MovieChat Forums > WarGames (1983) Discussion > early days of computers and video games

early days of computers and video games

posted 9 years ago by LTUM
6 replies | jump to latest

....sure were fun. i remember how great the arcade was, playing asteroids and centipede for hours eating mall hot dogs and fries.

i remember a store in town got a comm 64 in stock and put it up for sale on an endcap. they left it on all the time and you could walk by and type stuff on it. seems so vintage now, even to just think about it! this musta been in the late 70s, i guess?

then i remember when ibm's came out to compete with the apple. schools had apples mostly, businesses had ibm's. then i remember when we called others clones because they were made by diff manufacturers. i was in a computer room in 1987 when the boss opened a package and showed us the first 'windows' computer. around that same time he also bought a 'laptop' which was huge probably more than two feet long and felt like laying an electronic music keyboard across your legs. lol

and everything was monochrome, white or green letters against black background. i remember clones had orange or red letters against black. those were the days.

but yeah this movie brings back memories from the early days of computers. they were so new to the average person hardly anyone knew much about them. hard drives were UNBELIEVABLY small. (look it up, lol)

(anybody remember 5 inch floppies? lol)

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R.I.P. V.L.M. Jan 2012 - Oct 2015

[–] 9 years ago

[deleted]

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] Erico19 8 years ago

5 inch floppies? They were luxury. I had cassette tape player. "loading" simple game into Atari 800XL took 30 to 45 minutes, that is if no errors were made during that time. If they were you had to repeat the process. Fun times.

[–] [deleted] 7 years ago

5 inch-floppies? No such thing.

They were 5,25" floppies, thank you very much.

They were not a 'luxury', floppies weren't that expensive. The floppy DRIVE was a luxury, though. It cost quite a lot, until the cheaper drives became available. OC-118N (Oceanic/Excelsior), for example, cost around 1000 money units at the time when its alternatives cost around twice as much.

I don't know how slow it was to use a tape drive for Atari 800 XL (I have the computer, just not a cassette drive), but on the Commodore side, it never took quite that long.

A commercial game loads in about 5 minutes, a "Turbo Tape" game in less than a minute, depending on the game.

Heck, even some disk games can load longer, if they have no turbo.

And you didn't -have- to repeat anything - I don't think anyone forced you to repeat. Besides, repeating would have been stupid. Whatever caused the errors the first time, would surely do it again the second and third time, etc.

You had to fix something inbetween attempts, if the load didn't succeed. On the C64-side, we adjusted the reader heads of the datassette drives. I don't know what you did on the Atari side.

In any case, your exaggerated nostalgy-hallucination with pre-embellished shock attempt doesn't hold water.

[–] mikethemartian (6992) 2 years ago

I remember trying to load a program off a cassette tape connected to a TRS-80 around 1980 and if the volume control on the cassette player wasn’t set properly it wouldn’t load.

[–] MaximRecoil (4840) 2 years ago

"and everything was monochrome"

A lot of them were, but not all. The original IBM PC (model 5150 introduced in 1981) had an optional CGA graphics card available from day one (the MDA graphics card was monochrome). Many businesses opted for MDA graphics because they were higher resolution and therefore better for the text-based applications that were common at the time. And of course, many of the popular "home computers" of the time, such as the Commodore 64, TI-99, Apple II, Commodore VIC-20, etc., had color graphics.

"white or green letters against black background. i remember clones had orange or red letters against black. those were the days."

That was determined by the monitor itself, not the computer hardware. Monochrome monitors have just one color of phosphor coating the screen. A B&W TV uses white phosphor for example, which allows it to show neutral shades of gray. Many monochrome PC monitors used green phosphor; it was thought to be easier on the eyes than white phosphor. The "orange or red letters" you mentioned were amber phosphor. And since the computer had nothing to do with it, an IBM PC would display amber letters if connected to an amber phosphor monitor and a clone PC would display white or green letters if connected to a white or green phosphor monitor, and vice versa.