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How old ARe you thread


SithTexasDeath

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Well 32 doesn't put me in the biggest percentile but it seems to be on the upper end of this group. The first computer game I remember playing at home was something called ScarfMan (a pac man ripoff) for the Tandy Model I computer back in '79. It had a whopping 4K of memory and a one piece keyboard/B&W monitor assembly. (retail $2,000) It took a good long while to load the program from the cassette tape everytime you wanted to play. (Usually it would glitch and you'd have to start over again.) Then there was the eventual memory upgrade to an enormous 8K then 16k. As I recall those cost about $160 a pop and you had to replace 8 ICs each time without wrecking the pins or circuit board.

 

Of course before that I had the old Sylvania and Searsucker Super Pong games. The super version was really cool 'cause you could play in TWO colors.

 

I don't think it's fair for some of you folks here to complain about graphics quality unless you suffered through the dark ages of video gaming.

 

Back in my day, young'uns, we only had a single colored rectangle & a square blip to hit and we were happy to have it. :D

 

But then again I come from a long time ago....in a galaxy far far away. :p

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Come to think of it you're right. That 4K of memory was after an upgrade. If I remeber correctly those first home pc's shipped with less than 1K. When you upgraded you got this neat little square metallic bubble sticker thing that you could put on the case after you pried the old one off.

 

Boy it seemed like 2K was a lot of memory back then didn't it? That's when programming was easy 'cause everybody used the basic OS built into the chips. Many a night I spent typing in a program that was printed in the monthly computer mag. I remember the thrill I got when I first created a program to move a symbol around the screen using the arrow keys. That's when the control freak instinct was born.

 

That first color computer was cool too 'cause then you could make things in 8 colors. Wow. :eek: Of course those color computers were real memory hogs needing 16 and 64k.

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Ah those were the days. :)

 

I was reminiscing about the good old Atari 2600 console, circa 1977. That dot there on the TV? That's a tank. That dot over there? That's an artillery round. That dot there? That's a bomber.

 

None of this lightmapped, mipmapped, bumpmapped, heightmapped, multipass, multitextured, patch-mesh, inverse kinetic animated 10,000 polygon model, dynamic deformable terrain, dolby 5.1 surround-sounding, 1280x1600 32BPP @ 100 FPS, 100 MBps internet-enabled, 64-player-supporting, voice-activated stuff.

 

Funny to think the Atari 2600 had as much computing power as the LEM computers used in the Apollo Moonshot missions less than 10 years earlier.

 

[ June 07, 2001: Message edited by: Wilhuf ]

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Aragorn...

 

Cyberpunk!

 

There you go, I said it. Do I get a cookie? :D

 

Wilhuf... :eek:

 

If 1000 Mhz is 1 Ghz, then I assume 1000Ghz is 1 Terahertz (Thz).

 

Yeah, I wouldn't mind having a 104Thz processor in my wristwatch-size PC in the future...as long as it doesn't cook me alive! :D

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