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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23525221
That damned Mylar keyboard. Easy to clean, horrible to use. Atari 400 has the same problem.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Cassette Futurism
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A place to share and discuss Cassette Futurism: media where the technology closely matches the computers and technology of the 70s and 80s.
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Yep. Tried one at a family friend's house with a RAM expansion pack hanging off the back that kept disconnecting because it was such a wobbly connection, and heavier than the computer itself. Then there was the fact it was only black & white. Seemed a really unreliable PITA, so I was iffy about getting one.
Then Captain Kirk advertised the VIC-20, and I was sold.
Oh shit, that's cool. Did any of you guys do this?
Yup! I remember it so well. I even remember seeing this ad in a magazine and begging my dad to order it.. I was 10 years old, and built it with him.
I also remember going to a home computer sale event in my hometown. No shops were selling computer stuff in that town yet. Men with beards and long hair laughing that I was buying 1k Chess to play on my new computer.
The location for that sale was turned into public toilets.
Was that chess program that bad ?
Why were they laughing ? This is a perfectly reasonable chess implementation
It was great. I was 10. I needed to be able to win once in a while, and I did.
They were laughing because they were early neckbeards. They probably had 16k of ram on their fancy BBC Micros.
Oh ok
Thought it was some kind of inside joke
Typical snobbery.
The Sinclair was rather ridiculed at the time as "not a real computer".
Nothing ever changes - Instead of being excited by someone having the skills to implement chess in 670k of memory by using freakin' machine language, and appreciating the Sinclair for what it is, they compared to what they had.
I mean wow, if you've never done machine language coding... I'm flabbergasted.
You're off by a factor of 1000. It's not 670k, it's just 672 bytes, no prefix.
Wow. My parents weren't cool enough to get it for me.
This was sadly before my time. One of the people in the original post did have one though.
I built one of these with my dad. I think he still has it around somewhere.
Cool little computer but the software was limited.
Sinclair? Sinclair, where did you go? Why did you leave me here?
I miss those thin serif fonts that were all over tech magazines in the 80s and 90s