Nostalgia Corner - those weird inventions from the past

Remember when computers first got printers, and those big blocks of continuous paper with the punched holes down the edge ?

Reams Never End ?

I remember getting thousands of pages of that to use as scribbling paper when I was a kid. Every other line was made up of thin green lines for some bizarre reason.

When I was a kid my father once came back from his office with a printing of Snoopy wearing pyjamas and holding a candle made with such printer on such paper. The drawing was made only with letters, numbers and standard symbols, yet it was unbelievable, a real revolution. All his colleagues had to print it for their children...

Nostalgia...

Three words: Scratch and Sniff

That blew my mind, man

Do you remember the softwares were recorded on tapes? Floppy disks were professional stuffs.

I had a computer based on Basic. No one ever heard of Microsoft those times. Good times...

Originally posted by Spotnick Yeah, paper.. used to do banners with those in high school..As for software on tape, it was the base of my TRS80 Color Computer, games on tape! We got eventually a 360k 5.25" Floppy disk for 400$ when upgrading the memory from 16k to 64k for the computer!I had a watch a few years ago more powerful than this!!! ;)And yes, the computer booted inside a Basic prompt... so you were in programming mode.. I have yet to remember if the Commodore 64 was doing the same....But it could have been worst, a friend's father worked on computer with data stored in punch cards..

Oh my, the TRS80..... That was the first computer I remeber seeing in school. Then we got Apple II's...WOW!

Originally posted by Spotnick Yeah, paper.. used to do banners with those in high school..As for software on tape, it was the base of my TRS80 Color Computer, games on tape! We got eventually a 360k 5.25" Floppy disk for 400$ when upgrading the memory from 16k to 64k for the computer!I had a watch a few years ago more powerful than this!!! ;)And yes, the computer booted inside a Basic prompt... so you were in programming mode.. I have yet to remember if the Commodore 64 was doing the same....But it could have been worst, a friend's father worked on computer with data stored in punch cards..

Yes, my computer was a TRS80, called CP400 in Brazil.

oooh, i remember vividly the games for the old commodore 64s.

Wow the TRS80 gives the Apple Mac Power Tools a run for it' money.

Originally posted by Spotnick Yeah, paper.. used to do banners with those in high school..As for software on tape, it was the base of my TRS80 Color Computer, games on tape! We got eventually a 360k 5.25" Floppy disk for 400$ when upgrading the memory from 16k to 64k for the computer!I had a watch a few years ago more powerful than this!!! ;)And yes, the computer booted inside a Basic prompt... so you were in programming mode.. I have yet to remember if the Commodore 64 was doing the same....But it could have been worst, a friend's father worked on computer with data stored in punch cards..

I used punch cards at college on a Fortran programming course! We had to tie them together with an elastic band and put them in a box for some computer boffin to run for us...and then find there was an error in the first card or they'd take the elsatic band off and drop the whole deck! And before you call me an old git I'm not as old as 'new' comedian Ricky Gervais who was in the same year as me (and I had the misfortune to see his New Romantic band!)...

Originally posted by Taboo # 7 Three words: Scratch and Sniff

How about scratch and sniff porn?

I was always waiting to see that on the shelves.

Originally posted by Server Error in "/" Application Do you remember the softwares were recorded on tapes? Floppy disks were professional stuffs.

Yes, I've got that Stranglers cassette (Aural Sculpture) that a computer game on it, billed as a 48K adventure program for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Computer. Didn't ever have one, so I never played it; the cheap computer that I was given way back when could only play a couple of simple games as well as making a barely functional clock that would show up on the TV that I used for a monitor.

I remember Smith Corona Word processors. One step above a type writer, and a bunch below a computer.

I remember those Trash 80s as we called them. We also had things called Microbees at School.

Myself I still have my Commodore Vic20 complete with tape drive and plug in games.

I started with a Commodore 128D. But it was years after that Snoopy thing I mentionned above, which was in the early 80s or late 70s. My father used to tell my sister and I that the computer from which it was printed was as big as our living room. The problem is that we had no idea of what was a computer .

The softwares and games for the Commodore 128D were either on tape or on 5inch floppies, if I remember well. My favourite game was "Labyrinth", adapted from the Jime Henson's movie with David Bowie. A baby (Tobby he was called I think) was taken away from his house by an evil wizard (Jareth I think, played by David Bowie) who brought him to his castle at the center of a Labyrinth. As a player, you were the babysitter who had 13 hours to get to the castle, find the baby and defeat Jareth. During your journey through the maze, you had to solve many riddles, fight the gobblins, avoid falling in the "bog of eternal stench" and you would make friends of several creatures (among which Jareth's valet Hoggle).

Funny how well I remember all the characters! I must have spent weeks playing that game.

http://www.movieforum.com/movies/titles/labyrinth/gallery.shtml

Originally posted by Old Blue I remember getting thousands of pages of that to use as scribbling paper when I was a kid. Every other line was made up of thin green lines for some bizarre reason.

Yeah - Gramps used to bring it home from work.

The reason for the green lines was so you could easily follow figures across the page as computers just seemed to churn out gargantuan lists of numbers in those days!

So - what about all those 'hand held' computer games (they were sometimes the size of a suitcase!) like Mr Merlin, Simon, Munchman, etc...?!

Chris :)

Had a Vic20 with the excellent plug-in carts (was superb compared to the 5 minute tape loads!!!) and the uncomparable (then at any rate!!) Gorf game - still a real arcade fave.

Started out with a Commodore Plus 4. Not their finest hour, as they made a 64K computer and the only other CBM machine it was compatible with was the more popular C16 (with 16K memory). Thus the majority of the games available were designed for a computer with 1/4 of the memory. However, there were a few classics on it, but don't ask me to remember any names. The days when playability was the major factor in designing computer games and all those wasted hours sitting in front of a flashing screen waiting for the game to load from a cassette. Bliss!

I had an ZX80 followed by an Electron (poor mans BBC )

Originally posted by Grell oooh, i remember vividly the games for the old commodore 64s.

wow. you had a commodore 64? we only had a commodore 24. you must have been, like, futuristic or something.

seriously, what the hell was the difference, anyway? all i know is that our TV was the monitor. mostly i used the thing to play space invaders, although i once programmed it to count on the screen from one to one million using a BASIC program i learned at school. my father was not amused, as he wanted to do 'work' and the counting took up the whole evening. i don't know what 'work' he was planning on doing, as the only thing the machine was good for was playing space invaders and programming it to do ridiculous nonsense (like counting to one million), anyway.

The Stylophone for me. Rolf Harris used to market the thing. I bet Kraftwerk have sampled them

Mike

Anyone have theat old Mousetrap game? You know, the one where you cranked the handle and the steel ball rolled around the rig until it made a basket fall and tarp the poor sod under it. They don't make 'em like they used to. :p