Apr 03
Well, at least it was back in the day. Anyone old enough here to recognize that wicked stuff?
EXTRALIFE – By Scott Johnson is powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS Feed | Return to Top
Well, at least it was back in the day. Anyone old enough here to recognize that wicked stuff?
EXTRALIFE – By Scott Johnson is powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS Feed | Return to Top
I LOVE the BK Star Wars glasses on the shelf!
I see some old atari stuff, but im just 15
Mmmm reminds me of my childhood
Hmmm…..got to love the TV/Monitor
I see a dot matrix printer, cassett deck, 5 1/4″ floppy disc not sure what that thing next to the cassett deck is though. Brings back memories but of course I never had that many things attached to my computer.
I didn’t have one, but I recognize it. Our family preferred the Commodore 64 variety. That thing is to blame for my gamer status today. (Nearly 26 years of age now)
wow i hope thats not your desktop scott or you need an update
I had a friend that had one.
My first PC start was with the Tandy 1000
Here is an ad for the Tandy 1000. Is that the hulk in the picture?
http://www.1000bit.net/lista/dati/tandy/tandy1000_ad2.jpg
Wow, do that remind me of my early days! I still keep my first-timer in near mint condition, Radio Shack TRS-80! oh the time i spent on this basic system listening to the tape deck playing that sweet noise.
… and i am not even 30 yet!
The Atari 800 was our family’s first personal computer. By the time we got a floppy drive, it was a later model than that, and we’d worn out the play button on the tape drive (so you had to hold it down for five minutes to load frogger…) The box next to the tape drive might be a 300 baud modem, but I’m not sure. (We had one of those, and later an upgrade to a 1200 baud modem.) I’m sure somewhere, just out of view of the camera, is a box of worn-out joysticks.
The first PC (Personal Computer!) I ever had was a Commodore 64. There is a picture of me in front of it, but I dare not post it.
The first computer I ever USED was some big huge thing that looked like 2 full size superman-style phone booths and read its program from paper punch tape.
I’m 36. So… yes.
Love the Burger King Star Wars glasses.
That set-up reminds me back of the days when you had to wait a long time for your games to load and EPYX was one of the top game companies.
My first PC was a TRS-80 with cassette drive. I later got to play on one of these technological marvels =)
That green monitor would make me angry enough today that I would probably become the Hulk. I remember using those in elementary and middle school in the 6th grade. We didn’t get into a “modern” computer until 8th grade or so when we were using Mac II’s and doing spreadsheet type work.
http://www.blakespot.com/images/ti99.jpg
This here is almost the same stuff as my first computer. Just that the big box and the monitor part is what I didn’t have. The box on the side of the keyboard is the voice synthesizer. I blame Matthew Broderick and “War Games” for that little piece of fun that rarely was used. It was even my first gaming machine. I used both 1st and 2nd player joysticks to control a bot in the game “Microsurgeon” first player joystick would move, the 2nd would aim the bullets to the viruses. Now THAT was some fun hand-eye coordination!
http://www.mobygames.com/game/ti-994a/microsurgeon/screenshots
Atari 800, two Atari 810 floppy drives, Atari 410 cassette tape drive, Atari 850 interface. Yep, had it all. But I also had a Commodore monitor. My son rescued one of the game joysticks and still has it as one of his treasures.
forgot to add that I still have a Darth Vader Burger King glass. It sailed the world with me while I was in the Navy. Drank lots of iced tea from Darth.
those glasses, are they from “Star Wars” or “The Empire Strikes Back”?
Thats an Atari 800. I had an Atari 800XL, which included a cart slot on the top so you can play 2600 games! I bought a book that had the code for 50 or so basic games that you had to hand key in. You crazy kids and your new fangled CD Roms.
And I am 31.
The BK glasses are from Jedi. You can see Jabba on the third one, and I’m pretty sure that’s an ewok on the fourth.
TI-99-4A was my first compy.
I’d copy program code in BASIC line by line from magazines. Programs would be saved on standard cassette audio tape. It sounded like an old modem. It would take about 15 min. to load a program.
The computer had 16K RAM. Not 16Gig, not 16Meg, but 16K!
The CPU ran at a blazing 3Mhz.
You could use 16 colors but who needed any more than green?
It couldn’t use floppy disks. The 5 1/2″ disks used by the TRS-80 really were “floppy” and everyone thought that the 3 1/4″ disks were “hard disks” cause they came in a hard plastic case.
@brian_d:
Thanks for helping me relive some old memories of Super Demon Attack, Hunt the Wumpus, Parsec, Road Wars, Tombstone Alley, and many others. As a kid, though, I was never able to figure out Microsurgeon.
I had all those BK Star Wars mugs. Never an Atari 800 though, we had an old epson(that still works), don’t know the model number though.
Our first computer was an 8088 (4.77 MHz), 512 KB RAM, two 5.25 floppies.
Nice! My first tv was a sony trinitron that could be used as a tv or monitor. The thing still works & has excellent picture quality to this day! Oh yeah, i also had the same cassette storage.
Does that say Fertified Diskette?
Seeing AtariWriter on the screen sure brings back memories. I still have my AtariWriter cartridge somewhere.
I had an Atari 800 and that tape deck thingy you programs to… my dad had a book with programs and he would stay up all night long “programming” a game and saving it to the tape so we could play it. Awesome.
Had a Commodore round about that time. Exodus: Ultima III was the RPG of choice. I remember the first monitor we had was more upscale than the green, we had amber! =)
return of the jedi collector glasses!!
Hehe there is a lot of money sitting on that desktop, that’s a prehistogeek wet dream.
@sgtdetritus: I think you are confusing with the XL serie, the Atari 400 and 800 were contemporary to the VCS2600 and Nolan Bushnell.
I’m 38 and remember most of that stuff, though we had a ZX Spectrum 48k (48k!!!!). Arrr, I still remember those days of trying to get Atic Atac to load but kept on getting the ‘R Tape Loading error’
message. Now I’m so impatient that I hate waiting for Halo 3 to load!!! So much has changed. We expect it all now, now, NOW!!
@Steve: that remind me my first personal computer, it was a C64 (without a tape recorder); the first thing we did with a friend was to type one of these games listings you could find in the computer mags at that time. We spent a whole day typing hundred of Basic lines and when we finished, without any way to save our work we just entered the RUN command. That day we discovered two basic computer’s rules: the crash and the compatibility issue (it was a Vic 20 listing).
It is strange to think that our desks really have not changed that much. Instead of a external drives, I now have routers, modems, and hard discs littering my pristine space. My tower and monitor are actually larger than computers from the Apple II era. My parents still have a shelving unit on top of their desk, my brother keeps one as well.
I LOVED my Atari 800
I remember one Christmas my Dad went all out an bought a Disk Drive, Printer, and 4-5 games for my Atari. Next day I was at my friends house copying EVERY game of his I could get my hands on
Great times….
First computer I had was a Commodore 64. Programmed Monopoly on it. But I do have those Burger King “Return of the Jedi” glasses still.
Sadly, I am old enough. Although I think that may be because my school was about 20 years behind everyone else when it came to technology. The good old 8 inch floppy drives. And they really were floppy back then.
I had an Amstrad with the first cartridge slot. I had a game called Burnin’ Rubber. It was a racing game that NEVER ENDED.
On and on you drove, passing pixelated landscapes that resembled some hellish apocolyptic nightmare of what the real world would look like if Bill Gates could get his hands on it. The sun went down, the sun went up. Not smoothly, you understand. One minute it was day, the next you were plunged into darkness. I drove along those lonely roads for hours and hours, but never did a finish line come. It would have driven a lesser child insane.
Years later I would kill and eat twelve students in what newspapers would call ‘The Spinksy Slacker Schmorgesboard’. It’s not all bad though. My cell is padded and I’ve grown used to the poorly recorded sound of a red sports car screeching around a corner that echoes in my skull at all times.
Ah, yes. That picture brings back some memories…
heres the question we all want to know can it play crysis and if so how are the graphics?
Remember it, yes… but mine had the Commodore 64 labels all over them.
I grew up on (as far as I can remember) an IBM PS/2. My dad brought it home one day from god-knows-where, and I adopted it as my own, while they had a Win95 box. Ah, the good old days… I tell you, they don’t make things like they used to. I used that IBM keyboard, which was about 12 years old when I got it, up until about 2-3 years ago.
Worse yet, when my dad went to school his district had a timeshare rental with Iowa State University, where they had a terminal in his school, and they would put in punch cards and it would send the data to Iowa State, process it, and then return it. He remembers when 5kb hard drives cost $500.
Heh, I’ve got an Altair 8800 that still works. Have the TTY machine connected too (was too broke for a video terminal at the time)
TV/PC monitor, not that new… Half of a typewriter… and then some floppy and vhs drives?
Since I’m almost one year behind Scott, yes. (However, getting people to believe me is a different matter. They often think I know about it because I work with computers and not because I was actually alive and old enough to use one at the time. I blame the antioxidants in dark chocolate… the only chocolate for me since I can remember.)
Wow – is that O’s setup to publish Commissioned Comic and connect to ELR Radio? Columbian technology at it’s finest.
In all seriousness, I do remember that. We had an Atari 400 that was upgraded to be the equivalent of the 800 – except it had the flat pressure sensitive keyboard instead of a normal one. I remember playing Star Raiders on that thing for hours.
re: LaVaGoD
just so you guys know how f’d up my company is…I still use a dot matrix to print mutipart sheets and the first computer they brought me to work on was a Tandy 2000. In 1998.
Recognize it? I had that stuff! Well, okay, actually, I had most of it. I opted for the sleek black Indus GT floppy drive in lieu of the slower, chunky beige floppy drive from Atari. And I had an Okidata OkiMate 10 color thermal printer. Good times!
Makes me have an urge to say, “Back in my day, sonny…”
Yep, mine was C64 too. Casette and all.
Sprite graphics programming FTW!
I sooo remember that stuff, I had a Commodore64, sadly it’s not working anymore, but the monitor, actually a TV without a TV tunner still works.
@Mattzilla:
O’s computer can actually play Crysis and we don’t live in colUmbia, we live in colOmbia.
I’m just digging the complete set of Star Wars glasses above it.
The thing on the tape drive might be the lightening fast 300 baud modem.
I didn’t have an Atari setup. I was like Marcus, and had the Radio Shack TRS-80 CoCo, which was geek speak (in the day) for Color Computer. That’s right. COLOR. Woot! Sold my dirt bike at age 10 or 11 for the CoCo, and then a couple years later sold the CoCo at a garage sale for $5. I wish I had kept the dirt bike, but I did admittedly get alot of mileage out of the coco thanks to the magazines of the day that would put the BASIC code for games in. My cassette drive never really worked right, and our Radio Shack was full of itself back then, so I had to carefully enter all the code, and hope it never exceeded 4096 characters or it would simply run out of memory.
I even had a few cartridges for the coco, including pinball! It was groovy.