GRA
Well-known member
Hah! This is what I started off with (not counting playing Original Adventure and Star Trek on PDP-11/70s, or an even earlier period being notably unsuccessful trying to learn Fortran [punch cards!] in junior high so we could print pictures of Snoopy et al on computer graph paper using Xs): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Commodore_2001_Series-IMG_0448b.jpgDarthPuppy said:Scary analogy regarding the 5" floppy disks. PC data storage and transfer went through quite a number of turnovers to get where we are today. IIRC, started with 8" floppies (dating myself), then 5" (first 360kb, then 1.2mb), then 3.5" (1.44mb) then zip drives (various iterations), then CD/DVD of different flavors and portable HDDs then finally thumb drives and cloud. That's 9+/- in 37 years I've been using computers. And that isn't counting tape drives and associated media options or SD, Micro-SD, XD, etc.. I do hope the automakers/governments can compress this down.
And people (me too) complain about 20 second waits for page loads - try 20 minutes to load or store an 8k program, and the Chiclet keyboard! :lol: To be fair, the full-screen editor and string arrays included in Commodore Basic made it much easier to write/edit programs compared to Apple II (pfffft!) and Atari 400/800, although the latter had the best graphics and sound. I had no experience with the TRS-80 aka Trash-80, so can't compare.
Rooting around in some long unopened boxes a while back, I came across some of the Original Adventure maps I made. For those who aren't familiar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
And just for completeness, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(text_game)
Some things never change - I still often encounter situations using computers that can be accurately described as being in "a maze of little, twisty passages, all alike"