I wrote "Standard European Plug (EU)" very purposely, so I was technically (and sadly) correct.
Something fun
- Thread starter APTI
- Start date
The Timex/Sinclair memory pack's mechanical extension seriously restricted my use of it as i constantly feared loosing time-consuming work, which simply felt too anxiogenic once i experienced a few crashes, while this wasn't a truly structured programming language. For that i much preferred the confidence of Hewlett-Packard's HP-48, especially when i got my hands on its books, not long after the initial purchase, early in the '90s.
America On Line, GEnie and similar would have implied recurrent spending hardly justifyable at the time, even worse for a hobby! Lucky me, our local BBSes happened to be financially supported by generous donators and hence also provided access to FidoNet, etc. In Grand-Mère/Qc (which was a local call) we even got our own country-wide french-speaking alternative near the end:
Canada-Média, Universel, Michel Boulanger
Possibly also available beyond the ocean thanks to the internet, eventually - which finally killed it...
Last edited:
Phone phreak?
Never load more than $20 worth of tones (in short order) or they'll kill the line because they think it's faulty. You can tone more currency at any time, but you never want to deposit more than $20 worth. They'll send a tech to check into it and they'll cut your lines - unless you hide them well.
Of course, none of that information would be valid today.
The GI Bill was a joke compared to today and I didn't have a ton of financial assistance. I suppose those are just excuses.
I recall worrying about the memory pack coming loose but never had it actually happen. My main problem with the memory pack was that the video quality went all to crap when the memory pack was plugged in - you could still read the screen but it was harder. As a result, I usually didn't use the extra RAM. I also had the little thermal printer that plugged into the same port and I don't remember it affecting the video quality. I don't know what I paid for the printer but it must have been -dirt- cheap or I wouldn't have bought it.
"anxiogenic": Did you just invent that? If so, good work!
It was anxiogenic BEFORE the crash, then panicogenic...
I can remember the joy of having multiple tiers of IBM 3290 terminals. Four screens per monitor. Man when something would go wrong in the data center the first thing to do was go get a cup of coffee and wait for all of those screens to quit rolling. PC's were a novelty unless there was an irmalan card in it so you could bring up a mainframe session. I'mmm too old
Monochrome cathode ray tubes felt like glorious luxury after dealing with a TTY, the type with real fanfold dot matrix paper in days when CR/LF actually meant something... Oh and the music of it late in the evening! Yet even Google forgot about such nostalgia unless it's provided sufficiently precise magic words, no blame from me. Which somehow is a reminder of Space 1999 relying on paper rolls, that made a great return decades later with cashless pizza delivery.
Yeah, I remember in my college days they would have us log in on a printer that ran at 1200 baud so we could print our computer programming homework and run it right there on the printer. That must have used a ton of paper. Imagine all of those students each using about a dozen of those huge pages. Talk about noisy.
At least someone turned down that awful beep that happened every time someone logged in.
Signed,
Matthew Campbell
Yeah i was a huge C64 geek back then ,, right after my first computer class on a TI-99/4A - at the boys/girls club in town. I was in 4th grade and paired up with a girl in 3rd grade that i knew from my own school. We wrote in BASIC - a two-player tic-tac-toe. It was pages and pages of it-thens but it all worked .. we were so proud of it .
