Micro Men

MCLS

MCLS

Anti F1 fan
Valued Member
Micro Men was on the BBC last week, it featured the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Christopher Curry and the emergence of the home computer in British homes, it is a fantastic watch and very interesting to see how Britain emerged as world leaders in the computer market only to fall behind to American companies like Apple and Microsoft, almost because of a fallout between Sinclair and Curry which lead to 2 separate companies, Sinclair and Acorn. I know some people on here were alive when this 'war' was on with machines like the XZ Spectrum and the BBC Micro being extremely popular, (for different reasons), almost makes me want to have been alive in the 1980s :P :P :P
 
We used BBC Apples at school.
I owned a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and all the other models they made, except for the first one which came with an optional thermal printer about 8cm wide LOL

I still remember the day I got my Dragon 32 and then upgraded to a Dragon 64.
My mate had a Commodore 64 but mine was the superior machine :D
 
I remember the BBC well, used to spend hours writing around 50 lines of code just to make the screen turn different colours.

I can't remember the name of the machine but I had one which used tapes and it took longer to load the games than to actually play them.
 
F1Yorkshire said:
I can't remember the name of the machine but I had one which used tapes and it took longer to load the games than to actually play them.
Click to expand
That was the Commodore 32/64.
Invariably you would spend an hour loading the tape and then it would crash right at the end of loading as the tape had stretched
 
Brogan said:
F1Yorkshire said:
I can't remember the name of the machine but I had one which used tapes and it took longer to load the games than to actually play them.
Click to expand
That was the Commodore 32/64.
Invariably you would spend an hour loading the tape and then it would crash right at the end of loading as the tape had stretched
Click to expand

Ahh, it could also be the Spectrum, the poor inferior cousin to the Commodore!!! I remember that fondly because I had the donkey kong game, and that one with the frogs crossing the road.

The Commodore was a lot better though because it had the two great games. Settlers, and Brian Clough's Football Fortunes :D
 
I remember one of the games was Jet Set Willy, I'm not sure what happened to the old thing its probably worth something now.

It was so easy to cheat at BC's Football. You were supposed to calculate your squad defensive and attacking strength and then input the numbers but I always put in massive numbers and win all my games 6-0 :D
 
My first ZX Spectrum was in 1984. One of them little things with the rubber keys. I "upgraded" it by adding the Spectrum+ body. You know, the one with the moulded keys?!

I then sold it and bought a Spectrum 128k. It had three channel sound and er... three channel sound! Oh, and it had a heat-sink attached to one side. :chuffed:

The game loading on the 128k was epic. Daley Thompson's Decathlon took ages. There was even games that you couldn't get on the 48k machine, like the adventure game "The Pawn". Still not enough memory for it to be a graphic adventure game, but I always thought text adventure games were better... :whistle:

I still wish I'd kept my ZX Spectrum. I know you can get simulations on the PC, but simulation is never the same as the real thing, is it? :(
 
Clive Sinclair was brilliant man. I remember watching a program about how he created the first pocket calculator and wrote the algorithms or code or something in one night. Then he went mad and gave us this:

sinclair1.jpg


Cost him his company. Wonder if Gordon Murray is going to go the same way?

2010-gordon-murry-design-t25-city-car-2.jpg


I should critcise, I drive a Smart car LOL
 
MajorDanby said:
The Commodore was a lot better though because it had the two great games. Settlers, and Brian Clough's Football Fortunes :D
Click to expand

I think you're getting the Commodore 64 mixed up with the Commodore Amiga. I don't remember Settlers making it onto any of the 8-bit computers, but I passed many hours playing it on my Amiga. In fact, the 10th Anniversary edition of Settlers 2 runs very well on Windows Vista or Windows 7 and is well worth playing.
 
Ahh true there, well corrected Jez.

The 64 was a deck loaded system, but the Amiga supported the then very new and modern Floppy Drive!!!! Amazing technology, how you managed to get a whole 1.4 Mb of storage on something that small and portable was beyond me at the time ;)

There was also Monkey Island that I loved, and the speech synthesis program that came with the system. This is Amiga Speaking!!
 
MajorDanby said:
how you managed to get a whole 1.4 Mb of storage on something that small and portable was beyond me at the time ;)
Click to expand

880KB on an Amiga disk (verses 720KB on a DOS formatted disk). Only the high end Amigas came with high density drives, which stored 1.76MB (verses 1.44MB on DOS).
 
fat_jez said:
MajorDanby said:
how you managed to get a whole 1.4 Mb of storage on something that small and portable was beyond me at the time ;)
Click to expand

880KB on an Amiga disk (verses 720KB on a DOS formatted disk). Only the high end Amigas came with high density drives, which stored 1.76MB (verses 1.44MB on DOS).
Click to expand


Are you a curator of the obsolete technology museum Jez? LOL
 
I loved my old amiga 500. It had a whopping 1MB of memory once I upgraded it.

So many timeless games on there, Sensi soccer, Cannon Fodder and the original worms. I want it back!!!
 
...still have some of my old consoles. Several C64s, an Amiga, even an original Electron with programmers guides etc

on disk drives; pretty sure my dad bought me a disk drive for the C64, before the Amiga came about... he was fed up of me screaming the house down when the tape crashed right near the end of Mission Impossible...

Edit - think it was probably 5 1/4" come to think of it, but still, i had a disk drive! and a rapid fire joy-stick! even had an F1 game i think?
 
When was the 1st Geoff Crammond F1 game?

I've managed to get hold of an Amiga emulator, just don't know what to play 1st!
 
F1Yorkshire said:
I loved my old amiga 500. It had a whopping 1MB of memory once I upgraded it.

So many timeless games on there, Sensi soccer, Cannon Fodder and the original worms. I want it back!!!
Click to expand


Awww hell.

How could I forget about Cannon Fodder?? Good old Jools and Jops, and then Stoo and Rj if i'm not mistaken. Awesome game!
 
WAR!

Go to your brother
Kill him with your gun!

Leave him lying in his uniform
Dying in the sun!

The lyrics every 6 year old should know, errr :embarrassed:

I never did kill my brother.... surprising really!
 
You missed out the intro

War!

Never been so much fun

War!
Never been so much fun


And I think the brother referred to is your brother man, not your literal brother.
 
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