Favourite old computers?

weegie.geek

How about least favourite?

Mine had to be the Amstrad GX4000. The pads would give you blisters in about 5 minutes, they were terrible things. Burnin' Rubber was a half-decent game though.

weegie.geek

BillScarab wrote: »

Then when I had my ST my major time sink was Dungeon master, which again was very advanced for the time.

Did you not like Frontier on the 16-bits?

I was never really an Elite fan, but Frontier was great.

culpepper

my little speccy was my favourite. 8k and rubber keyboard. Still bigger than a nintendo DS though. I have the emulator and games now .
We still have our Amigas from 1994 put away incase we want to play at some point. they were great game machines.

Aliktren

ahh, the VIC 20, many happy hours spent with those old magazines typing in the labouriously the code for some game and then watching as it locked up and you lost your hours of effort for no reward, not much has changed really , and pokes, man the thrill of being able to turn the screen to black with white text

chunter

7 of 9 from Star Trek

Much more snazzy than an Amiga

BillScarab

weegie.geek wrote: »

Did you not like Frontier on the 16-bits?

I was never really an Elite fan, but Frontier was great.

Not as much as Elite. I think sometimes it's not just the game but the time as well, there was just nothing else like Elite when it was released. Apparently David Braben is now working on Elite 4, although he's been doing that since 1998 so god knows if it will ever appear. Probably just after Duke Nukem Forever!

Butterfliesarepretty

It was 1978 and my dad came home with a Commodore 8k Pet computer with a tape player. It cost him £500 quid. I remember typing things in and it would say syntax error. Had a green screen and a flashing cursor after ready.:T

Next was the Vic20 with the cartridge my mum loved playing Rat Race and Bonzo. We also had a Tandy computer also. I remember typing in programs and watching it crash after typing run. Next was the Commodore 64, Remember playing Raid over Moscow, Pitfall, Ghostbusters, etc. We had the various zx80's spectrums etc, but commodore was the best.:rotfl:

We liked atari but always thought they were far too expensive!

My dad still has the Pet.

Aliktren

oh man, we had those old Commodore Pets at school

John51

I've had a lot of Uncle Clives stuff. Started with a Science of Cambridge Mk 14 in 1980. £50 for the kit and as well as having to solder it together, for the power supply you only got a schematic, supply your own parts lol. It had a massive 256 bytes of ram, yes a quarter of a kilobyte and programming was in assembler. Nothing more than a glorified calculator really.

About that time what I really lusted after was a Commodore Pet but it cost about the same as the deposit on a house. A decade later I saw one at a boot sale going for £5 but I wasn't interested.

The ZX81 was cheap and nasty, he did have a problem spending on things like a nice keyboard but he got the compromise right with the Spectrum, the rubber keys let you play Manic Miner all night without blisters. I think he'd be the big name in computers now if he wasn't so cheap with the build quality of his products.

My favourite in the Sinclair line was the QL, a superb machine for its day and with great software. The programmable database 'Archive' opened my eyes to the capabilities of a computer.

BillScarab

To be honest I don't think any of the old 'home' computers stood a long term chance of survival. A combination of cheap PC's and ever better consoles killed them all off.
Look at the ST, it was a good machine at a good price, widely used in the music industry and used a lot for business in Germany. They still went to the wall as they were ultimately unable to compete with Microsoft. Even IBM couldn't compete in the business world with the PS/2 running OS/2. Apple only survived because Microsoft bailed them out so they would have a competitor and wouldn't get investigated for being a monopoly.