Comments on: Three new home computers that teach themselves – and teach you how to use them

By: sdfgsdfg

sdfgsdfg — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 04:26:43 +0000

Those old TIs were great. They’re built like bricks, and use a really durable cartridge with a buil-in cover. The preschool I went to had a whole mess of them. They had a huge library of educational software, most of it able to use the speech synth, so a kid who couldn’t read could still use it. There were some progs that only needed the user to recognize numbers, like “Early Learning Fun”. My mother’s preschool used them past 2000.
Parsec taught me to love side-scrolling shooters.

By: Computer Rental Company

Computer Rental Company — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:02:48 +0000

Truly computers have evolved vastly in such a short time. The continuous development of computers only serves as a response to the increasing demands of computing power by users located all over the globe. Modern man wouldn’t survive a day without computers. We practically revolve in a world that is operated by computers. At home, at work even at social gatherings computers are used both for simple and complex tasks.

By: Toronto

Toronto — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:20:41 +0000

The TI 99 4/A’s “terminal” cartridge gave you access to the phonemes library, so you could say pretty much anything – and tweak the pronunciation. But the Amiga’s “Stephen Hawking” voice was more practical.

By: hwertz

hwertz — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:45:24 +0000

Oh the TI… yeah. Other than a few demos I don’t recall hearing about much being done with it. A few games used it, so the game would speak instead of showing on-screen text. I never had one, but from what I’ve heard/read the most fun people had with this voice synth was firing up the app that tried to read ANY text, put in like “lkjflksjlkjfldsa” and listen as your nice new computer basically starts burping and farting. Yeah these were not adults doing this

By: hwertz

hwertz — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:35:56 +0000

“But just how many bytes did fit on the standard tape?”
I don’t know.. the floppy would hold 90K per side in low density, and newer double-density drives like the Atari 1050 did 180K per side. Use a disk-punch to cut out the write-protect notch, flip the disk over, and the other side of the disk could be used for 360K per floppy; other than the earliest IBM PCs which were also 180K, PC floppy drives have one head for the top of the disk and one for the bottom already.

Tape? 600 baud, there was a bit of a header etc. so it’s about 60 characters per second. This would mean 216000 bytes for a 1 hour tape. There was quite the pause between blocks of data on tape though, I’d guess it was actually about 50% used. So 108000 bytes (105K) or so. Notes on this: 1) The tape player had a 0000 to 9999 counter on it, usually you’d write what number your program started at on the tape, and fast forward to that number. Since that’s not an exact process you’d likely leave a good-sized gap between programs so you don’t erase the end of one with the next one. 2) Keep in mind that most Atari 8-bits maxed at 64K of RAM (128K on the 130XE..) and apps were not all that big.. people really didn’t hurt for space even with the 90K floppies 3) You’d spend like 30-40 minutes to fill that 64K! The tape drive ran at regular tape speed!

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:52:34 +0000

It was the Youtube embed. I took it off. If anyone has any idea what I could have done to my page to cause that, I’d love to know.

By: jayessell

jayessell — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:59:39 +0000

Charlie:
Re #2:
The main page is broken somehow.

By: Myles

Myles — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:58:02 +0000

Is the author referring to the BIOS when he refers to the monitor program? I remember the excitement about early computers and their marvels. I don’t think I would have called them “clever” though and they certainly did not teach themselves. My first computer was the Tandy CoCo. I even subscribed to the CoCo magazine which came with tapes so that I wouldn’t have to type in Basic programs by hand. Getting useful functions out of that computer other than word processing was hard work. The word processor program (commercial) was WYSIWYG, used 32K of memory and had all the necessary features and extras such as footnoting. The CoCo had a fast processor, and I was dissappointed when I got my first PC as I thought it would be faster, and it wasn’t.

PS I couldn’t log on to this website directly today. Something on the front pages seems to be crashing windows IE.

By: m

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:56:04 +0000

Incredible! “48,000 bytes (48K)— more than enough for most home applications.” and now Vista alone is taking 500megs of my laptop (that slightly resembles those)… and I am considering buying LOW-end pda with like 64mb of it… But just how many bytes did fit on the standard tape? a megabyte? a doubt it, probably less…

I remember that Atari, I used it once or twice when I was little. There was this long pause until anything loaded from the tape and you had to fast forward it to get to the next game… or maybe it was next gen?