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Back in 1993 I bought my A1200 from a little shop on London Road in Sheffield with money I had been told was for a new boiler. The boiler waited. The Amiga did not. Thirty-odd years later it had started doing two things that every A1200 owner learns to dread: the sound had gone thin and quiet on one channel, and when I opened it up there was a faint fishy smell. If you know, you know. This is my log of putting that…
G'day retro legends. Bit out of my lane here, so be gentle. My dad still has his C64C and a 1541-II drive in the garage, and about 60 floppies from the 80s. Most are games, but a handful are things he wrote in BASIC, and one is a recipe database Mum typed in over about two years. That one I really don't want to lose. He's 74 and keeps saying "it's all on the disks", and I keep picturing the disks. What I've read so…
In 1997 I took a job looking after the systems at a mid-sized firm in Hobart. On my first day the office manager walked me round, pointed under a desk in accounts at a beige tower with a handwritten sign taped to it, and said: "That one runs payroll. Nobody touches it." The sign said DO NOT TURN OFF in capitals and was signed by a man who had left the company two years earlier. It was a NetWare 3.12 server. It had…
Back in 1981 my dad came home with a ZX81. I was 13. It had 1K of memory. Not one gigabyte, not one megabyte, one kilobyte: about the size of this paragraph. It plugged into the telly and you saved your programs to a cassette recorder, at roughly 250 bits a second, give or take, with a screech that made the dog leave the room. The keyboard was a flat membrane you pressed like a lift button. In FAST mode the screen…
