[CaptainCrunch]

Its funny because like, thanks a lot reading all of your stories makes me feel really old.

My first home computer was a Timex Sinclair kit computer, that you built and it had a chicklet keyboard. You wrote all of your apps, pre basic in binary and machine code.

My parents bought me a Commodore 64 when I was an early teen with the tape drive and the RGB monitor. I still remember the load "blah blah",8,1 and putting the tape in and then walking away for an hour while the game loaded. I had a 9 pin dot matrix printer as well. If I wanted a game, I picked up a copy of a magazine and they had games in the back that you had to code in. But first you had to use basic to write the compiler then you would enter in line after line of three digit numbers, and god forbid you screwed one up.

I remember when I saved up $1000.00 and got a one of the first 1541 disc drives. It used the 5 inch floppy, and we were over the moon when we learned that we could cut a notch on the opposite side of the disk from the original notch, and it would allow you to use both sides of the disk.

We learned about using 8 colors, and sprites and superbit maps to write games. When we wrote applications, we used a box and shadow box to give it a cool 3d effect.

I remember upgrading to a Commodore 128, which was awesome because it had three modes, a 64 mode, a CPM mode and a 128 mode. Oh my god we weren't stuck with 16 bit memory blocks anymore we could do 32 bit memory blocks. On top of that I got my first C compiler and I left basic behind.

Then my buddy got an Amiga, and gaming was never the same, an independent sound and graphics processor, and 64 colors, it was so far ahead of its time.

That's why it felt like a downgrade when I went to university and my parents took me out to buy a new computer which was the Commodore AT. Do you need a hard drive sir? Nah these two floppies will do. What about a mouse sir? Get the frack out of here.

I remember putting the dos disk in to book it up, running wordstar using two disks, a applications disk and save disk. It had a CGA card in it, and speaker sounds. I remember my first game was Ancient Art of War , so amazing.

I remember learning Dos, and its 8 million commands. Putting in a 5 mb hdd which at the time was $2000.00 and then buying digital DrDos with the drive doubler which gave me 10mb. Man I'd never fill that up.

In our day we proudly said we didn't need no windows interface (DosShell), give us a right facing arrow and we're good. And if we wanted to change how the program worked we rewrote the Autoexec.bat file.

ah yeah, you kids with your vintage computes with their fancy Pentium chips, and 8 mb of ram, you don't know the pleasures of a 286 with a mb of ram, 10 mb hdd, EGA video card, Sound blaster 16 and a 8 color monitor.

Salad days baby.

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