## 34 Vintage

Last week, I have used an unknown emulator for me, an Ohio Scientific Challenge 1P emulator. It's an old computer build in 1976. It was designed around a 1-MHz MOS 6502A microprocessor. You certainly know that CPU because it was also inside the Apple I, in the same version but also inside the Commodore PET, and many other computers from the 70s. Apple used the same CPU in different versions for the Apple II. But the Ohio / OSI came months before and with less memory. Many of the games and programs were common to all those computers because written in BASIC language. So I had to test many of those games to complete the UVList database.

Many came from Creative Computing Magazine (since 1974) or from Aardvark Technologies. It was a different time for computer users : No Hard Drive, sometimes a Floppy Disk Drive but you had to type Basic programs to make it work. Or the programs had to be purchased by mail order while waiting to receive the 5¼-inch disks by mail. Computers were still for Geeks and Hackers, with no big stores to sell them. I knew that because I'm a child of the 70s/80s...But I didn't remember how simple were those programs and games. I have used a BASIC language on my Amstrad CPC, a computer with so much power than this OSI 1P. 

I tested about 50 games during the week and most of them were as simple as a Hangman game or "Guess the number" game. They were in Text mode, sometimes using graphical functions to show play cards and that's all. You could compare all that to the prehistoric times of Computers. The MS Dos Times could be the Middle Age, ha ha ! Sometimes, it was easy to understand the program for me because I remember how to write something in BASIC. But for people from the 2000s or 2010s, it could be ridiculous to run that. You have to write the code (or mount the disk) and then run...And sometimes it crashes because all the BASIC languages were not exactly the same. So it was like using a DeLorean in Back to the future but on my Desktop. 

It's fascinating to see how many emulators you can find for all the vintage computers. It's very interesting to see how much memory you had and what you could do with that. Without that computer and so many of them, we wouldn't be on that website or on a PC and even a Smartphone today. Bill Gates made a lot of money with his BASIC for those computers and built the foundation of his fortune. It was also the end of the free "Forks" and the beginning of Software companies. Fortunately, GNU/Linux and other free software projects endure.

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