Posted on 04/13/2005 9:18:26 PM PDT by gilor
Remember when 'killer app' started the buzzword lexicon of today?
What was the first program or game that made you realize: 'these computer things might catch on'?
I used to mess around with the early stuff (ATARI 800XL w/ dual 5 1/4" 360K drives was my first), but once way back when a friend of mine upgraded his XT to CGA, added one of those new 'sound cards' and replaced a failed 20MB HD(it sucked loading games up off multiple floppies) he installed "INCUNABELLA"(sic) the game had shit graphics but excellent game play.
"Leather Goddess' of Phobos" on an old Radio Shack Tandy 1000EX. This boat anchor of a computer didn't have a hard drive, only 38K of memory and ran everything from 5 1/4 inch floppies.
I remember going with my dad to rent CPU time on saturdays. This was early 70's, after he started his own computer related business in 1966. I would haul in handtruck after handtruck of punch cards to the monster computer with the tape drives and the keypunch card readers. IIRC, everything was programmed in COBOL. The printers were humongous and severley slow, and the daisy wheel and dot matrix print quality sucked. I will probably forever hate the green & white color combination.
The day I realized computers were really to stay was when I, at 10 years old, could carry a stand-alone computer into the trade shows. An IBM 5110, with dual 11" floppy drives. Those things were like rockets, you could actually sit & wait for the calculations to run instead of leaving it overnight. It took about 20-30 minutes each to format the disks. My whole summer job on year was to format the floppy disks (I quit after about 2 weeks to work in a landscaping crew.)
Then came the IBM PC. It weighed about a quarter of the 5110 and had a separate monitor. It also used the mini (5 1/4") floppys. Later on the color monitors came along. It sure was a hell of a lot easier carrying a half dozen floppy disks than a pallet of punch cards.
Yeah, therre were some killer apps for the comodious 64 and the trash 80, but they didn't change my outlook on computers like the IBM PC (with no fancy at or xt extensions).
Star Raiders on the Atari 800. And then...Leisure Suit Larry.
I bought the Atari800 for ~$800 essentially to get the PacMan cartridge. Remarkably at the time I saw it as a way to save on quarters!
Hey! That was mine as well. I'd start loading up Scott Adams' Adventure, then go to dinner. It'd be ready by the time I got back.
SpeedScript... didn't "Compute!" magazine produced that word processor, and the machine code (to be hand-entered by the hobbyist) appear there? I didn't have a Commode Door, but I did fool with that listing, because I wanted to learn 6502 machine language. :')
Speedscript
Commodore:
http://www.digitaldinos.com/Pages/ForSale/Commodore/docCommodore.htm
Atari:
http://www.atariarchives.org/speedscript/
Speedscript Apple II:
http://www.devili.iki.fi/library/issue/74.en.html
Yes... I had forgotten that! I remember typing in all 39K of it... accurately!
I also typed in the Apple version, and it's at least an outside possibility that the magazine is still around the house. I think I made typing errors because as I recall, it tended to bomb. :')
The first piece of software I ever purchased was Doom. In fact I think Doom is the whole reason I convinced my parents to buy a PC when I was around 13.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.