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To: Ramius
I remember playing Star Trek on the computers at school, but it was via the printer. Every move required a new printout on that wide-carriage dot-matrix printer with the green-bar computer paper.

Youngster. I remember the standalone "printer music" programs for the IBM 1401. A more advanced version required you to put an AM radio on top of the computer at a certain spot so it could pick up the RF emissions. In college, one of the other guys at the datacenter disassembled the program, found a table that "described" each note, and developed a macro language that would allow him to transcribe sheet music into "computer music". It worked, but it was consistently flat.

The most computer overkill I ever played was "spaceships" on an IBM 360/50. The graphics was on a par with "Asteroids", but it was ship-to-ship combat between two players. It required the extremely expensive IBM 2250 engineering graphics workstation, and the overall configuration we played on (on midnights, when work was light) was about $5,000,000 with all the tape drives, TP boxes, card readers, punches, and printers, and disk drives (about 250MB of disk). None of that was used, however, since the game came on a deck of punch cards, and was IPL'ed ("boot" in IBM mainframe terminology) from the card reader.

No sound, blue monochrome graphics, and all controls were the 32-key function keypad, divided in half so both players had to share it. But it was a blast, especially considering the vast amount of expensice hardware involved.

I'm just happy to have the old Moria from my old 80286 PC running on my Palm Pilot now. I played that game for months in my spare time.

782 posted on 05/07/2004 6:35:25 PM PDT by 300winmag (FR's Hobbit Hole supports America's troops)
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To: 300winmag
Was that stuff before or after the PET came out?
787 posted on 05/07/2004 6:43:53 PM PDT by Fedora
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To: 300winmag
Wow... now *that's* some expensive big iron time. :-)

But then again... the "computer at school" that I referred to was an Amdahl 7000. Yikers... those were the days. Way before being a computer geek was cool.

Memory lane, it is...

791 posted on 05/07/2004 6:46:24 PM PDT by Ramius (Objects in post may be larger than they appear.)
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To: 300winmag
That is incredibly geeky. Almost makes me wish I'd seen those days.

Wow, catching up on the thread tonight is a history lesson!
803 posted on 05/07/2004 7:01:15 PM PDT by JenB
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