The 1980s: Nostalgia Overload

[DangerousMinds]

It all started with HBO's "Video Jukebox" for me! How else would I have discovered Squeeze in 1982 in suburban Ohio?

[Retronaut]

On September 11, 1983, I was 9-and-a-half, and still all aflutter over our new computer, my first, the Atari 1200XL.

 

It was a 64K computer, the most modern of the Atari line.  Sadly, it was much maligned as it lacked the capability to be expanded, and it had some incompatibilities with the popular Atari 400/800 machines.

 

We had gotten it less than a month before, and since the Atari 410 cassette drive was not functioning, we had no way to save programs!  So I laboriously typed in code from books, ran the programs to enjoy my borrowed handiwork... and then lost them when I turned off the machine!

 

It was still amazing.  It looked just like the keyboards from the movie Wargames, which I had just seen. 

 

Eventually, we would get a 1010 cassette drive, and in April the next year, an Indus GT disk drive.  By 1989, when I officially retired the Atari and used an AT-clone as my primary word processor, I had logged thousands of hours, gaming, modeming, and programming on Atari 8-bits, but not that 1200XL--we gave it to my brother in 1985 so he'd have a computer in college, and we replaced it with the more-modern Atari 130XE.

 

Interestingly enough, my brother gave that 1200XL back to me several years ago, and I still play on it regularly.

 

In fact, I introduced my daughter to the machine when she was 9 and taught her how to program Atari Basic.  History repeats--with a little help!

[CherryMalotte]

Oh gosh...I graduated high school in 1985.  I didn't get a computer until 1997, a Gateway.  I loved that damn thing, and while I have never learned any programing or coding I did enjoy flipping that case open and adding a hard drive, dvd burner, memory sticks, upgrading video cards, all that kind of fun.  Did the same with my next PC.  Gateway lasted nine years, then the next, an HP lasted me eight years, and I got my current PC last year when the other one was resisting all my coaxing to keep running.  I know a lot of people had problems with Vista, but I never did, maybe I was just one of the few lucky ones.

 

I'm following the music of the show on Spotify.  There's so many songs I'd forgotten about that I had enjoyed and some that frankly quite horrify me that I liked back then but have since seen the error of my ways.  

 

I still miss Night Flight.  First place that exposed me to Fantastic Planet, New Wave Theatre, and all sorts of nonsense.  3AM watching the shorts on Dating Do's And Dont's and Mind Your Manners...good times!

[scowl]

Oh gosh...I graduated high school in 1985.  I didn't get a computer until 1997, a Gateway. 

 

I also graduated in 1985 but had computers since 1977. It was not cool to have a computer in 1977.

 

 

I still miss Night Flight.  First place that exposed me to Fantastic Planet, New Wave Theatre, and all sorts of nonsense.

 

There is so much that I barely remember watching Night Flight. I saw Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (a semi-fictional film shot literally in the middle of the 1968 Democratic Riot) and had a strange feeling that I had seen it somewhere. It dawned on me that I had seen it on Night Flight back in the 80's. They also broadcast a lot of independent short films that never would have been seen by anyone. We now have hundreds of cable channels yet I can't imagine any of them having the guts to develop a show that would be as unpredictable as Night Flight was.

[javaluvr]

In the early eighties I was writing process control programs for Michelin- on a Computer Automation LSI 4 in assembly language. I remember it was a big deal when we were finally able to write some Fortran. Oh, and we stored source and executables on paper tape as well as floppy (later on). Paper tape is what we used on the plant floor and we used to stuff colleagues' safety shoes with paper tape chad.

Later on I worked at the Shuttle Mission Training Facility at Johnson Space Center. I remember the old Perkin-Elmer/Concurrent machines (assembly there too) and the Sperry-Univac mainframes that did most of the heavy lifting for the models in the shuttle simulators.

We used IBM clones (AT&T) in the office and in the early 90s finally started to use the occasional Mac for documentation. I still remember the first web browsers and how we marveled at being able to watch that coffee pot from half a world away ( the photo would refresh once every few minutes).

I love my Macs today and still prefer the Unix command line to DOS.

[Anela]

I was eight. I played Atari, and my mum bought the neighbour's keyboard and tape recorder computer, that hooked up to the TV, for my birthday, when he was getting something new. I used to play Pigs in Space, when I couldn't sleep. 

[scowl]

Since the show is featuring the Commodore-64, anyone remember those ridiculous 1541 disk drives? Before third party developers came up with workarounds, the drive transferred data at... 300 baud, the speed of a cheap modem! I didn't own one but I remember waiting for a friend's C-64 to take nearly forever to load a stupid game. Wait wait wait wait wait. An Apple II program would take twenty seconds to load. An equivalent C-64 program could take two minutes!

[ketose]

Since the show is featuring the Commodore-64, anyone remember those ridiculous 1541 disk drives? Before third party developers came up with workarounds, the drive transferred data at... 300 baud, the speed of a cheap modem! I didn't own one but I remember waiting for a friend's C-64 to take nearly forever to load a stupid game. Wait wait wait wait wait. An Apple II program would take twenty seconds to load. An equivalent C-64 program could take two minutes!

I bought a 1541-II when they sold them at Toys R Us. They were daisy chained and you had to open data lines to use them. Early on I bought an expansion card for the C64 that supposedly increased the access speeds and let you use tape drive commands (load, save) for a floppy.

http://www.networkscanning.com/store/COMMODORE-64-128-WARP-SPEED-BY-CINEMAWARE-COMPLETE_171751814945.html

 

I remember those Commodore monitors, too. I got one from a school that was dumping them. Not only would they allow you to use the component video lines from the DIN cable, you could also hook it up to a VCR and use it as a TV monitor.

 

From what I understand, Apples were the big classroom computer in the US and Commodore was big in Canadian classrooms.

[ganesh]

I think the first computers I saw in person were Apples in 6th grade. 

[scowl]

I bought a 1541-II when they sold them at Toys R Us. They were daisy chained and you had to open data lines to use them. Early on I bought an expansion card for the C64 that supposedly increased the access speeds and let you use tape drive commands (load, save) for a floppy.

http://www.networkscanning.com/store/COMMODORE-64-128-WARP-SPEED-BY-CINEMAWARE-COMPLETE_171751814945.html

 

How much did it speed things up? Over thirty years later I can still remember waiting and waiting and waiting for some game (I think Karate Kid) to load. I think you'd hear the drive click a few times followed by a long period of silence, then a couple more clicks, then more silence. Repeat this over and over for two minutes. That's when I decided that I would never buy a Commodore-64.

 

My impression was that Commodore sold the C-64 and VIC-20 nearly at a loss and made money from the peripherals like disk drives, printers and monitors. To do this they gave the computers a cheap slow serial interface and every peripheral needed a lot of expensive electronics to talk to it (the 1541 was effectively a second computer).  

[ketose]

I don't remember waiting a long time, but I bought the cartridge around the same time as the drive, and my point of reference was the tape recorder in my "old" computer, the TI-99/4A.

 

I actually used the C64 for writing BASIC programs and making title cards for VHS videos. The games I had were all on cartridge.

[2AT]

Speaking of the 80s, I remember Night Flight. That was the insomniac show of choice.

I LOVED Night Flight! I wish that some equivalent was still on.

[scowl]

Night Flight would show any crazy mix of anything. They showed Flesh for Frankenstein uncut! It was convenient for west coast people since you could watch the east coast airing early in the evening here.

[scowl]

The show is up to 90s nostalgia now, but the end of this one jabbed me. The modem in Cam's Internet setup was a Zyxel. I immediately thought, "Ugh! Zyxel!"

The company I worked for then had a modem at every customer site that our applications used. Naturally management found the cheapest modem in the world, bought thousands of them, then brought one to us and said, "Here. Make sure every application works with this gizmo. And do it quick because we're shipping them in a couple of weeks."

Well, this Zyxel modem was probably adequate for dialing up AOL, but it failed in everything else it said it could do in the manual. Set it up for hardware flow control and it would lock up. Hook it up to a 9600 baud leased line for credit checks and it locked up. Communicate with MNP5 compression from parts manufacturers and it locked up. Do anything but dial up AOL and it locked up. This would mean that the customer would have to reset the modem several times a day. 

Zyxel was in Taiwan so we never got a new firmware more than once every two days because (supposedly) no one there spoke English. After two weeks of getting fixes that broke other things, can you guess what happened? Of course management scolded us for not being able to get our applications to work with this modem that they had spent $50,000 or $70,000 or $100,000 on (the number kept rising). 

I believe we had to buy expensive Hayes modems until Zyxel fixed everything. Of course the "expensive" modem worked perfectly right out of the box.