~~3Home-Computers -------------- Having seen a lot of adverts recently for faster and better computers, it made me think back to the good old days and also how far we've managed to come. ~~6A bit of history ---------------- I remember getting my first home-computer (THE first home-computer). The sinclair ZX-81. This was about 13 or 14 years ago now. It was great, wasn't it? Just think of all that memory you had to play around with, a whole 1024 bytes of memory, not a byte more, not a byte less. A whole 1K. And you could actually create some rather excellent pictures on the screen. I mean, yeah okay, so they were a little bit blocky. Yeah, okay, so they were either black pictures on a white background or white pictures on a black background but it was fun. And we were always finding out new and exciting things such as how to get the stupid thing to actually display just one pixel rather than a whole block of them, and how to get sound out of the machine. Okay, the latter is a touch difficult since this computer didn't actually have a sound chip inside it, not even a little buzzer or anything. But, with a bit of clever thinking we did indeed (like the most inventive hackers and coders) find a way of getting sound out of it; in a few different ways, as well. You could turn the volume on the television set right up and then get the computer to switch between its "fast" and "slow" modes at varying speeds; you could put a radio near the computer and tune its frequency dial into the same frequency that the chips were working at (probably about 0.5Hz. No, only kidding.......or am I?), and then you could press a key on the keyboard and the radio would respond with a sort of a fuzzier sound than the sound that was currently coming out of it; alternatively you could place the computer under the wheel of a car, then proceed to let the car drive over it. This definitely gives a satisfying sound. Suddenly (well not that suddenly), five years pass, and here comes Commodore with the latest thing, and to be frank, I have to admit it nearly blew our minds. Yes, that's right. The VIC-20. Now *this* was a machine; the ZX-81 began to look increasingly small and really rather limiting. The VIC-20 soon took over as one of the best home-computers, I mean it had to really; it had an amazing 8 colours, it even had three channel sound. Now for the memory, this was the good bit. The computer actually came with a massive 3.5K (I'm not joking, it really was that much!). But Sinclair had to challenge this new machine. Therefore, they brought out the Spectrum computer. Shock horror, here was a computer that had a total of 48K.....We were astounded, what could we possibly imagine to do with as much memory as 48K? They'd even given it the feature of colour-clashing when two colours got too close to each other on the screen. Now not even the VIC-20 had that. The two computers were very close on sound though, the spectrum only came with a small buzzer, (one channel sound), and the VIC-20 just sounded like a sound chip trying to imitate the sound of a small buzzer, but not just any buzzer; a buzzer with a bit of pizazz, with a bit of spice to it, a real man's buzzer. Pretty soon afterwards, it was Commodore's turn again and they came up with the CBM-64. With 64K of memory....... And so the tale goes on. Right up to today. ~~6Have we reached the limit yet? ------------------------------ Look how far we've come in about 14 years or so. A computer with a measly 1K of memory, no sound capabilities, and only two colours. Today's computers are measured in thousands of everything. How many thousands of K you have for RAM. How many thousands (or millions) of colours you can display. How many decades of Mhz your computer clocks in at. Someone I knew once said that he'd heard that if the ancient Greeks had continued progressing from their level of technology at the rate they were right up to today, we would have colonised all the stars you can see in the sky at night by now. But because of some small thing such as a Roman invasion or something, they were stopped. But have we reached our limit? I mean, there's only so many colours that the human eye can detect, so surely we don't need to go above this value. There's only a certain quality of sound that our ears can detect. Why go above 16-bit sound? I think we've reached our limit in everything except storage space and speed of processing. But there's still a limit on how fast you can put a signal through a microchip without burning it up anyway. It's amazing how much storage space you need nowadays. For instance, on an IBM PC, just Windows takes up quite a few megabytes of hard-disk space. Weren't things simpler and easier in the old days? ~~6The old days. ------------- Maybe I'm just suffering from severe nostalgia but wasn't it better back in the early 80's? That was when programmers were real programmers, computer musicians were real computer musicians (Rob Hubbard for instance, I think most people would remember him). Waiting for a game to load off cassette was enjoyable wasn't it? You could watch the title screen draw up character by character and perhaps listen to some loading-music as well. And if the program didn't load first time, you didn't worry, (there *were* no viruses then), you simply rewound the cassette, cleaned the heads and cranked up the volume a bit on the cassette player. You'd eagerly await the next new tune from Rob Hubbard or David Whitakker on the new game you'd purchased. But nowadays, everyone's a games musician. This is good since there is a large variation in music produced but could be bad since there's no big names anymore. No proper music charts in magazines, (like there used to be in Zzap etc) The strange thing is, I can't wait to get the latest demo for my Amiga and show it off to my friends who have, perhaps, lesser computers. Oh well. Some things never change.