Talk:Spectravideo
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"The kernel was CP/M" - what does this mean? The CP/M 2.20 operating system came with no extra charge with the floppy drive controller, but was not shipped with the computer itself, so most users would never know about it. The fact that this operating system software was available for it doesn't mean it was "the kernel"... 62.78.204.68 11:15, 21 January 2006 (UTC) (ravel)
- Agreed, I have changed the formulation. Please feel free to change it further, if you wish. Alatius 20:37, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Dim Memories$(100)
My very first computer was a Spectravideo 318. It brings back such fond memories to read this article. I tried the emulator a few years ago and it was great to see the logo filling with colour and to play Spectron again (doesn't it have the catchiest tune!).
The 318 was a computer in a keyboard with a large red lollipop of a joystick on the far right. It had the smoothest keyboard, made from soft gray rubber. That rubber is the part that actually failed in the end, after almost 20 years the keyboard just stopped working, the rubber lost all its bounce.
The machine had some ridiculous low amount of RAM (like 8 or 16K, I can't recall) but for those days it kicked the ZX-Spectrum's butt in almost all ways. I loved the sprite system, with automatic collision detection and I used to vpeek and vpoke to get all kinds of graphic effects.
My good friend and I (word Ali!) spent years writing a series of drawing programs, this culminated in our magnum-opus which was a mixture of BASIC and Assembly. It had a cursor, a toolbox, undo levels, zoom, an off-screen scratch-area, save, load, in short it had the works - and all that out of our own heads. We had never seen other programs like it at the time and we had no connections to any modem networks or even magazines in the stores (being in South Africa was like digital Siberia). The drawing app we were writing suffered a terrible fate however, it got to a point that when you typed "LIST" it would list fine, but then show corrupted code towards the end. What had happened? We had run out of RAM! What a blow. We had to stop the thing and I suppose it's still on some old cassette tape somewhere - if it didn't get used to copy some pop music!
Well, it was the best of times. Peek and Poke and Z80A and coding directly in hex. Sprite$ and Dim and Gosub and Goto and all that spaghetti code with :'s to make lines longer. The white text on the blue background. LIST and RUN and STOP and CLOAD.
Ah, I wish I could rewind the clock.
Thanks Wikipedia.
