9 hours ago, vgbaron said:

My first system was an IMSAI 8080 kit. 🙂

I believe the first with a monitor was a z80 system I built from various parts. Had an 8" floppy disc that held 396K of data. IIRC it used the CP/M OS and had 4K ram.  

yep, I'm old.

 

Sounds about right. I remember the 16K ram expansion pack, stuck out of the back like a brick and had to be taped to the computer lest it fell off.

17 hours ago, 109Sqn said:

Question, did they have flight sim back in the dinosaur age?? Kidding 😂

We flew Pterodactyls.

 Oops-What, you didn't play PteranadonSimulator-89,000,000?😉

Edited January 31, 20224 yr by Penzoil3

12 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Sounds about right. I remember the 16K ram expansion pack, stuck out of the back like a brick and had to be taped to the computer lest it fell off.

So you're old too!!!   🙂  And they were expensive.  Ah, the good old days - computer users today have absolutely NO clue as to how lucky they are.  We used to use funny little programs like Gopher, Telnet and Ed. There was no WWW.

I built a Southwest Technical Products machine with a Motorola 6800 and 256 Bytes of memory. All machine code with the stack being in the middle - painful. After about a year there was a 2 MByte memory card and a BASIC Interpreter. Heaven. Finally, I purchased a "Stringy Floppy" endless loop small tape cartridge and did a published review of that. At the time I was serving in the Royal Signals based in West Germany and had a terrible time getting it through the German Customs and Excise. It was all supplied as components for self assembly.  All still in the loft with all hardware, technical Manuals and the [separate] VDU driver hardware with a 15 inch "green screen monitor and receipts. Yessir, I am*that* old 🙂  BR

M.

OK, just wondering if this beats all get out!  This is what I cut my teeth on back in the early '70s!  Anyone remember "wired doughnuts" as memory?

 

1 hour ago, vgbaron said:

So you're old too!!!   🙂  And they were expensive.  Ah, the good old days - computer users today have absolutely NO clue as to how lucky they are.  We used to use funny little programs like Gopher, Telnet and Ed. There was no WWW.

Well, if we are going down that route, my first commercial program was Quattro Pro. Came on a disk and was absolute magic, it could do spreadsheets and calculate figures! Of course I had to buy a printer. A thermal one that printed on special paper 4" wide, I think.  So there I was, upgraded to Commodore 64, with a floppy disk reader and a printer and using a small Black and white TV for the monitor. Heaven.🤣

2 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Well, if we are going down that route, my first commercial program was Quattro Pro. Came on a disk and was absolute magic, it could do spreadsheets and calculate figures! Of course I had to buy a printer. A thermal one that printed on special paper 4" wide, I think.  So there I was, upgraded to Commodore 64, with a floppy disk reader and a printer and using a small Black and white TV for the monitor. Heaven.🤣

I actually preferred QuattroPro to Lotus or Excel mainly because it was the only one at the time that could do a column rename.

7 hours ago, vgbaron said:

I actually preferred QuattroPro to Lotus or Excel mainly because it was the only one at the time that could do a column rename.

And to finish. It actually came in useful may years later when I was the only one in the IT dept. that knew Quattro pro and several times had to fix a branch that for some reason ran QP for some of its customer programs. That was before we were taken over and everything stadardised. 

I started work before they had calculators. We used pay table books and a pencil and paper. Later I used to use Quattro Pro. We liked it for its charting. My first personal spreadsheet program was Power Ledger for my Atari ST. I remember it used an R1C1 format for cell addresses rather than today's A1 type. It made doing formulas interesting.

Edited February 1, 20224 yr by AOB

You lot don't know your born! 😁 This is what real hardship is like. Imagine if they'd been flight simmers!

Four Yorkshiremen.

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

You lot don't know your born! 😁 This is what real hardship is like. Imagine if they'd been flight simmers!

Four Yorkshiremen.

The start of the endless "shoebox in the middle of the street" gags.

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

 

You lot don't know your born! 😁 This is what real hardship is like. Imagine if they'd been flight simmers

 

I miss Marty Feldman; he really had an “eye” for comedy.

1 hour ago, Mike A said:

I miss Marty Feldman; he really had an “eye” for comedy.

And he put his "back" into every project!

 

2 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

The start of the endless "shoebox in the middle of the street" gags.

Or the days when you boasted about buying a fantastic new Matrox Mystique 4Mb graphics card for 100GBP. Luxury! 🤣

That was Auugust 1997 by the way. And Mb, not Gb. 😁

I think AVSIM should add a "Grumpiness" level to the user ID. Personally, I believe real men do it with needles and the only legitimate form of flight simulation is v4 classic jets fiddled into P3Dv5.2. Also, anything above P3Dv5.2 is a suspect innovation by the Devil. So can i please be the first with a Grumpy Old Man badge? Speaking of which, I wonder what the average age of people hanging out here is? I would guess 88. And if you're not an old man yet, you will one day learn, my son, why old men are grumpy 😉