Old Tech thread

I would still be using my Creative Zen MP3 player if the LCD screen hadn't become unreadable. I still use the little docking station/speakers with my laptop; the sound is better than anything I've heard less than full stereo speakers.
 
I had one of those. It was really good.
 
pyan said:
Not exactly tech, but...

'Over 100 graphic locations!' I had the Hobbit game for the Spectrum, and each 'graphic location' took literally up to 2 minutes to load, line by line.
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It was actually done by the same guys who did The Hobbit, Melbourne House. It was much larger and you could switch between characters; but it was also much slower and less fun to play.

Watching the graphics draw (and then fill in) was pretty cool , and even today the graphical depictions in the game are interesting to view. The game (The Hobbit) was also incredibly complex in it's day, and quite possibly the first 'sand-box' game. In an era where most text adventure games used simple verb/noun combinations, in The Hobbit you could string together a complex series of commands, and the game also had it's own internal clock (again quite unique for the time). The non-player characters in the game also had their own free will; sometimes they would help you and sometimes they wouldn't. You'd could set up some 'interesting' situations , such as wearing the Ring then 'hitting' a non-player character such as Gandalf. Not being able to see you, he would assume he'd been hit by another non-player character (such as Elrond) and they'd start fighting. All this was totally unique at the time,
 
Does anyone else remember The Boggit adventure game? One memorable part had Goodguff the wizard swing in through the window on a rope, the game played the Milk Tray fanfare, Goodguff dropped a box of chocolates which then shortly exploded killing you unless you took appropriate action.
 
I never played Bored of the Rings or The Boggit, but I understand they were both great, funny games. That sounds like a good example, Vladd.
 
autodidact said:
For anybody who wants to experience what early 80's microcomputing was like, I can highly recommend this


I taught myself programming on a real one back then and, from a programming perspective, this facsimile is exactly like the real thing. The case is also very close to the original, and the keyboard is excellent and, again, very close to the original. I can't attest to the games experience as my interest was, and still is, from a programming perspective.
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I have the mini C64 which is great fun, and a cool looking piece of equipment. What I would love to see (but probably won't) is a mini Atari 800 with the Activision games (BallBlazer, Fractulus etc) and some of the other Atari classics (Star Raiders, ElektraGlide, Alleycat etc)
 
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Any one play any Level 9 games, I really enjoyed playing Snowball.
An interstellar colony ship built on a comet, using the frozen gases of said comet for fuel, hence the name.
You would wake up in mid-flight from deep freeze sleep only to die within a couple of minutes of starting the game, turns out someone had given the robot nurse a poisoned syringe!
It had a pretty good parser, about as good as the Infocom games such as Zork ect.
 
I did wonder if it was a fake newspaper report but that newspaper exists. It is Mansfield in Ohio not the one in Nottinghamshire. Sorry for being sceptical.
Vladd67 said:
I wonder if Roddenberry saw this?
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I don't think he would need to have seen that particular report. If one newspaper was reporting this, then it is most-likely that it wasn't the only one. In the early 1960's, in the "white heat of technology", it was believed that in the future, anything at all was possible with the application of science. There were no barriers to what could be achieved and it would all happen very, very soon. Only a few people mentioned resource depletion, limits to growth and sustainability. Thunderbirds has video-phones but we don't see Gerry Anderson as a visionary in the same way as Gene Roddenberry is seen about the flip-open communicator. They actually designed mobile cell phones that looked like the Star Trek communicator but they didn't catch on. You can still buy them for $149.95 if you are a real fan, but most people have progressed on to camera smartphones. No one ever predicted having computers that small, did they?
 
Not on tv but I remember an English teacher reading us a short story about a boy who had glasses that acted as a monitor for his edu-computer/communicator that he had fitted to his belt. this was in the early 80s
 
Vladd67 said:
Not on tv but I remember an English teacher reading us a short story about a boy who had glasses that acted as a monitor for his edu-computer/communicator that he had fitted to his belt. this was in the early 80s
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That sounds remarkably like Joe 90 's glasses.

What I meant though, was that (even in books) that "big brain" AI that "knows all," and controls all, was always the size of a city, or at least the size of a high-rise building, and that smart-phones themselves now fit in your pocket. You are perfectly right, of course, that smartphones wouldn't be possible without internet connected gigantic servers. They probably would take up a small city if they were all put together in one place. So, really it is the internet that allows geographically dispersed data centres that wasn't predicted.
 
Foxbat said:
Many folk view electric cars as the future but they also predate the internal combustion engine so I think they qualify for this old tech thread:)
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I wasn't aware a much of that, such as the history of Porsche. Very interesting. I'm not convinced that the success of the Model T Ford was the cause of "everything [going] very quiet for the electric car". The well-known proverb, "necessity is the mother of invention" is quite true, but battery technology would have been driven by a lot more than car manufacturing and would have helped in electrical distribution networks if available. Maybe you could say the easy availability of fossil fuels was the cause, or maybe we were just lacking the right materials to manufacture modern batteries. It has certainly come a long way in the last few decades but that also coincides with computers and semi-conductor technology. I'm minded that the joke in Stainless Steel Rat of the coal/steam powered robot was written in 1961.
 
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