Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

8-bit computers are great

Over the past few days I've found myself reading and watching a lot of material that documents the early days of the microcomputer revolution.

Ah... nostalgia!

The most striking element of this retrospective on my part is that I'm sure I had a lot more fun with computers back in the 1970s and 1980s. Compared to today's miracles of modern semiconductor technology, those old machines had character and a mistique that has long since evaporated in the race for performance.

Hands up everyone who had a computer in 1978...

What?

Barely a hand to be seen?

Of course there's a lack of hands, that's because the microcomputer was an expensive rarity back then -- a device reserved for the hard-core enthusiast or someone willing to plonk down a used car's worth of cash for a pre-built.

Today, computers are so cheap.

I recall paying NZ$500 or so for an Ohio Superboard back in the late 1970s. This was a 6502-based single-board microcomputer which chugged along at (from memory) with a clock speed of just 1MHz.

Today I can pick up a Raspberry Pi Zero SBC for just over $30. If you adjust that $500 I spent back in 1979 for the effects of inflation and compare the specs of the two boards you'll really see the stark contrast that a few decades has made.

However, even though the Pi Zero and to an even greater extent, the machine I'm typing this column on have become so much more powerful and easy to use, they're not as much fun.

Take gaming for example...

Like most hard-core computer hobbyists "back in the day" I'd spend hours typing in the listings printed in the many microcomputer magazines that were on the shelves of the local bookshop. This was no trivial task, since many of the best games consisted of little more than page after page of "DATA" statements with masses of numbers that had to be typed in with 100 percent accuracy so that they could be "POKE"d into memory by the BASIC program that surrounded them.

Nothing was more rewarding than to spend days typing in all those numbers, saving to flaky cassette tape at the end of each session, then typing "RUN" and being greeted by a highly animated screen with spacecraft, explosions and little bullets that erupted whenever you hit the space bar.

Unfortunately, nothing was more likely than finding that the whole thing just locked up when you typed RUN because you'd got one or more of the DATA statements wrong. Thus began more countless hours of comparing what you'd actually typed to what you should have typed.

Perhaps it was the incredible challenge that such simple tasks represented that made the whole process so rewarding.

These days I guess I could create a Steam account and buy a copy of CyberPunk or some other uber-realistic high resolution game with mind-blowing graphics and animation... but I just can't be bothered.

You see, the real challenge and joy back then wasn't actually playing the game... it was getting to the point where you could play the game. Simply logging in and presenting your credit card details just doesn't create that level of buzz, at least not for me.

That's also probably why I haven't really spent much time playing with the retro games I've got loaded on an SD card for my Raspberry Pi 5. I spent quite a bit of time setting up one of the emulator suites of software and sorting out all the issues so I could use an XBox game-controller with this setup but then I realised that it wasn't actually the playing of the games I enjoyed.

The journey is far more fun (to me) than the destination.

I kind of miss the long, long hours (often all nighters) I used to spend designing, hand-coding (into the actual bytes of the executable code), entering and debugging the code I ran on those old 8-bit systems.

Another bonus was that when you finally got some pretty awesome program running, people were impressed.

These days, nobody is impressed by the fact that you've just bought the latest PC game and installed it on your machine are they?

I fondly recall the steep learning curves and the rewards that flowed from mastering machines such as the Superboard, the TRS80, the Compucolor, the Atari 400, a raft of CP/M computers and early MSDOS/PCDOS systems. Unfortunately, it's very unlikely we'll see that sort of challenge/reward situation appearing again within the computer world.

Even code-cutting may soon be a lost-art, as vibe-coding takes over, allowing even those with zero programming knowledge to enlist the power of AI to produce applications that would previously have required a team of skilled programmers to create.

If I was looking for a(nother) hobby right now I think I'd be probably be very much attracted to collecting some of those old 8-bit microcomputers from the 70s and 80s, restoring them as near as possible to new condition and then writing some cool programs -- like we used to do. Retro computing (as opposed to retro-gaming) may be poised to make a come-back, at least in my house.

If you also have an interest in retro-computing, this YouTube channel may interest you. It's fantastic to see a young person whose also discovered the joy of the world of old 8-bit microcomputers... let's hope more discover the joys that are to be had from this.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font