A serious gamer's set-up in the 1980s
When I saw this in a museum of technology, it gave me a pang. This was almost exactly like my setup back in the 80s! I'd also put the old TV that I was using as a monitor on a fat book. Possibly even this very book. I don't remember for sure, but it could be. Everybody in Germany had this book back then.
Oh, and that TV. It wasn't particularly kind on my eyes. As soon as I could afford it, which was definitely not "soon", I got a monochrome monitor. And there was the great big blinking block cursor. My cat loved to sit on the TV and chase the cursor with its paws.
So most of the time I couldn't see what I was typing because there was an upside-down furry head with two triangular ears blocking the view. And when the cat was elsewhere, the screen was full of dirty paw prints.
What I don't see here is a printer. I also had a great big noisy matrix printer hooked up.
I remember starting the computer and watching it counting every bit of its memory, seemingly slow enough for me to follow, until it proudly announced that it was finally ready and all of 38911 basic bytes were now available to cater to my computing needs.
I owned a few games, but even back then, they bored me. Except for a flight simulator. But as I didn't have much money as a measly engineering student, and serious software was painfully expensive (if it existed at all for the C64), I had to write a lot of it myself. I wrote my own word processor and even a rather primitive numerical propagation tool for satellite orbits.
The computer took forever to compute things that the computers at my current workplace will do in a few seconds. I remember one particularly tricky computation that took all day and half the night. I had gone to sleep waiting for the results. At around 2 in the morning the dot matrix printer robustly sprang into life, waking up not just me and my cat, but also the neighbours to the left and right, as the computer had finally finished its job and was now printing the results on reams of paper, after which it lapsed into a sort of exhausted coma.
Ah, the memories. Can it really be that this happened over 30 years ago?
Seen in the Technoseum, Mannheim, Germany
I have created a new Flickr group for film photography using the Contarex series cameras and lenses --> Click
Camera: Zeiss Ikon Contarex Special (built between 1960 and 1963)
Lens: Carl Zeiss Planar 1:2 50mm Contarex Mount
Kodak Portra 400 professional grade colour negative film
Developed and scanned by www.meinfilmlab.de
A serious gamer's set-up in the 1980s
When I saw this in a museum of technology, it gave me a pang. This was almost exactly like my setup back in the 80s! I'd also put the old TV that I was using as a monitor on a fat book. Possibly even this very book. I don't remember for sure, but it could be. Everybody in Germany had this book back then.
Oh, and that TV. It wasn't particularly kind on my eyes. As soon as I could afford it, which was definitely not "soon", I got a monochrome monitor. And there was the great big blinking block cursor. My cat loved to sit on the TV and chase the cursor with its paws.
So most of the time I couldn't see what I was typing because there was an upside-down furry head with two triangular ears blocking the view. And when the cat was elsewhere, the screen was full of dirty paw prints.
What I don't see here is a printer. I also had a great big noisy matrix printer hooked up.
I remember starting the computer and watching it counting every bit of its memory, seemingly slow enough for me to follow, until it proudly announced that it was finally ready and all of 38911 basic bytes were now available to cater to my computing needs.
I owned a few games, but even back then, they bored me. Except for a flight simulator. But as I didn't have much money as a measly engineering student, and serious software was painfully expensive (if it existed at all for the C64), I had to write a lot of it myself. I wrote my own word processor and even a rather primitive numerical propagation tool for satellite orbits.
The computer took forever to compute things that the computers at my current workplace will do in a few seconds. I remember one particularly tricky computation that took all day and half the night. I had gone to sleep waiting for the results. At around 2 in the morning the dot matrix printer robustly sprang into life, waking up not just me and my cat, but also the neighbours to the left and right, as the computer had finally finished its job and was now printing the results on reams of paper, after which it lapsed into a sort of exhausted coma.
Ah, the memories. Can it really be that this happened over 30 years ago?
Seen in the Technoseum, Mannheim, Germany
I have created a new Flickr group for film photography using the Contarex series cameras and lenses --> Click
Camera: Zeiss Ikon Contarex Special (built between 1960 and 1963)
Lens: Carl Zeiss Planar 1:2 50mm Contarex Mount
Kodak Portra 400 professional grade colour negative film
Developed and scanned by www.meinfilmlab.de