Nah, they ended up playing Pacman and an adventure game that came with the computer. 
You’re right about EPROMS, I bought them pre-programmed. They were locked so I couldn’t get into them if I wanted to. :idea: I’ve just remembered where I bought them from - AMSTRAD! Alan Sugar’s company made all the BBC computer stuff under license in those days.
Pixie,
It was a typo!
Should have read late 1960’s!
Apologies!
Heh! ok, but still…that’s pretty far back to be honest…
Ooh! So…is that the same as our current ROM then?
My first sight of a computer was at Canterbury Uni in the early 1960s when I was attending tech as a Youth in Training with the then GPO Telephones.
It had a tiny memory in kilobytes but massive in physical size which was basically a box full of wires and ferrite cores. Programming was carried out using punched tape and it had been taught to run a model railway. Actually all it did was work out how to get certain trucks in sidings into a train in the right order and move surplus trucks out of the way. It’s output was a teleprinter where it printed on tape like a telegram.
One of the Uni students demonstrated it capability to build a train then he took a truck off the track, the teleprinter immediately sprung into life and printed out, “Someone’s pinched a truck”, they were very proud of that. It took up a couple of air conditioned rooms and had less computing power than my Commodore 64 a couple of decades later.
Later in the 60s I worked at the PO Tower and our fault records and equipment reports were on cards where you had to push out a hole in the card so it could be read by a computer.
The GPO itself was decades behind the rest of the electronics industry in its uptake of technology for its equipment. Instead of looking at what was available it insisted on writing its own specs for new equipment which were “safe” and really old fashioned.
Hubby worked in computers so we had one early on in the late 80s early 90s I think…I used to play backgammon on it then I discovered ICQ… remember that? I’m not into chat sites though they are full of weird people pretending to be this or that…that was my experience anyway.
Oh yes ICQ, I used that too and MySpace, completely forgotten
I had my first computer in the late 90s, my husband had one in the early 90s.
Haha, no, I didn’t write code, I just typed it - you could buy books in those days with the code for lots of different programs. All you had to do was type it in. Well, that makes it sound easy. It wasn’t. It was just one long continual screed of keyboard characters, usually several pages long for each program. You’d get to the end, try to run it, and it wouldn’t. Because somewhere in this jumble of characters, you’d maybe typed a > instead of a /. So then you’d have to go through the whole darn thing to find the error 
And I can tell you, unlike that emoji, I absolutely did not have a smile on my face while doing it
That’s a lovely story about the train, Bruce! And again, I had no idea computers were around that early. Also…is anything even in kilobytes now? Its weird how you had massive machines to deal with kilobytes, but nowadays machines are tiny yet deal in gigabytes and Terabytes!
I’m not familiar with ICQ, Summer, but I did enjoy the first games that came out…and even now I prefer PC games, rather than stand alone consoles. Chat sites I don’t do either. They ARE full of weird people and the one time I tried was very weird, so nope.
Did you find it easier /familiar to use because your husband had one, RJG? Did he help you set it up?
Bruces post made me think of the times I was a courier in the 2000’s One of my most frequent jobs was to deliver electronic parts to BT engineers who were dealing with emergencies. I could be called out day or night.
One such job was in Bury, an engineer was working on a telephone exchange there and needed parts urgently. It was eleven at night and I rushed to Bury with the parts. The telephone exchange was housed in a beautiful four story building, the architecture was unique. I was met at the door by the engineer who asked if I was interested in this stuff…Does Long John Silver walk with a limp…
We climbed the stairs past three empty floors until we arrived at the top floor where in the far corner were what looked like lockers. He opened one of the locker doors and I was faced with a myriad of flashing green lights. He removed a circuit board and replaced it with the one I had just delivered. Everything worked and he closed the door…
He told me that this whole building used to be full of Electro Mechanical switch gear, but now it had been condensed into just three or four lockers tucked away in the corner of the top floor…Amazing!
It was about 16 years ago, I didn’t have any interest in computers couldn’t even switch one on, my son in law persuaded us to get one,he got us the first one second hand think it was xp…I know now the reason was that I’d get hooked on it leaving my husband free to watch all the football he wanted on telly ,still true to this day…
I love that story, Foxy! And yes, everything has just shrunk and shrunk, yet bizarrely got bigger and bigger in capacity. I still struggle to get my head round it - especially when I looked at pics of the very first computers, and like you said - they took up an entire floorspace! I wonder what the building you mentioned is now…is it still standing, even?
Ahh Paula…sneaky eh? Thing is now though, I suppose your husband could watch it on a myriad of devices, and leave the TV for you! Heh
Yes Pixie, that’s very true…If he knew how to…
No they were not. Even so, the advent of the personal computer made a hige difference. Before then it was much worse.
[quote=“PixieKnuckles, post:1, topic:67903”]IB
and what prompted you to be online in the first place?
[/quote]
The IBM “Retain” System, early 1970s, if you were called out to a failing computer you hooked into Retain & found out if it had been seen anywhere else on the planet. Every new incident was kept & the fixes made available.
Not long after that inter office communications using MSG s, later to become emails. were in common use.
I think it was not long after that some bright spark “invented” the" internet".
No need to correct me on the dates, I might be a year or two out!
I’m too old to worry!
It was in 1985.
