I grew up around a bunch of these machines (and more besides, like the Oric). My dad wrote programming books for many of them, and was even on the front cover of the first Dragon User magazine:
I’ve been feeling bad lately because I started programming at about six or seven and my kids haven’t been hugely interested (my oldest child’s computer teacher laments that most of his class don’t know what files and folders are). Reminiscing about this list of machines reminds me just how naff they all were, however lovable. You had to really work quite hard to drag much fun or utility out of them. Only eating what you can kill teaches quite a lot, I guess.
What was wonderful is that you could get value in one or two lines of code. No NPM or JS stack, no jar hell, no servers…you had all you needed on day 1. You also created without all the fluff. It was like programming with wire drawings, where the absence of perfect image and sound and video meant a you were dealing with real basics. Just drawing a circle might mean using cos and sin. Printing graphics might mean binary to switch dots on and off.
Those ads bring back so many memories. What a wonderful time.
https://archive.org/details/dragon-user-magazine-01/mode/1up
I’ve been feeling bad lately because I started programming at about six or seven and my kids haven’t been hugely interested (my oldest child’s computer teacher laments that most of his class don’t know what files and folders are). Reminiscing about this list of machines reminds me just how naff they all were, however lovable. You had to really work quite hard to drag much fun or utility out of them. Only eating what you can kill teaches quite a lot, I guess.