4 ms·
Jet Set Willy was one of the largest video games of its day and took roughly four and a half minutes to load from tape on the ZX Spectrum. I was telling our tee
by Gordonjcp 4y ago
Jet Set Willy was one of the largest video games of its day and took roughly four and a half minutes to load from tape on the ZX Spectrum. I was telling our teenager about this the other day while she was waiting for GTA5 to load on the PS4. And waiting, and waiting... for about five and a half minutes.
I used to use WordStar on a CP/M machine well into the 1990s because at most its 5.25" disks kept you waiting for two or three seconds.
- stevekemp 4y agoI've got a single-board Z80-based system where I still run wordstar and write (trivial) code in Turbo Pascal. I had a lot of fun working my way through the infocom archive, especially playing the Hitchhikers guide, and writing my own simple four-room adventure game. CP/M is basically dead, but there are enough retro-fans such as myself that it'll probably still live on for another fifty years.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThe difference is your ZX was running flat out as fast as the hardware would allow. Your PS4 is a supercomputer hobbled by bad programming practices.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoWell also, the Spectrum was pulling roughly 44kB of data at 1800bps and the PS4 is pulling in something mental like 24GB ;-)
- tengwar2 4y agoIn the mid 90's I remember one guy at the European Commission telling me that he still used Word 2.0 for similar reasons.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoWordPerfect is still used by a lot of solicitor's offices. They have stuff on floppy going back to the 80s, when they were early adopters, and since That Big Firm There used WP, *you* used WP, so you could interoperate, and that meant that Other Big Firm used WP to interoperate with you, and so on. Decades later you still need to pull stuff off those old floppies occasionally.