When did you get into Android?

[eisawi99]

hello my name is shahin and im 14. i started getting into android when i was 11 and i just wanted to know when you all started working with android linux or pc in general. btw i started doing advanced pc things when i was 8. lol

 

[Codegerm]

Well that is a lot to cover for me. Android for that past few years (five or so). I was a BlackBerry junkie before that. Linux goes back to prior than 2000. PC's in general was the early 80's I have had and used machines like the Commodore Vic 20, C64, Radio Shack TRS-80 model 2,3, and 4 (we called them trash 80's). I also had an Amiga, various dos boxes I built. I also used OS/2. Played with VAX and Sun Sparc systems at the university. That doesn't cover all of them but the most popular ones.

 

[kevincott]

Ha. Codegerm, does it show my age by saying I remember most of those products being new? OS/2 was a big deal to techies: multi-tasking (!).

I'll go a bit further in that my brother and I had a Timex/Sinclair 1000. I remember when the only real gaming options we had were programming in BASIC, the Atari2600, or feeding quarters at the arcade.

Android? I wanted to dump Verizon (cost) and knew smart phones were popular. Got first my Prevail about 2 years ago and have been a fan since. I was definitely late to the Android party.

 

[Codegerm]

You are old kevincott! hehehe I did like OS/2 warp. I had true preemptive multitasking back on the Amiga, and it was hard to give up when moving to the PC. Windows 3.1 couldn't do it and I threw it out the moment I opened a command prompt window and started formatting a floppy, The machine about ground to a halt and all other applications in windows hardly responded while the format process was going.

Did you know you can get a BASIC compiler for Android? It is an app on the play store.

 

[kevincott]

Did not know the Amiga multi-tasked. Nice.

I have to point out your slightly incorrect referencing though ... during Win3.1 PCs weren't really 'PCs' or 'Windows machines', they were IBM Compatibles. There is a great discussion: the rise and fall of IBM computers. **cough** micro-channel **cough** lol Still, even with limitations Win3.1 was more fun than MS-DOS.

I might have to check out BASIC emulators for sheets-and-giggles.

 

[Codegerm]

We were calling them PC's long before micro-channel. Only the retail stores called them IBM compatibles. It started because the IBM had a label on the thing that read IBM personal computer, naturally we all started calling them pc's or dos boxes. WIN 3.1 was still a dos box just with a pretty face (for that matter so was 95 and 98). One thing I did like with dos was when you were done with what you were doing you just flipped the switch and turned it off (windows don't like that very much lol) We did refer to the third party machines as IBM clones sometimes.

The Amiga was brutally efficient at multitasking. Its OS was based on a Unix type environment. It was something to see an Amiga 500 with its 7.14Mhz processor out do a 40Mhz 386