Old computer adverts

[Cobbydaler]

How things have moved on...

http://www.2spare.com/item_92760.aspx

[Dude111]

Very nice seeing all them

Quality has gone WAY DOWN since then.. (Stuff was made MUCH BETTER back in the day)

Erm, no.

Mean Time Between Failure is much better now that it was in the 80's, and disk storage and processing power is cheaper and faster.

[Halcyon]

I'd have to agree with foreverwar. The speed at which technology progresses is so fast we now have a much better value for money.
As soon as Multimedia sound and video and the web hit the market it gave a standard too and computers all had to conform to basic multimedia requirements. This together with gaming pushed graphics and performance and really took things to a higher level.
There was a period where motherboards were being pushed out as everything onboard and that often lacked quality components....eg. onboard sound and video.
Look at individual components now. Sepearate graphics, sound, better device controllers, etc.

Ah, the days of when I had my 486 SX 33 without the Maths co-processor as it was too expensive back then.

It's funny when you look back and see that a computer in "Color" was a must have feature.

[rogerdraig]

have to disagree it was much better you set it to load a program and go and have a snack and coffee before having to do anything else

now it expects you to use the program straight away

Yes, those "cassettes" were state of the art and so user-friendly, weren't they?

Originally Posted by foreverwar

Yes, those "cassettes" were state of the art and so user-friendly, weren't they?

especially when you had typed in the hex from a badly printed magazine page, taking hours, saved it to a cassette & then found 7 minutes later it didn't work & you didn't know if it was a typo, the cassette, or just a bug - happy days

Originally Posted by foreverwar

Erm, no.

Mean Time Between Failure is much better now that it was in the 80's, and disk storage and processing power is cheaper and faster.

have to agree its easy to look back with rose coloured specs and when we do we only decieve ourselves

---------- Post added at 22:12 ---------- Previous post was at 22:11 ----------

Originally Posted by rogermevans

have to disagree it was much better you set it to load a program and go and have a snack and coffee before having to do anything else

now it expects you to use the program straight away

come back find its not loaded and have to start again go for a walk come back if you are lucky its on

[Turkey Machine]

Did that with a BASIC program when I was 8 - spent hours typing it in, the bugger wouldn't work, 10 minutes with mum fiddling a couple lines, it worked perfect.

Still, remember these?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNkhOgoiwww

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o72T8qQr7GE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q_qXlAJLiw

Funniest is the last one.

[rogerdraig]

Originally Posted by foreverwar

Yes, those "cassettes" were state of the art and so user-friendly, weren't they?

Old computer adverts - Cable Forum

i loved my cassette loading Commodore pet 16 i still miss it learned how to code in 8086 machine code on that lol and used to love peeking and poking it


http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/...mechanical.jpg

sigh

and this

http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html


i heaven now lol

as to user friendly it was a breeze to open up though was not much you could do to it once open

[Anonymouse]

<slightly OT>
MTBF has indeed increased dramatically since then. However, I'd like to offer a corollary to that, viz. as equipment becomes more and more reliable, i.e. failures become less likely, the downside of this is that when it does fail, it tends to fail badly.
</slightly OT>

On the other hand, I liked having a computer which you could just switch on and immediately start using. Or, in the case of the Sharp MZ-700 I once had (Z80A CPU, excellent keyboard), you weren't limited to a single language, or even a given version - you could load any available language via a tape deck or microdisk, as it didn't have a BASIC ROM as, e.g. the VIC-20 did. It even had a built-in machine code monitor; with that plus Hisoft's Devpac (still the best assembler software I've ever had the pleasure of using), writing Z80 assembler was a) a doddle and b) a joy.

I miss the days when the user had almost total control over the computer...

[rogerdraig]

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

<slightly OT>
MTBF has indeed increased dramatically since then. However, I'd like to offer a corollary to that, viz. as equipment becomes more and more reliable, i.e. failures become less likely, the downside of this is that when it does fail, it tends to fail badly.
</slightly OT>

lol loss of data on one tape

or

loss of data on that 2 terabyte drive


OT

http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/old-computer-ads.html

[Hom3r]

My dad upgraded our ZX81 to this a Video Genie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Genie

IIRC he bought a 1MB (yes 1 megabyte) upgrade that came in a box that was bigger the unit it self and cost £250.



What I remember was if the fridge motor kick in while you where loading it killed what you where doing and you had to start again.

[rogerdraig]

this is good lol

http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/wow/MDhd.jpg

i used to have one of these

http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/portables/trs80-pc1.jpg

Originally Posted by rogermevans

lol loss of data on one tape

or

loss of data on that 2 terabyte drive


OT

http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/old-computer-ads.html

some of us are clever enough not to put all their eggs in one basket