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Re: Obit - Sir Clive Sinclair, Computing Pioneer [message #411149] Wed, 22 September 2021 15:57 Go to previous message
Andreas Kohlbach is currently offline  Andreas Kohlbach
Messages: 1456
Registered: December 2011
Karma:
Senior Member
On Wed, 22 Sep 2021 09:13:12 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
>
> On 22/09/2021 06.11, SevenOverSix wrote:
>>
>>   You could LOOK, but not TOUCH the mini-mainframes. Only
>>   the Holy Elite were allowed in the Computer Room. You
>>   could offer your sacrifice of punch-cards in the room
>>   next door of course ............
>
> Oh, we had our lab time on the terminals.
>
> However, the machine got so busy with all the students compiling and
> testing their Pascal assignments (specially in the last weeks), that the
> editor would take seconds to respond to a keypress. So we counted: five
> lines down, then 12 letters right, then three deletes, then replace
> "tye" with "the", then wait :-D
>
> It was then that I decided I needed my own computer and asked my father
> to get me one. An Amstrad PC 1512, the student association had an
> agreement with a vendor. A bit weird vendor... it was not a computer
> shop, but a warehouse of some industrial thing... There no home PC
> computer vendors by that time, they were starting.

That was Spain at that time?

Similar in Germany. Dedicated computer shop chains only showed up later
in the 1980s and had their boom in the 1990s. Then most died.

Then you had general department stores which added home computers by the
early 1980s. Then you had hypermarkets (like Walmart or Carrefour today)
where you (in my case at least) only found products by Commodore. There I
got my C64 (1984) and Amiga 500 (1989) from.

[...]

>>   Need to find a compatible tape cassette unit now. Junk
>>   store ? COULD cheat and record to a modern PC audio
>>   capture, but it's just not the same somehow  :-)
>
> Might not work (a capture). Just a guess. If you do try, make sure to
> not use mp3. Now that I think, I would try the experiment, to find out.

There was a short lived [1] UK computer show "4 Computer Buffs"
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178499/> I never heard of before. They
sent program data via audio the audience record. When I found the show on
Youtube I tested that (extracted the audio at that position) and ran the
resulting WAV in an emulator fir that particular machine on my PC. It my
amazement it worked.

X'Post + F'up alt.folklore.computers

[1] So unknown the IMDB page has only little information and a Wikipedia
page not even exists.
--
Andreas
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