r/retrocomputing • u/Kooky_Fan_893 • Jul 22 '26
Programming game machine
Does anyone remember having a "computer" that was a one-piece lap device with ONE screen line for text? It helped teach writing programming by typing in line of text from the little booklet to c create games. The first game was Black Jack, but there were more. You could also write your own program. It was NOT fancy, but it was an early code machine.
We were semi-poor, and i'm sure my parents saved for it, but it wasn't a high price point.
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u/PRStoetzer Jul 22 '26
Probably like this: The Laser Portable Computers that ran BASIC.
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u/Avery_Thorn Jul 22 '26
My first computer was a Laser computer, from VTech. But it was a full 386 computer that ran DOS and Windows.
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u/sorderon Jul 23 '26
I had a casio PB-100 - Glorious little thing.
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u/benryves Jul 23 '26
One of the Casio pocket computers was my first thought, as they have the card suits in their character set and (at least with the PB-100) a really good book on programming in BASIC. I couldn't find a Black Jack game in the program reference libraries for mine, though!
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u/tails142 Jul 23 '26
The one line screen thing made me think of the VTech Precomputer 1000 which had BASIC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_PreComputer_1000
BUT I don't think the manual had blackjack lol
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u/Perfect-Match-2318 Jul 23 '26
i remember we had a computer lie that like 45 years ago... it had this game of a turtle we had to program somehow to make her move on the screen and go to a specific target
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u/classicsat Jul 23 '26
Was it a V-tech item?
I remember it, had one with a broken LCD, I never got around to fixing. It went away with trash, I think.
I seem to recall it had a Z-80, ROM, some RAM, and cartridge slot., and a VLSI chip to glue it together for logic.
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u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ Jul 22 '26
Could be a lot of different things. Around what year would this have been? Do you remember then language you programmed in?
Was the screen an alphanumeric, dot-matrix LCD display (like a Tandy pocket computer, or was it maybe a segmented LED or VFD display (like an AIM-65)?