All entries for Saturday 10 October 2009

A massive 48k of RAM

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n5b92/Micro_Men/

Affectionately comic drama about the British home computer boom of the early 1980s.

Or: Adam Curry vs Clive Sinclair. As a piece of drama it's rather poor. As a nostalgia trip back to an era I am just about old enough to vaguely remember, it's rather good. In the early 80s computers home computers were not yet a ubiquitous commodity with profit margins slimmer than the hips of a photoshopped Ralph Lauren model >90% of which all run the same operating system. There were a bunch of different companies all making their own machines which may or may not have some degree of compatibility between them in terms of the programs they could run. I remember having books of BASIC programs that I'd type in to our BBC Micro Model B, sometimes even saving them to tape afterwards. They'd have annotations about the different alterations needed to make them work on various different machines such as the Vic 20, Commodore PET and Dragon 32.

Mike Willis : 10 Oct 2009 11:10 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem