When shrunken heads were hot...

[Dien Rice]

Hi Trevor,

You and I must be of a similar "vintage"... and we seem to have had similar experiences!

I also used to buy magazines and books, to type in the programs... So I could have games to play! (I couldn't afford to buy the games myself, at the beginning, so typing in programs from magazines was what I did!)

Yes... that's how I learned to program in BASIC too...

I was here in Australia, so we got influences from both the USA and the UK. We bought a Commodore-64 (a US computer), but I saw all the ads for the ZX Spectrum, the ZX-81, the BBC Micro, the Amstrad, etc. (Those were all British-made home computers, for those who may not know... )

Few would know this, but there was also an Australian home computer manufactured back in those days (the 1980s)... the Microbee.

(It's amazing to me that Alan Sugar - who hosts the UK version of "The Apprentice" - is the guy who was behind the Amstrad computer! I'd only known his name associated with computers... He's had an amazing business history, when I read more about it a few years ago...)

The other guy I'll mention is Clive Sinclair... (who was behind the ZX Spectrum, the ZX-80 and ZX-81 home computers, and others)... He was a great British inventor, I'd compare him to James Dyson nowadays (though of course, they were/are innovating in different areas).

This is Clive Sinclair's C5... a pre-Tesla three-wheeled electric vehicle, which came out in 1985...



He was amazingly prolific in his heyday...!

Thanks for the trip down memory lane... Those were some great days...

Best wishes,

Dien

Originally Posted by trevord92

Thanks Dien - interesting flashbacks.

The real fun (of course) was typing in the program listings from the magazines and hoping things saved to cassette before something crashed. That and adapting Basic for a different computer (hmm - wonder how I got started in programming!)

One weekly computer magazine here in UK had a one page cartoon advert on the back, partly created by Mel Croucher who wrote this very readable book about one of his games.

Different times indeed!