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For me, it has to be the game [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch ]Zarch[/url] on the Acorn Archimedes. It wasn't just the 3D rendering, but the sense of momentum that made it really great, that and trying not to get caught playing it by the librarian!
10 Gary is skill
20 goto 10
Run
(Or something like that)
Display actual words on a screen as you typed them.
Up to that point it was an upside down LED calculater or nothing.
meh..games.
When it can reliably talk to me and respond to me talking, that or nothing.
[i]When it can reliably talk to me and respond to me talking, that or nothing. [/i]
You probably still think that stw is real people talking to you, don't you...
Beat my granddad at chess! He needed the memory expansion pack on his zx81 to play it though
Programming that logo robot thing at primary school from a BBC Acorn.
The awesum power of the Secondary School Archimedes. Rendered demos and the such like.
Lotus 123.
@sum
I wuz amazballzed 😀
The one where you'd type a command and it would repeat the text cascading down the screen.
Sick!
I don't know as it was absolutely the first thing, but I remember being truly amazed the first time I saw a 16-bit machine. A mate's dad was an early adopter of the Atari ST; he had it running Starglider and my jaw hit the floor.
(Okay, not the original music, but still - real music not plinky stuff from a computer. Wow.)
10 Gary is skill
20 goto 10
Run
Syntax Error.
Yup it was the basic words on a screen and trying to programme a ZX81.
Free pron.
Or there was a speech synthesiser for the Commodore 64 - a wee cartridge, you plugged it in and sent it BASIC commands, and it would speak. Actual words, you could sometimes understand.
First day (in fact it was evening, I worked shifts then) of my first job working in IT.
Boss, "I've sent you an email with all the details you'll need".
Me, "Email, how does that work"?
Email and the internet...I like it.
Few weeks later I was working the night shift, some fella phones up and asks me to reboot his machine on the floor below. Afterwards I watched him "PC Duo" into his machine from Singapore and take control of the machine....blown away...
I should add a few weeks before I was working on building sites as a Sparks....Didn't have much use for Puters in those days.
A good few years later I even have a certificate to say I'm an "expert", one of the best decisions I ever made jumping into the IT game....and I can still wire a plug if I have to.
Donkey Kong on the commodore 16 or spy hunter on the spectrum.
First non game thing was probably playing with dulexe paint on the amiga years ago. I did all the 10 20 print stuff and all that but was always underwhelmed by the outcome!
Dextralog predictive production software running on a PDP11 in 1990 or so.
Telling production staff & managers that a batch would fininsh at such-and-such a time, and they need to have the next tools ready. And statistical quanlity management.
@sum
I worked with a trainee accountant who used a calculator to sum up numbers when using Excel. Didn't trust it.
At work, when I could see my code on a screen, rather than printed on lineflow - so early 80's.
When Cougar remoted onto my laptop after I got a virus, seen it done at work but not at home, amazing and terrifying at the same time.
First game was Doom, like an arcade in your own house
alt.binaries.pictures.amazonwomen
3D Maze.
[URL= http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h260/Magicman657/game%20screenshots/maze_screenshot.pn g" target="_blank">
http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h260/Magicman657/game%20screenshots/maze_screenshot.pn g"/> [/IMG][/URL]
mudshark - Member
I worked with a trainee accountant who used a calculator to sum up numbers when using Excel. Didn't trust it.
He was right. If I remember it correctly there was a way to get a wrong result. This was either in the early 90s or late 80s.
Can't remember exactly what it was, but doing a checksum showed it up I believe (I was using a different programme so can't be sure).
When Cougar remoted onto my laptop after I got a virus, seen it done at work but not at home, amazing and terrifying at the same time.
That reminds me, I still have your credit card details somewhere.
😯
😆 I think.........
No he has, well we have..
He kindly shared them on here a little while ago..
Thanks for the wheels 😀
Nothing really, just tools aren't they, although MATLAB was pretty impressive.
Although while everyone now gets excited about Macs I still think Silicon Graphics workstations were the coolest computers produced.
Spell check
My father's work meant that we were at the front of the computer revolution. Consequently, I remember these:
[img] 
[/img]
and, not much later, this:
[img] (Microsoft)-1.jpg)
[/img]
That he could bring home a [i]personal[/i] computer was simply amazing. I remember turning in a story writing assignment at primary school which I had typed on a computer and printed out.
[i]That[/i] impressed me.
Saxonrider - what machine is that in the first picture?
The sound and music on a Commodore 64.
Thanks for the wheels
Your welcome 😥
When the W.O.P.R threatended 'Global Thermo-Nuclear War' on the whole of the United States.
[img] 
[/img]
That bit in the Wargames film when he makes the computer talk back to him.
[url= http://www.rs-online.com/designspark/electronics/eng/blog/my-raspberry-pi-thinks-it-s-a-mainframe ]This is what we expected out of Moore's law[/url].
It impresses me. 🙂
He was right. If I remember it correctly there was a way to get a wrong result. This was either in the early 90s or late 80s
Was a young lady and 2001. There was that Pentium CPU that got its sums wrong in the 90s I suppose....
gobuchul - Member
Saxonrider - what machine is that in the first picture?
It is a Mohawk Data Sciences keyboard from the late-1960s/early-1970s.
[url= https://deskthority.net/photos-f62/mohawk-data-sciences-keyboard-t12471.html ]This guy[/url] has done his detective work on it, but I remember not only it, but all the old equipment rapidly evolving in my dad's office...
What you see in that picture soon became this:
[img] 
[/img]
Oooh - this comes down to two things…
1. First seeing the Lucasarts game “Rescue on Fractaus” on my 8 bit Atari 800XL. Was absolutely blown away by the “non square”/“real” rendering of the landscape at the time. Can’t think of anything else quite like it.
2. Recently discovering one of the lead developers of Resuce on Fractalus follows me on Twitter…
🙂
Rachel
Many, but at work, running Autoroute in DOS.
TBH with desktop stuff I'm never that impressed, even with very clever things it's just "well, it's a big computer, just a matter of power and programming". But smartphones do impress me- things like google sky and goggles especially, paper camera- basically toys but really [i]ingenious[/i].
It's only a matter of time til I have a blood glucose meter inside me, talking to an app on my phone, maybe telling an insulin pump what to do. That's a ****ing tricorder, basically. Til someone hacks the bluetooth connection anyway.
Well as I first learned programming on <ahem> punched card with tape outputs then keyboards with monitors attached impressed me no end. Being able to code, compile, run and get output without getting cards, loading hopper bin, loading language from mag tape, going and getting paper tape output, feeding tape through tape reader, counting the cards to find the one that probably had the typo on it.....
EDIT - oh and then being proper computers that could sit on your desk.
Me, now
[img] 
[/img]
Playing F117 Stealth fighter into the early hours or my first real experience of a 3D environment tool, I think it was called Superscape VRT, where you could set variables such as gravity and mass to objects (I was a CAD guy in the late 80's/early 90's).
Spreadsheets allowing me to carry out iterative calculations really quickly.
When it's happening, not a lot. Pretty much worked in IT and Laboratories with lots of IT for the past 25 years. Grateful for the bits that have made life easier but it's only with hindsight I've become impressed.
Cloud Services is an annoying buzzword but as an IT bloke it made my life far simpler not having to look after onsite server, security and backups for small companies where the boss won't pay for server, security and backup. Putting it all offsite and only having to worry about a Firewall and a few PCs was liberating - so much so I got another job as I was bored 🙂
Minecraft recently stuck in my mind in at how deep and useful such a simple concept can be for entertainment and education.
Online games for turning awkward, uncommunicative kids into people that can demonstrate teamwork and work out strengths and weaknesses for situational problem solving.
That last one is a bit hit or miss as some of the awkward, uncommunicative kids in online gaming just turn into awkward, sweary kids.
I'm still waiting to be impressed, computers are still way too slow!
I vaguely remember being impressed when hard drives got into the hundreds of megabytes. those were the days when you only got 4mb on the school server to save ALL your work.
But TBH, computers just got more powerful/better/smaller, don't think there's really been a giant leap in my memory.
I remember the X-Box being the point at which graphics caught up with TV resolution, so that at a glance you couldn't tell the difference between Forza replays and the BTCC on TV. That was impressive.
3D games.. starting with Vortex Raider and continuing through the telescope on Franklin's balcony in GTAV
Photographs on screens that looked like photographs
Communicating with people (firstly using a 1200/75 modem connecting to a bbs)
1K Chess on the ZX81!
Possibly one of the greatest bits of coding of all time.
Bencooper beat me to it with Xenon II and the quite respectable stab at rendering a Bomb the Bass track on a 512Kb Amiga.
I suppose the first time I went "Oh wow!" in front of a computer was watching someone play Elite on a primary school BBC model B and realising what "Procedurally generated" meant given that you couldn't store the names of all 256 star systems in one galaxy in 32kb of memory.
Communicating with people (firstly using a 1200/75 modem connecting to a bbs)
This.
Last night a pan-European group of gamers and I played Secret Hitler on the tabletop simulator. Shouting "Sieg Heil!" at the other players when I was revealed as Hitler and having a group of Germans crack up with laughter is one of the most impressive things I have witnessed on the internet so far. Good times.
The sound a modem makes when connectiong used to give me such a thrill the computer came alive with a modem.
+dungeon master on the Amiga
Still waiting.
It infuriates me that I have to plug my laptop in every few hours. Why have they not come of a way of sending electricity by magic?!
It infuriates me that I have to plug my laptop in every few hours
Plenty of laptops around now that can get you 10 hours from a charge.
making my first bat file in dos
Then playing with format C:
😉
Sat on the sofa at my in-laws house in Slovenia .
Realised I wanted to record something on my Sky box back home in the UK .
Grab tablet , open up Sky+ app , search for programme , choose series record .
Job jobbed , recorded content viewed on return .
Seamless experience and absolutely no technical knowledge required .
The day i replaced my Tape Loader with a floppy drive! MASSIVE (well, 1.4meg) storage, INSTANTLY (well, within about 5 sec) accessed on demand.
Suddenly, being sat for 20mins listening to those annoyong modem tones loading (or more often, failing to load) a game was a thing of the past! Major quantum leap in tech imo 😆
It's like having the 'Future' at your finger tips
ZX Spectrum 48K "Jetset willy"
Impossible to say what the first thing I was impressed by computers was, could have been anything at all, so am going to go with:
"sfynfeshyzed spfeecfh"
+dungeon master on the Amiga
Yeah, it wasn't a bad port from the ST. </playground wars>
peteimpreza - Member
Sat on the sofa at my in-laws house in Slovenia .Realised I wanted to record something on my Sky box back home in the UK .
Grab tablet , open up Sky+ app , search for programme , choose series record .
Job jobbed , recorded content viewed on return .
Seamless experience and absolutely no technical knowledge required .
It's even more seamless if you don't bother with the sky subscription!
Now you mention it, Napster was pretty much my entry into the on-line world, downloading that first song on a 56k modem was a pretty awe inspiring moment.
Ahhhh, that's what the Interweb is for, free stuff! Looks like I don't need to go to that dodgy stall in the Barras anymore! 😆
clodhopper - Member
3D Maze.
3D Monster Maze !
I was really impressed with ascii art.
Barry, a bloke who lived in our road in 1967, had life size drawings of naked women
on his garage wall.
Loading music on the c64.