1980s Computer Porn

Posted By Mark on Nov 2, 2014

If you were a boy or girl at around the same time I was and if you owned a computer then there’s a good chance you’d have followed the same ritual I did every month: down to the newsagent’s for a furtive flick through the magazines on the shelves before picking up what caught my eye, then back home to the bedroom where the door would be shut and the computer switched on, magazine spread out on the desk by the keyboard, all ready for some passionate pounding, sometimes using two fingers. Good grief! Look at this filth for the BBC! With every byte counting there’s no room for spaces in the listing leading to dirty, dirty code. Makes me feel grimy just looking at it. “VDU28,0,24,39,24,134,136:” I have no idea what you’re saying but keep talking! “EVERY 7,1 GOSUB 1530” This Amstrad code is up for some repetitive action. It’s going to be doing it over and over again until it’s stopped! Naughty! That there is the holy grail of ZX Spectrum program listings: Z80 baby! Short and sweet, pulsing to the music you’re playing, poking away in two holes in the memory space. Oh yes! And look that those 201s! 201 is C9 in hexadecimal, and that means RET. Yeah, this code isn’t just going there it’s coming back for more. Insatiable! These days our listings embrace all the colours of the rainbow but back in the 80s the best you’d find was a little bit of black on white action thanks to some inverse video. This was pretty damn risqué back then. This Spectrum code will take what you give it and then flip it over, lay it on its side, look down on it from above, and spit it right back at you. That’s what we call European code and things were just a little bit nastier back in the 80s. You give it your depth and it’ll multiply what you’ve got by the cosine of PI over 6. When was the last time you had that done? Yeah, I thought as much. This C16/Plus 4 code is a bit of a hard mistress to please. You just want to get right down and do things but there are conditions you’ve got to meet first. Look at it, line by exquisitely conditional line; have you ever seen so many IFs in your life? You get a nice long listing split into many parts then you want some detailed instructions; you want some code that knows what it wants you to do and isn’t afraid to tell you exactly how to do it. You’re looking at...

HP 9845 Games

Posted By Mark on Nov 2, 2014

An article looking at some of the computer games that were available for the HP 9845 from the 1970s into the 1980s. 9845 Games It would have been a real surprise if the at the time outstanding capabilities of the 9845 desktop series would not have inspired a complete series of computer games dedicated to those systems. Even Hewlett-Packard itself contributed a tape, the so-called Computer Games Library, for the 9845A and 9845B series with a selection of 14 popular games like Gomoku, Hangman, Life, Star Trek or Nim. Most games were character based, but some use graphics for action-type animations. Special binary programs written in assembler provided the required speed. Even a couple of games were developed for the 9845C color system, like HPs Gravity game which is part of the 9845C...

The Hairstyles Of Adolf Hitler

Posted By Mark on Oct 25, 2014

Adolf Hitler – you’ve probably heard of him – had a style all his own. The Hitler moustache, of course, was fashioned after the comic actor Charlie Chaplin’s, whose movies were Hitler’s favourites; Chaplin, it has to be said, was not so fond of the films featuring the German leader. But when it came to hair only Hitler could get away with the slicked side parting. It was smart. It looked sharp, clean, leaderly. However, Hitler wasn’t always quite so dapper in the hair department. Despite attempts to remove from history all evidence of his previous dalliances with hair fashions in much the same way he tried to eradicate his occult connections during the Night of the Long Knives some previously unseen pictures have emerged from the darkness in recent years. Hitler was a massive fan of African and Caribbean music and a typical rally during his early political career would always start with something a little reggae, calypso, or Ghanaian polyrhythmical. Embracing those cultures led to the future despot sporting dreadlocks for a period. It wasn’t a massive leap of hairstyle logic to shift from dreadlocks – considered (rightly) by some of Hitler’s supporters as “looking like you haven’t washed in ages” – to the afro so that’s what the German leader did next. This move created such a backlash in Europe’s black communities who felt the charismatic chancellor was insulting them that Hitler retaliated by embarking on a white supremacy political and ideological platform. To appeal to the Nazi youth Hitler briefly employed a young stylist who transformed his look with lighter colours and soft curls. The style was mocked mercilessly and the stylist was forced to flee for her life. She survived and continued her styling career for decades to come. Her clients included Weird Al Yankovic and Kenny G. Towards the latter years of the nineteen thirties Hitler finally started to close in on what would become his trademark look. This final photo shows the penultimate transformation in the many hairstyles of historical madman Adolf...

The Invention Of Punk

Posted By Mark on Oct 21, 2014

UK National Grid Power Status

Posted By Mark on Oct 19, 2014

If you ever want to see how much power is being generated by coal, nuclear, gas, and wind in the United Kingdom, or see the gigawatt demand throughout the day, and you want that information presented on retro dials and in line graphs – and, let’s face it, who doesn’t? – then the place to go is U.K. National Grid Status. The data it uses comes from a series of web services here provided by...