C128.  The list included an API for raster interrupts, character-graphics support on the OS level and sprite multiplexing.

I finally got an A1200 in 1993 when I started college and was very happy with it despite Commodore going under in '94.  It had everything on my list or better.  (The raster interrupts were not nearly as good as the Copper coprocessor.)

[hardlink]

Before Amiga I was an Atari 800 guy... I can remember being exstatic about finally getting that 88k floppy drive! and the 16k upgrade...

I was also a Jay Miner 400/800 guy. I tried to design and build a 64K memory upgrade; it did work, but the machine would 'only' see 32K, which still was twice what most others in my user group had! Then I used $600 of my college student loan money to buy an ASTRA 1620 double disk drive - one of the best investments I ever made

I still have it all somewhere, including the Action! cartridge, the dot matrix daisey-chain printer, and a direct plug in modem. And Star Raiders projected onto a wall at night still rocks!

[ElPolloDiabl]

So no-one started out on a PC or Apple II? I suppose the monochrome graphics and speaker that goes "beep" was not something to impress your friends/family with.

I started out on the Vic-20 and I liked typing in and tinkering with the Basic games. I got my first go at text adventure, there was a haunted house you had to go into in the game.
My aunty&uncle, had an old PC with trackball you could play stick figure games on and various brainteaser games.

[JimS]

I was also a Jay Miner 400/800 guy. I tried to design and build a 64K memory upgrade; it did work, but the machine would 'only' see 32K, which still was twice what most others in my user group had! Then I used $600 of my college student loan money to buy an ASTRA 1620 double disk drive - one of the best investments I ever made

I still have it all somewhere, including the Action! cartridge, the dot matrix daisey-chain printer, and a direct plug in modem. And Star Raiders projected onto a wall at night still rocks!

Cool... I still have most of my Atari stuff in the storage bay. A couple weeks ago I came across the label printing program I wrote in an online archive... so I had to try it out in the emulator. It was a hoot to see it again after all this time. I only wrote it as a hack to make some nice labels for the user group xmas disks.... but everybody kept asking for the program so I polished it up a bit for general use.

Never did much in the way of hardware design for the Atari though. Got my fill of that with the homebrew Z80 system that came before the Atari. That was one ugly POS. ;-)

[lassie]

Here in Mexico 1985, our family got a bare C64. My older brother, wasted half of his saturdays typing programs that where printed in Ahoy and Compute! (a Mexican magazine for 8 bits computers). Me and my little brother, waited until he finished and played together at 1 am on sundays. At last, all the happiness went away when the 64 was turned off.
This happened for half year until my father bought the Datassette and we could store these programs.
A year later, we got the 1541 (second hand) and a new world began.

Hi is it very hard to get Amiga parts in Mexico?

[motrucker]

Started with a Timex/Sinclair in year one. Went to TI99/4A system, and learned some BASIC. Then on to the C-64, C-128, then Amigas.
Through a fluke, I don't have any C-128 at present. Anyone want to trade a working C-128 system for a working 2000HD?

[NovaCoder]

My first computer was a ZX81 in 1981, what a horrible little computer

Keyboard like a lump of plastic (which is was), black and white and no sound.   As I could never get the cassette games to load I had to type in the code for each game I wanted to play from the games magazines which had the code for each game listed.   Can you imagine anyone doing that to play a game these days!

[lassie]

My first computer was a ZX81 in 1981, what a horrible little computer

Keyboard like a lump of plastic (which is was), black and white and no sound.   As I could never get the cassette games to load I had to type in the code for each game I wanted to play from the games magazines which had the code for each game listed.   Can you imagine anyone doing that to play a game these days!

Have you ever played 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81? i heard that was a cool game on it

[Drummerboy]

Before Amiga...

Texas Instrument TI99, Atari 8Bit (Atari 600XL), C64, 128.. and offcourse Amiga 1000.

[NovaCoder]

Have you ever played 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81? i heard that was a cool game on it

Yep that was meant to be one it's best games but I never played it because I couldn't find a cassette player that would actually work with the computer (a common problem), unlike Commodore products it didn't come with its own official cassette player.

The longest game I ever typed in was called 'Swag', it took me about 4 hours to type that sucker in (16k) and only got to play it for about 10 mins because I was told to go to bed

[desiv]

My first actual computer experience was in school.
There was a guy who would come by once a week after school and setup his all-in-one (Kaypro???) and we could use it.
We'd get to write small BASIC programs during the week and try them out when he showed up.
They had to be small, we had to type fast, and we made sure it worked.  No time for debugging.. ;-)

I finally got a Vic-20 a bit later (The C64 had been out long enough for the Vic-20 to really drop in price) and a tape deck.

Only 3 and a half K, but it was AWESOME...  Writing my own programs.
I eventually bought a 300 baud modem..
22 column modem fun.. ;-)

Eventually went to a C64 (it was a refurb from DAK, and had a slightly cracked case, but worked and we could afford it).

The first computer I bought (although I was the primary user of the family's Vic-20 and C64) was an SX-64.  
Loved that thing.  Even used it for word processing (Fleet System 2) in college and Pascal.
(I remember I had missed the part in the Pascal manual that mentioned that variable names could be X (8??) characters long, BUT it only recognized the first 2 characters.  Dang, that messed me up till I figured that out..  Remember kids, read the manuals!!)

After a bit tho, I sold my SX-64 for my first Amiga 500.
(Actually I used my first credit card for my Amiga 500, I sold my SX-64 for the monitor and 512k RAM expansion.  With the interest rate on that card and how long it took me to pay it off, no telling what I actually paid for that thing..  But it was still worth it.. )

desiv

[EWS]

I remember wanting an Atari 400/800 back then (probably for Pac-Man) but my family got a C64 instead. At school they had Apple II's and some TI99-4a's, both of which I did some BASIC programming on. I got a lot of use out of the Commodore. Besides games I did word processing, graphics with OCP art studio (and the Bill Budge pinball construction set oddly enough), animation with Movie Maker, and some game programming in BASIC and Gary Kitchen's Gamemaker. Tried out GEOS for a brief period too. When I got my first Amiga 500 around the end of 1988, the C64 stopped working soon afterward, which I attributed to jealousy.

[commodorejohn]

We didn't actually get a computer until 1993, when I was seven or eight. It was a Mac IIcx that I think my dad must've got through a discount at the Hennepin Tech, where he worked, because that was the only computer we actually bought until 2000 - in between, we got another 68k Mac as a hand-me-down, and a Pentium II machine as a gift from relatives. (My dad, as you may guess, is a bit of a cheapskate.) I tried to get into programming on both platforms, but was continually stymied by the lack of good development tools (not like today where you can just download Dev-C++ or FreeBasic and get going!) I developed an interest in the C64 after reading about it - it had Basic built-in, it must be a perfect machine to program on, right?

Yeah, I didn't actually do any reading about Commodore BASIC before getting one :laugh1:

Anyway, even though the BASIC sucked, the machine itself was intriguing, and it got me reading up on Commodore, where I heard about the Amiga, which sounded basically like what my beloved old Macs would've been if you were allowed to get your hands dirty. I didn't actually get ahold of an A500 until 2001 (talk about late to the party!)

[Hattig]

What was your computing like before Amiga. Did you think the mouse was for lazy people? Did you program your own Basic games? Memorize about 100 different keyboard shortcuts?

Nope, the mouse was always a great thing when coupled with software that used it. I had a mouse on my Amstrad CPC which I used with OCP Advanced Art Studio - a major improvement over using a joystick or keyboard to draw with!

However the computers were far more simple - but at least they were instant-on. I typed in many a type-in from magazines (I got a full back collection when I got my second hand Amstrad CPC 464) and then wrote my own BASIC games. I eventually progressed onto Z80 assembler, but not to a deep level unfortunately.

The Amiga arrived (second hand 1.2 A500) and DPaint and AMOS (and then Blitz Basic 2) were too good to ignore.

edit: wow, thread necro, didn't realise i had answered this two years ago :p

[lassie]

Yep that was meant to be one it's best games but I never played it because I couldn't find a cassette player that would actually work with the computer (a common problem), unlike Commodore products it didn't come with its own official cassette player.

The longest game I ever typed in was called 'Swag', it took me about 4 hours to type that sucker in (16k) and only got to play it for about 10 mins because I was told to go to bed

Yes that sure was a long time typing to get to play for 10 mins