It's the things from your childhood thread - The Bear and Badger

davyK

AJ wrote:

Ooh, that's a nice looking artefact, davy. Reading what you had to deal with makes me realise just how lucky I was to start my experience of coding on an 8086. Very interesting read, thanks.

They was badged as an Epson HX-20 when I used them - we had them out in mobile libraries too before laptops became affordable for them. There's still one sitting on our dev floor just for fun.

Actually most of the time that application I worked on (public library admin) was a joy because the VAX hardware with VMS OS running on it was a terrific environment. Yeah - it was COBOL and green screen display (24x80) and not so terribly sexy in 1992 - but it was rock solid and we used some highly optimised libraries (call it middleware now I guess) for fast access - when we read or updated a record (it was ISAM file - not RDBMS) we got the physical disc address returned to us for subsequent access which was faster than accessing data in virtual RAM. Those same libraries supported commit and rollback in an ISAM environment so it was pretty cool to work with.

Was a great way to start my professional coding life as the whole source code management process hammered good practice into me. The senior programmer wrote crystal clear code that a child could follow too - he was highly skilled and I like to think a lot of it rubbed off onto me.

It is a comfort to think that below all the nice RDBMS tech I now use via Oracle or Microsoft that it is still actually implemented as rock solid ISAM at the low level.

AJ

I often wish I'd worked with more programmers, working in media I've often been the only one on a team. Gotta admit, those big old systems do sound pretty fun; it's a headache trying to figure out what's actually happening at the metal with all the layers I work on top of (not that you often need to, but it's nice to know).

And, unless something's changed in the last few days, we still have libraries.

davyK

yeah - we call them web services or middleware now I guess.....

Just remembered that product we used even supported threading so we could have multiple instances of apps communicating - we rarely used that (usually just used to retain a state between called programs) but it was really powerful - it's probably down in the bowels of some modern tech now with a modern front end- working away.

I'm starting to tinker with Xcode at home and it is hard to click into the way of a framework - much more productive of course. I have played with BlitzBasic too on PC which only does a few things for you like double buffering and I liked that because I could control pretty much everything.

The ultimate is atari 2600 programming - you are actually issuing instructions to the electron beam in the CRT to control the display - mind boggling - I've only ever tinkered with pre-existing 2600 ROMS though.

AM playing with Java too - again - learning the class structure is half the battle.

The whole ajax thing looks really cool too - would like to get into learning about that as most online sites seem to use that for a richer UI.

AJ

Wish I didn't have to run off, I'd love to discuss some of that (the 2600 and your first point, particularly), but things are calling. Might do a general coding thread later, if peeps seem up for it.

davyK

yup - start it up and I;ll come calling

Must go now too..

Moot_Geeza

[Deleted User]

Hated Badger Girl. All about the haunted castle one and Through the Dragon's Eye.

Also fuck Wordy.

adkm1979

AJ wrote:

You'd be interested in this. There's also a pirate themed one in Tesco, albeit it could be 'inspired by' rather than by Tomy, I didn't look closely enough, I didn't know this thread was going to happen.

AJ wrote:

Does anyone remember that one where you had to climb the mountain with the gorilla at the top? I can't remember what it's called.

davyK wrote:

That reminds me of pocketeers....remember them ? I had this one among others.

I had a couple of those. The race cars one, certainly. Did any have clockwork? I have memory of a purple plastic maze, same size and shape, and the high pitched buzz of mechanics inside. These days, it's this oversized garish nonsense:

Talking of early programming, I wrote a lottery program on my Casio graphic calculator. It asked you to enter your six numbers, then ran through 52 weeks of random draws, comparing them to your numbers and telling you if you'd won anything. Looking back on the results (sitting watching it running, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was "10 PRINT "You did not win anything." 20 GOTO 10) it makes me wonder why I actually play the lottery. Anyway, this is the model I had:

AJ

Yeah , saw they were still making Screwball Scramble when I was grabbing the pic. It's far too big to have for nostalgia, unfortunately. I might buy it for my nephew when he's older, though.

And thank you so much for finding Kongman! That was really bothering me.

Graphing calculators were definitely where it was at for school, most people had a TI-83 at mine, so we'd transfer programs to each other as well as (a handful of us) coding on them. The big winners were Dope Wars and an amazingly complete version of Tetris I found on the Internet that some guy had written in Assembly. Ha! I've just remembered soldering cables together to transfer to/from PCs 'cause the official one was a ridiculous price.

davyK wrote:

yup - start it up and I;ll come calling

Will do. Just let me think up a good name for it.

ZMM

Albert the Fifth Musketeer, and Robinson Sucroe.

Brooks

Marble maze in a globe? I want a go.

davyK

My kids have that 3D maze - it's rock hard. It's larger than the one pictured above though.

Roujin

Zoids anyone?

AJ

Fuck yes. That's even cooler than I remember it being.

Tempy

Yas

I had a bunch including

and

beano

WHat was that last one called?! These were good yes!

Tempy

Gojulas

not copyright

beano

Ah, ta! It's the only one I remeber had a name.

AJ

When I was a kid, it was called Zoidzilla and looked like this:

Tempy

They all had names, that top one was ULTRASAUR or some shit, it was massive (thanks dad)

Edit: wait yes, I see what Beano means. But I remember on the boxes lots of them had little names and stories and stuff. And yes, Zoidzilla was likely the one that I had, I think that picture is one of the new versions.