eee heck hasn't this tech come a long way

[Perpetua]

Jun 1, 2017 19:13:25 GMT Get Off My Cloud said:

Jun 1, 2017 15:32:09 GMT Perpetua said:

Our very first Video Recorder which we had to buy on HP as it was hundreds of pounds that we just didn't have . . . . massive great lump of a thing!

We were thrilled nonetheless.

Front loader how posh, we had the old top loader which ejected so hard you could launch things into orbit.

I think we decided to make the HP worthwhile Get Off My Cloud!

By the time it was paid off, you couldn't give a Betamax recorder away.

[Lee]

Back in the days a 21 inch tv was a large screen and there were about three tv channels

[VapingBad]

I remember getting our first colour telly, remote controls were still science fiction then.

[Get Off My Cloud]

Jun 1, 2017 19:34:26 GMT VapingBad said:

I remember getting our first colour telly, remote controls were still science fiction then.

Our first TV remote control was actually on a wire with a headphone jack so you had this cable trailed across the room to wherever you were sitting.
It was literally just a box with a rocker switch, click the rocker one way to change the channel up and the other way to change it down.

[decoy]

Jun 1, 2017 16:47:47 GMT solac77 said:

What a piece of kit!! What a game! Those were the days

i rem playing that on a thing called a tatung einstein that had a whole 256k of pure power(for its time lol)

sorta a rip off of donkey kong 

[DaveJ]

Oh, my.....

I remember the corded remote on our first VCR.

I owned an Amstrad CPC64 "computer" - it used cassette tapes rather than floppy discs.

I had PCs with 5 1/4 drives - and well remember futzing around with Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files to try to get memory "just so" to run that latest piece of software .... or to make the damned thing work with the latest piece of hardware.




OK - how about cars then? I well remember Dad's car not having any sort of heater/demister at all and he having to retrofit same. Or when cars didn't have airconditioning. Or when radios (before cassettes were available) were optional. And they had manual window winders. And drum brakes that only sometimes worked. And crude stuff under the bonnet that ALWAYS required tinkering to keep 'em running right (anyone remember manually setting dwell angles on points?). Not to mention the modern wizardry that makes us so much safer - the anti-lock brakes and stability controls. And boy, does Cruise control make long trips so much easier!

[laurie9300]

Jun 2, 2017 6:24:07 GMT DaveJ said:

Oh, my.....

I remember the corded remote on our first VCR.

I owned an Amstrad CPC64 "computer" - it used cassette tapes rather than floppy discs.

I had PCs with 5 1/4 drives - and well remember futzing around with Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files to try to get memory "just so" to run that latest piece of software .... or to make the damned thing work with the latest piece of hardware.




OK - how about cars then? I well remember Dad's car not having any sort of heater/demister at all and he having to retrofit same. Or when cars didn't have airconditioning. Or when radios (before cassettes were available) were optional. And they had manual window winders. And drum brakes that only sometimes worked. And crude stuff under the bonnet that ALWAYS required tinkering to keep 'em running right (anyone remember manually setting dwell angles on points?). Not to mention the modern wizardry that makes us so much safer - the anti-lock brakes and stability controls. And boy, does Cruise control make long trips so much easier!

My mate had the Amstrad, so much fancier than my Dick Smith TRS80, I was so jealous! I had the last laugh though, when I bought my AMIGA 1000!

Later, I upgraded to the AMIGA 500. For that I bought my first ever hard drive! A massive 120Mb which cost me $1300! It also had a built in RAM expansion card. I had to buy 4 x 1Mb DRAM SIMMS at $100 each!

And I remember my dad's car had a hole in the front bumper where you could insert a crank for starting should the battery go flat.......lol

[Greg]

Jun 1, 2017 18:52:17 GMT Perpetua said:

Jun 1, 2017 16:14:41 GMT Lee said:

Did you also have one of the first remote control TV's?

My uncle had one, along with his Betamax vcr

It was easier to shout "click" to change channel, than use the clicker remote

Same uncle had a pirate copy of the first mad max on tape

Gosh now you're asking Lee . . . . I don't remember having a remote control for the TV for a long time, so probably not! Getting to grips with the Betamax recorder sent my family into technical meltdown, so we probably decided that was enough to cope with.

I remember our first video had a remote control, a wired remote control 

[Lee]

First home computer I ever used was a zx80
You could buy them in a kit and build one

My own first pc was a ZX81, with a 16k ram pack and thermal printer
The ram pack needed a book or magazine shoved under it to make it work

That was followed by a Dragon 32.

At the time, my parents said computers would only be a gimmick and never catch on
Both 80+ yr old parents now have a laptop each

[Perpetua]

No one has mentioned mobile phones yet . . . . . from this great beast of a thing!




To what we're all more familiar with . . . . .

[Lee]

Jun 2, 2017 17:40:49 GMT Perpetua said:

No one has mentioned mobile phones yet . . . . . from this great beast of a thing!




To what we're all more familiar with . . . . .

In the days of the pager, engineers used to do a proper job

Pager would bleep, find a phone when you had finished what you was doing, get the next service call

If you was driving, you had to find a phonebox

Satans devices made it too easy to be pushed to get jobs done quicker, so you could get onto the next call

[decoy]

to this



one of them gopro thingies

[goneforagasper]

I remember the days when we had to manage with only 1 60" TV in every room with only 200 channels.
 Our family had to manage with just 1 car each - can you imagine

[handcraftedrings]

Jun 1, 2017 15:26:41 GMT toots said:

Jun 1, 2017 13:45:18 GMT bioxx said:

5.5 inch....properly floppy

Actually I remember the even bigger floppy discs than the 5.5 inch ones, they were bloomin massive things, can't remember how many inches they were though

Oh dear. The first computer I got my hands on was at school:-



The Commodore PET 16.
Tape cassettes only. I'd never even heard of floppy disks let alone hard disks!
The first one I actually owned was one I built from the kit - the Sinclair ZX81 with a whole 1Kb (yes ONE!) of RAM :-D
then Spectrum, C64, Amiga etc.
Pity I never followed my early interest in progamming the things. My careers advisor said that was only for Uni. graduates with a Maths degree and my 'O' level B wasn't good enough...
(feeling ancient ) :-D

[Perpetua]

A Cine Camera was one of my Dad's most treasured possessions, it used to come everywhere with us for him to record our day trips out and other family events.

Then every so often we would have our ' viewing ' evenings, I seem to recall it being quite temperamental equipment as Dad spent more time cussing the projector/placing the foldaway screen in the right position - hefty phone books ( another thing of the past! ) came in useful . . . . . . than we did actually watching anything he'd filmed!