h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Aha - excellent portrait of the Amstrad PC1512 with twin 5¼" disk drives

"Dixons at Dock Green" -

I still have my Amstrad PC1512 - no Microsoft products, just DOS-based or you could use a Windows equivalent called Gem, and the word processing programme was called Leading Edge.

Of course you know ELIZA.

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My Amiga burned out long ago, but its Windows equivalent was called Workbench, and the word processor was WordPerfect. No ELIZA equivalent, though.

I often wish that a 5 1/4" disc drive you could plug into a USB port was available so I could see if any of my old discs still work... I see WordPerfect is still going, though.

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Yes, backwards compatibility is tricky... I did some BASIC programming on the Amiga, and saved them (animated lines and lollipops) on to floppy disk, but obviously couldn't transfer them to the PC we got when the Amiga burned out...

I think I've saved a lot of my old files - I was able to copy Leading Edge onto my 20-year-old PC and though as a DOS-based programme it doesn't really work well with Windows 95, it was able to open a file and save it as .txt before crashing...

My BASIC programming with my ZX Spectrum is long gone. There was a game maker programme you could use to design your own basic games and save them onto cassette - but one day it failed to record properly and I lost all I had done.

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