Ours was the 2001 version which came with a built in tape deck for reading and storing computer programs, a 6502 processor and a whopping 8K of memory. PET Computer Advert – Taken from Wireless World July 1979īy 1980, the school truly entered the computer age with the purchase of a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor). In fact, the only problem they had was getting us out of the room at the end of lessons. Normally the thought of leaving pupils to their own devices would fill a teacher with dread, but since we were all nerds they were not worried. Due to the lack of space we worked largely unsupervised. The room was only large enough to accommodate the terminal plus around three people at a time. The Olivetti Terminal was kept in a tiny storeroom tucked away in the school’s maths block. I’ll be covering the history of computer art in more detail in a future post. The latter tape got copied quite a few times and distributed to all the nerds in the school. Two I remember well were of a picture of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy with a calendar printed underneath and a ‘naughty’ picture of a nude woman (called Deborah) sitting on a tall stool. This was our first exposure to computer art. The jumbles of seemingly random symbols made no sense until you stood well back to view them. Somehow, possibly via teacher visits to industry computing centres, we got our hands on rolls of punch tape that did not contain programs, but pictures made out of ASCII characters. To cut a long story short, it could literally take months to get a program to run correctly. Of course, on many occasions there would be multiple errors in your program, which you would only discover once previous errors had been ironed out. Instead your program was run until it failed. However, if you had made a mistake, ie incorrectly spelled a command, missed out a comma, declared the wrong variable or, heavens forbid, the person inputting the data made a typo, no attempt would be made to correct it. The whole process took around two weeks from sending off your coding sheet to getting back the results. They would then run your program and post back a printout of the output. Upon arrival, the sheets would be typed by hand into the computer. We ‘programmed’ this computer by writing out BASIC* programs on coding sheets that were then sent via snail mail to a data centre in Crewe. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the computer we would be using was not located at the school, but in another town around 35 miles away! Naturally, being a huge fan of science fiction, I wanted to get my hands on them. Suddenly, machines were drastically reduced in size, cost and reliability, making them increasingly accessible to the average person on the street. However, by the mid ‘70s all of that changed due to the birth of the Microcomputer. In short, they were very much out of the reach of the average person. Take computers for instance.Īs I progressed through my latter years of secondary school in the late ‘70s & early ‘80s, a new subject was added to the curriculum that really appealed to the nerd in me: Computer Studies.īefore the 1970s, computers were huge, complex and expensive affairs that only resided in military, industrial or university establishments. How about you? Maybe these AA characters are too dramatic to take your eyes off.The kids of today don’t know how lucky they are. I personally like the mysterious twins the best. Look like curse dolls! That’s enough! Too scary (*o*)!! (JAPAN Style made a post about this TV commercial a few months ago. If I saw him in the kitchen of a restaurant, I would call the police. But I don’t want to eat what he’s serving. His eyes look like they’re popping out (T_T). Popular mysterious AA character twins become… Now, let’s see other dramatic AA characters, too! Gee-yaaaah!! OMG! So scary Who is this!? Is this the prime minister of the “J” nation? I don’t think we can entrust him with our country… Wrinkles make the prime minister look tired as he probably is…Ĭharacteristic mole. Shading skills express this prime minister’s aged and tired skin very well. Y copies AA and makes it decorative, part by part. What a contemptuous face (^^ Īt first, Mr. There are a lot of versions of AA for this prime minister, and this is kind of the most recent one. The prime minister of a certain country beginning with a letter “J”. “What if I could make these ASCII art characters look very dramatic?” An illustrator, Mr. Here are some recent “keyboard art” trends in Japan below. On the internet, there are many characters newly created using AA (ASCII Art), and these are becoming more and more complicated.
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