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Who else had a history with microcomputers.

TRS-80, Commodore 64, Dragon32, etc. Any or all of those self contained units with a shit keyboard that ran BASIC and were completely useless and a long drawn out pain in the ass for anything but playing games and text adventures.
SW-User
✋ but you probably guessed that. What they were great at was teaching young nerdlings about systems architecture because they were so simple and had basically no abstraction layers. It actually helped me that BASIC was worthless, because it forced me to use a machine code monitor to do anything useful, and so I learned about hex and BCD and interrupts and registers and pointers and logic, as well as how to control hardware devices. At least after I got sick and tired of being killed by things in Zork II.
MethDozer · M
@SW-User Exactly. They were so crappy and low functioning it took a lot of thinking.out of the box to get potential.

Funny you mentioned ZORK. I just started playing the first one again on an infocom emulator on an Odroid rig. I rolled three joints, blasted Death in Vegas, and got sucked in till 3am.
SW-User
@MethDozer Honestly, the family 64 was the foundation of my career and the reason I've never worked a crappy job in my life. That knowledge set the stage for understanding things like call stacks and linkers and device drivers and operating systems that came later. I feel kind of bad for The Kids These Days who start out with Python and the like. They can mess around with microcontrollers, but the problem is that they don't have to do everything on them. My options were the 64 or nothing, and that's what forced my nose to the grindstone.

Those Infocom games were HARD, I think I only managed to finish Zork I, II and Planetfall.
MethDozer · M
@SW-User I was having a similar conversation about arduinos
recently. Like I love them and they are great but they simplify so much of the microcontroller process that I kinda notice certain things aren't grasped.
SW-User
I never had any of these, except a cousin of mine gave me his Commodore when I was little. After 1996, I got a PC with Win 95 installed, etc. etc. I learned BASIC at school, it was exciting for me to be a part of the school's computer club.
MethDozer · M
@SW-User I had dozens of much older cousins in the 80's so I was lucky in getting there old hand me down micros and consoles when they would move out or upgrade.
SW-User
@MethDozer Yep, you're lucky. Except my cousin, no one really in my closest family was ever interested in computers. It was like a new world to me, like everything was possible if I just had a computer; then the Internet started becoming popular, chats and stuff, big shift in programming, and I don't know why I lost all that interest.
Just by thinking of learning a new prog. language gives me anxiety now... like "what's the point?" It all came down to cell phones, Nvidia, shooter games, FB. Everything got moving so fast in the world of technology, like there is no real, solid interest.
Zaphod42 · 46-50, M
I learned BASIC on a Tandy 1000 in 8th grade, lol
MethDozer · M
@Zaphod42 Yeah, and I remember thinking "this thing is useful " ..... not really.
Zaphod42 · 46-50, M
@MethDozer Haha! Yep! No way to save what we wrote that day, and if some joker came by and hit that big red button your entire body of work was deleted.
MethDozer · M
@Zaphod42 Yeah, no matter what you were doing it would have been faster to just do it with pen and paper .
uncalled4 · 56-60, M
My brother had a VIC 20 and then a C64 in the early 80s. It might as well have been the Stone Age.
MethDozer · M
@uncalled4 Yeah, they were fun but they were just half assed Nintendo's and Ataris with a shitty keyboard.
uncalled4 · 56-60, M
@MethDozer Even that is pretty much a compliment. Hey, my brother is an IT guru now. It had its place. And I suffered with a Windows ME(Mistake Edition) computer for 11 years. There's no better education than dealing with something that doesn't work.
MethDozer · M
@uncalled4 Oh I agree. I have love for those wonky little microcontroller bastard boxes.


It takes a lot of special doing to get them to do anything special.

 
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