Various [1980 - 1990] A Time To Remember [12xCD]
CD-ROMs began being used in home video game consoles starting with the PC Engine CD-ROM (TurboGrafx-CD) in 1988, while CD-ROM drives had also become available for home computers by the end of the 1980s. In 1990, Data East demonstrated an arcade system board that supported CD-ROMs, similar to 1980s laserdisc video games but with digital data, allowing more flexibility than older laserdisc games.[10] By early 1990, about 300,000 CD-ROM drives were sold in Japan, while 125,000 CD-ROM discs were being produced monthly in the United States.[11] Some computers which were marketed in the 1990s were called "multimedia" computers because they incorporated a CD-ROM drive, which allowed for the delivery of several hundred megabytes of video, picture, and audio data.
Various [1980 - 1990] A Time To Remember [12xCD]
Software distributors, and in particular distributors of computer games, often make use of various copy protection schemes to prevent software running from any media besides the original CD-ROMs. This differs somewhat from audio CD protection in that it is usually implemented in both the media and the software itself. The CD-ROM itself may contain "weak" sectors to make copying the disc more difficult, and additional data that may be difficult or impossible to copy to a CD-R or disc image, but which the software checks for each time it is run to ensure an original disc and not an unauthorized copy is present in the computer's CD-ROM drive.[citation needed]
After my dad returned to the states, I remember doing some of my firstBASIC programming on the Compucolor II when we lived in Owings,Maryland. There was a built in ROM BASIC which apparently was apirated from Microsoft. My father at my insistence wrote an ASCII artPac-Man like game for me. It replicated the Ms. Pac-Man maze and usedan extended ASCII character that perhaps was a chess knight asPac-Man. I also remember my dad doing a lot of hardware work to keepthe Compucolor II going during this time. Unfortunately I alsoremember the last day of the Compucolor when, while doing some repairwork, my father plugged something in backwards that he shouldn't haveand the magic smoke was gone forever.
Sometime after the death of the Compucolor, I remember making the trekfrom Owings, Maryland, up to the Washington, DC, area to purchase aTimex Sinclair 1000, a Z80 powered machine with an infamous chickletkeyboard and 2k of memory. We had it hooked up to an cheap black andwhite TV and and old Sony answering machine for cassette storage. Thiswas quite a step down from a color machine with a disk drive and muchmore memory. However, at the same time, it was an order of magnitudecheaper than the Compucolor had been, cost on the order of $100+ not$1000+, which is probably why I got to keep it in my room.
Being mainstream, there were actually publications available ofprograms for the Sinclair machines. I remember really learning toprogram by debugging incorrectly entered programs. However, most ofthe time I tried to adapt more generic programs to work on the TS1000,which was often a challenge because of the 2k memory limitation.
As time went on, it got harder and harder to buy new games. I think atone point even Infocom switched to double sided disks. This wasprobably for the better, I went back to spending more time onprogramming. By middle school we had moved to DeWitt, NY, and myfather was teaching an introductory pascal at Syracuse University andI did many of the assignments using Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0. I canstill remember some of the WordStar editor commands. I recall readingNiklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs".
In October 2002, when I was applying to graduate school at Stanford, Idecided to buy my own laptop so I would have it once I left Ariba. Itwas my first machine with integrated 802.11b, causing me to upgrade myhome network. This was my first gaming laptop, bought specifically forits 2.2GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 M and its ATI Mobility Radeon 9000to be good enough to replace my old Dell Dimension for PC gaming,while also supporting development work. I remember playing a fairamount of Battlefield 1942 with both Ariba and Stanford friends onthis machine. It was maxed out with 1GB of RAM and a 2.4GHz processorfor Java server development, quite a lot for laptop at the time. It's1600x1200 resolution screen was great for both gaming and Emacsuse. 041b061a72