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Figure out what this machine is - Difficulty Level *IMPOSSIBLE*

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CoryBee:

So I was talking with the lady friend about my origin story and was going over all of my first encounters with technology that was significant and this machine popped into my head.

This is a very, very vague memory and have no idea its original use.

So one day when I was around 8 (I am 25 now), on "junk" day where you can put some stuff out on the street and cleaners pick it up the next day I spotted on my walk back from the park a very peculiar pile of electronics. Being the curious type I investigated and found a couple things I felt like tinkering with.

One of which was this black box that had several inputs on the back. Including but not limited to a keyboard port that was an old and big "DIN connector" (pre ps\2), a tv connector that was of two wires that went to the screw terminals on them old televisions like so,



and some other ports that I can't remember now.

When I finally got it powered up and working I was greeted with a prompt screen, you know with the little blinking text cursor * _ * that I think was green on a black background (that might be wrong because I was toying with them old Macintoshs a year later or something). I had no idea what I was doing and just started typing random shite and hitting enter. Then like magic a command worked, I thought I was the coolest ever. Stuff started happening on the screen.

Visual stuff, like the thing was programmed with screen savers or something. I remember trying a bunch of different things and typing in "bubbles" started creating bubbles all over the screen and weird noises played with it. Other commands worked as well that all resemble windows xp screen savers, abstract and random. There was no instruction manual either.

I even waited for the end of commercials so that I could type in the "url" for their websites thinking it would connect.....obviously I had no bearings on what the internet was at the time and there was only one or two commercials that even had a website so I would wait very patiently when they showed up. None of them worked, of course.

Anyways, let's see if any of you older techy folks know what the blasted I am talking about. I figure it had to be kind of old at the time because it was in working condition and was thrown out. I also assume that it wasn't used to just play screen savers......

Thanks a million, I am trying to come up with a prize. I have some Arcade related things I wont need for a while so we will see.

 :cheers:

404:

That's just way too vague. With the exception of the 'bubbles' screensaver or whatnot, you pretty much described half of the PCs from the first half of the 80's.

If you are state-side, popular monochrome computers of the era that had tv output were early Tandy and Atari computers.

Vigo:

can you remember anything about how it looked? Was the keyboard just a keyboard, or was the keyboard housing more?  Where did the power go? Did it have built a in disk drive, cartridge port, tape player etc? Did you use disks, or was everything already loaded into the machine.

Your biggest clue, to me, is that it you said it was black. I dont think too many early computers were black. Is it a Sinclair computer? Like a ZX?

Other than that, is it possibly an early windows machine, but you were stuck in the dos prompt? I don't remember screen savers hitting it big until the 90's. I guess it could be in that blurry era, like a apple IIc

zanna5910:

If you google image search for "computers from the 80s" you get a pretty good collection of different pics.  May want to start there and say what it kinda looked like to help us determine what computer you are referring too.

yotsuya:

Vic-20 or Commodore-64?

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