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Geek Culture / if you ever wondered what us old guys did in the 80`s

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Kevin Picone
22
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Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: Australia
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 17:06
Kangaroo2,

Yeah, Amiga Basic was licensed from Microsoft. There were also countless rumors of an Amiga port of Word, but whether it existed it not is speculation. I can't imagine MS wanting to validate a rival platform to Windows at that time.

Apparently C='s 8bit line (Pet -> C128) Basic editions originated via licensed from MS also. There's a rather interesting site on that bellow.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/c/co/commodore_basic4.htm

Kevin Picone
[url]www.underwaredesign.com[/url]
Play Nice!Play Basic (Release V1.088 Out Now)- Play Extreme with Play Basic FX {TBA}
Raven
19
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Joined: 23rd Mar 2005
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 17:18
Microsoft & Quick Basic were quick good performance.
Personally I hated the syntax in QBasic. Always felt it was more confusing than anything else.

OSX Using Happy Dude
21
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Location: At home
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 17:20
I liked C64 BASIC - much more than Amstrad, BBC (until it was upgraded) or Spectrum BASIC. Whilst it may have been a bit slow, it was powerful - you only needed two commands to do almost anything.

Come to the third DarkBasic Pro Sci Fi Con - Be there and be square
Blog:http://spaces.msn.com/members/BouncyBrick/
Web Site:http://www.nicholaskingsley.co.uk
MicroMan
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Joined: 19th Aug 2003
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 17:24
Francoise Lionet (the creator of STOS/Amos) has released the sourcecode for Amos.

http://www.clickteam.com/English/download_main.php?PID=2

-----
They SAID that given enough time a million monkeys with typewriters could recreate the collected works of William Shakespeare... Internet sure proved them wrong.
-----
OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 11th Oct 2005 17:31
I got £30 out of an Acorn magazine for a doubly-linked list module I did for the C64. They paid late, but I did eventually get the money

I also got £3 for an IRQ driven music program I wrote on the C64.

Come to the third DarkBasic Pro Sci Fi Con - Be there and be square
Blog:http://spaces.msn.com/members/BouncyBrick/
Web Site:http://www.nicholaskingsley.co.uk
Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Joined: 23rd Aug 2003
Location: Somerset / UK
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 17:43
Ahh thanks for clearing that up.There was never any Microsoft copyright or under liscence from messages on startup of any of the commodores I programmed for, they just said something like "commodore basic 1979 READY []" or somr equivalent Funny I used them for years and never knew that The first Microsoft product I knowingly used was MS-DOS 5

OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 11th Oct 2005 17:51
Yes, MS had their fingers in everything, even then...

Did anyone have an Amstrad ? I only know of one person (an old school friend) who had one - did a bit of programming on that.

Unfortunately whilst the language itself was okay, the editing system (a line editor) was very poor, especially after using the C64's screen editor...

Come to the third DarkBasic Pro Sci Fi Con - Be there and be square
Blog:http://spaces.msn.com/members/BouncyBrick/
Web Site:http://www.nicholaskingsley.co.uk
Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Location: Somerset / UK
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 18:05
Yes the line editting was a real pain in the proverbial - my cousin had one. I've actually just made 300 pounds re-selling a box of old Amstrad CPC Disk games on ebay (I bought them from a car boot sale) - they are worth quite a lot now, I got around ten pounds each for them!

If you had a disk drive and a colour screen, often the Amstrad ports of games were much better or certainly more graphically advanced than their spectrum and commodore peers...

Van B
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Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 18:18
I always liked coding on the Amstrad, it was a tape drive, and therefor pointless but the machine itself was neat. It was a lot like the quite rare Einstein computer, those had quite awesome keyboards and were a lot like Amstrads for coding, I had a friend who'd sit writing his own games, because there just wasn't anywhere to buy games! - it was like when the ST was in full swing (I did convince him to get a ST, and he did become something of a soundtracker wiz).


Van-B

Put those fiery biscuits away!
Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Posted: 11th Oct 2005 18:34
You could get a decent disk drive for the cpcs though, it used weird 4" disks that were more like cartridges to look at than normal 3.5 or 5.25 disks...

A friend of mine had an Einstein - he was always raving about how easy they were to use

OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 11th Oct 2005 18:41
It was 3" disks...

Come to the third DarkBasic Pro Sci Fi Con - Be there and be square
Blog:http://spaces.msn.com/members/BouncyBrick/
Web Site:http://www.nicholaskingsley.co.uk
Raven
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Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 18:47
I still have my CPC464 with Monitor and attached Tape-drive.
Still bloody works too, which surprised me after ages in the loft... there's some nerds out there that would probably still kill for something like that.

I enjoyed it quite a bit back when it came out.
I mean before that I had the Electron, so it was a step up from Black & White to Colour heh.

Me!
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Posted: 11th Oct 2005 21:07
Quote: "Whilst it may have been a bit slow, it was powerful - you only needed two commands to do almost anything.
"


just as well realy, cos that was almost half the command set, the C64 basic was minimal, no graphics commands or anything, even the Dragon had better graphics commands, the C64 sprites where due purely to the hardware, don`t thank Mr Gates for them.

you could do some evil self writing code tricks with the C64 screen editor, you could have up to 5 characters in the keyboard buffer, so if you wrote code that wrote 4 lines of basic to the screen, positioned the cursor at the top left and then poked 5 returns then something like

100 print "hello world"
105 for i=1 to 10
110 print "this program will continue"
115 next i
run 10

then it would add those lines to the code and then run the main program again, I made a self writing sprite creator that used that trick to write all the code and the loader and then remove the sprite editor to leave just the sprite creation code in ram

great fun



Tyger software
Drew Cameron
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Posted: 11th Oct 2005 21:10 Edited at: 11th Oct 2005 21:10
Quote: "if you ever wondered what us old guys did in the 80`s"


?

Katie and Drew return!!!

Kevin Picone
22
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Location: Australia
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 21:17
DBAlex,

Quote: "Forget any Linux, An OS that boots from 4 disks or so and has all those features is amazing! and when was this... like 1990 right? Amazing."


The original A1000 was released in 1985. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

For that time, It was pretty impressive. A preemptive multi tasking OS in what effectively became a game box for so many people with the introduction of the A500/a600 etc lines. Pity.

Kevin Picone
[url]www.underwaredesign.com[/url]
Play Nice!Play Basic (Release V1.088 Out Now)- Play Extreme with Play Basic FX {TBA}
Raven
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Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 21:28
I know quite a few people who used thier A500/600 for Word Processing mainly.

Kinda liked my A500+, was a nice machine.
Workbench certainly was far far better than Windows or MacOS, imo.

Even by todays standards even v2.04 was quite fully featured considering. With Deluxe Paint III was a pretty awesome combo.
Remember spending hours making animations in it.

Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Location: Somerset / UK
Posted: 11th Oct 2005 22:33 Edited at: 11th Oct 2005 22:33
Me too - a decent workbench setup was great - I used it for word processing, accounts, image editting, and making the computer say "This computer will self destruct in 10 seconds. 10. 9. 8" whenever my mum came in the room

OSX Using Happy Dude
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Posted: 11th Oct 2005 23:34 Edited at: 11th Oct 2005 23:36
Quote: "you could do some evil self writing code tricks with the C64 screen editor"

When Woolworths were selling the C64, I used to go in and write a small program that would just display coloured blocks. The only way to stop it would be to switch the machine off & on again, as I had disabled the RUN/STOP key...

Occasionaly I go into Staples, reboot a machine into Safe Mode and do a batch file that runs at start up The C64 can be blamed for that too

Quote: "the C64 sprites where due purely to the hardware, don`t thank Mr Gates for them"

All hail the VIC-II chip.

Come to the third DarkBasic Pro Sci Fi Con - Be there and be square
Blog:http://spaces.msn.com/members/BouncyBrick/
Web Site:http://www.nicholaskingsley.co.uk
Jeku
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Joined: 4th Jul 2003
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Posted: 12th Oct 2005 02:37
One of my first BASIC language experiences comes from using GW-BASIC on my Atari. I loved the graphics and sound commands

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