Bits and Bytes (1983)
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I always wanted an Atari 800 as a kid. When I was a little older though, this is the Atari I dreamed of...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Atari_1040STf.jpg/1200px-Atari_1040STf.jpg
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I had a few buddies that were seriously into the Commodore stuff. Big game collections. Ran great.
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@scotth said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
I had a few buddies that were seriously into the Commodore stuff. Big game collections. Ran great.
I'm a big commodore collector. I have a VIC20, C64, C16, C128, and Amiga 1000.
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@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scotth said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
I had a few buddies that were seriously into the Commodore stuff. Big game collections. Ran great.
I'm a big commodore collector. I have a VIC20, C64, C16, C128, and Amiga 1000.
Sheeeez. They loved the Amiga's too. They were big fans of the Motorola chips IIRC.
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@scotth said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scotth said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
I had a few buddies that were seriously into the Commodore stuff. Big game collections. Ran great.
I'm a big commodore collector. I have a VIC20, C64, C16, C128, and Amiga 1000.
Sheeeez. They loved the Amiga's too. They were big fans of the Motorola chips IIRC.
Motorola made amazing chips in that era. They were the bomb.
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Just starting the series now, not sure what to expect but very excited.
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just starting the series now, not sure what to expect but very excited.
It's really great stuff. Both informative AND silly and entertaining.
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Just finished episode 1. I'm fairly young and I haven't had much experience with older technology, so seeing how the floppy discs were read and how the programs were found through the directory was fascinating. Also, I thought it was quite comical how how large the hard discs were. Did they have smaller hard discs at this point or was that it?
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
I haven't had much experience with older technology, so seeing how the floppy discs were read and how the programs were found through the directory was fascinating.
it still works the same way. just the media changed.
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@JaredBusch Ahhh I see.
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Episode 2 down. It must of been such a pain that floppy discs only worked on specific computers. Also, has anyone here tried to learn a new language on one of the old fashioned cassette programs? Seems like it would be impossible.
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 2 down. It must of been such a pain that floppy discs only worked on specific computers.
Actually no different than today with hard drives, SD cards, etc. That's actually not really changed, the primary thing that has changed is that while Windows can't ready most things, everyone else can read almost everything else. But if you make things with other computers, Windows still falls down and doesn't know what to do.
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Also, has anyone here tried to learn a new language on one of the old fashioned cassette programs? Seems like it would be impossible.
It's not as bad as it seemed. You still do all of your learning in memory, and would just save when done. Only a problem if you lost power before you saved it.
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Interesting how even back then with very basic computers, they knew that they would one day be an essential part of life. It was also cool to see the elderly people trying to grasp the concept of computers in episode 3. Now if only I could convince my grandpa to start using computers
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Interesting how even back then with very basic computers, they knew that they would one day be an essential part of life.
That gets more and more in the series. It was truly amazing just how much they knew about the future of computing even way back then. And nearly all of the key technology that we still use today was already around then, just expensive or big or slow or whatever.
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@connorsoliver I found it crazy that there was no standardization. Imagine having to have different commands for different computers! We complain now when something comes out on IOS and we have to wait a week for Android and vice versa.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@connorsoliver I found it crazy that there was no standardization. Imagine having to have different commands for different computers! We complain now when something comes out on IOS and we have to wait a week for Android and vice versa.
Same today, just fewer machines. But Mac, Windows, and Linux all use different commands still today. And Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, BSD all are similar to Linux, but still generally different.
Windows has two different command sets just between the CMD and PowerShell shells, in fact!
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@scottalanmiller so is there any kind of movement toward standardization oris this just the way it is?
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Episode 3 - some questions I have:
Curse keys using shift-I wonder why they didnt use what we have today?
We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?
Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?
Sorry if this looks weird I'm on my phone!
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 3 - some questions I have:
Curse keys using shift-I wonder why they didnt use what we have today?
A lot of old keyboards had no cursor keys, so they had to make a way to move around the screen without them.
We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?
Bill Gates answer to that question was reboot (yes, I spent much of my early years in DOS.) The real answer to this question however is, programmers aren't supposed to do something that causes an eternal loop.
Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?
Manually numbering lines of code just doesn't happen in most programing languages. BASIC was one of the few (that I've used) where this was required.
