Yes its cold out there xmas morning. Unwrapping a great big box and hold on what's this.
Quick read of the manual and its a ZX80. By dinner time I have stopped everyone watching the Queens xmas day speech because I have plugged my new computer into the only TV in the house.
Ok what to do now. Quick read of the manual, and a few hours of typing in code using “BASIC”. I have managed to get the program to run “Hello Chris” appears on the screen. I had every one of my relatives sit there and watch these words scroll around the screen. I was so amazed by it all, and so were they I think, because they did not understand what I was excited about.
From that moment on I knew my life had changed, I could have been the first man on the moon or Albert einstein it did not matter I had found a love in my life , COMPUTERS !!!!!
It was and still is an amazing journey. Managing to write whole games in 16K of space seems impossible but it was done and when you think of what they do today its monumental. Anyway soon the 16k was expanded by a wopping 32K. If you follow the story of the memory you will find that it went up in multiples of bit size following the hexidecimal format. Meaning they could make chips bigger but that it was not very useable. More often than not it was only good for storage. So 16 32 64 128. etc. But this changed when Mr Sinclair managed to perfect a wafer Chip, meaning chips that overlay each other. That day was a milestone for Computers world wide.
Back to my list of computers I owned.
Amstrad 64 …. It was only one that came with a built in cassette recorder. You could tell when a program was loading rightly by the sound of the data transfer. A high pitched scream is best way to explain it.
Amstrad 128 ( Another innovation. This one came with a built in Floppy disk.) Yes we were sooo lucky then. This computer had 128k of memory but only 64k was useable. The extra 64k was just another chip really . But if you wrote games you could store Sprite data in there or screen swapping, great for scrolling games.
Commodore 64 ( perhaps this machine is responsible for most people learning programming)
Oric Atmos ( only the french would add a keyboard click that sounded perfect)
Amiga 500
Atari 520 ST ( it may have had 520K of memory but only 64k was useable as ram, the rest was only good for storage. A bit like a stack really.
My first PC .. Home made
The end of the 80's great things were happening and people like myself, had got bored with spending nights hacking games etc and moved on to more business orientated software. Databases, spreadsheets etc. Myself I wrote accountancy stuff and also mini cad systems. But along came a fellow who I think we owe lots to his name “ALAN SUGAR” he took on IBM who dominated the world then with its PC, and brought to us a low end PC for the home user, and small businesses . With in a year games were popping up and the PC was here to stay, accessable to everyone. Many a PC addict made a living building Home made PC's. It was that easy.
Next programming basic, Machine code ( assembly ) perl, fortran cobal, I done them all and it was boring in the end nothing new. And then came what I was after a structured language that kind of made immediate sense. Pascal. There was no internet then just what you call univercity Databases that you contacted by phone modem . So if you contacted a database in Norway or Japan , you actually paid for a phone call to Norway or Japan. Also if you wanted to download some code it could take around 30 mins, so as you see it was very expensive hobby.
The internet popped up. And here now modems are now the focus of attention as 16k modems are not good enough, So over the years they get faster as we are using dial up so much and phonebills are massive, but still us diehards are there every night exchanging routines for mouse interupts, or screen mapping. Lol good days.
Now even Dhal Llama has a cloud server. So whats next I wonder.
Quick read of the manual and its a ZX80. By dinner time I have stopped everyone watching the Queens xmas day speech because I have plugged my new computer into the only TV in the house.
Ok what to do now. Quick read of the manual, and a few hours of typing in code using “BASIC”. I have managed to get the program to run “Hello Chris” appears on the screen. I had every one of my relatives sit there and watch these words scroll around the screen. I was so amazed by it all, and so were they I think, because they did not understand what I was excited about.
From that moment on I knew my life had changed, I could have been the first man on the moon or Albert einstein it did not matter I had found a love in my life , COMPUTERS !!!!!
It was and still is an amazing journey. Managing to write whole games in 16K of space seems impossible but it was done and when you think of what they do today its monumental. Anyway soon the 16k was expanded by a wopping 32K. If you follow the story of the memory you will find that it went up in multiples of bit size following the hexidecimal format. Meaning they could make chips bigger but that it was not very useable. More often than not it was only good for storage. So 16 32 64 128. etc. But this changed when Mr Sinclair managed to perfect a wafer Chip, meaning chips that overlay each other. That day was a milestone for Computers world wide.
Back to my list of computers I owned.
Amstrad 64 …. It was only one that came with a built in cassette recorder. You could tell when a program was loading rightly by the sound of the data transfer. A high pitched scream is best way to explain it.
Amstrad 128 ( Another innovation. This one came with a built in Floppy disk.) Yes we were sooo lucky then. This computer had 128k of memory but only 64k was useable. The extra 64k was just another chip really . But if you wrote games you could store Sprite data in there or screen swapping, great for scrolling games.
Commodore 64 ( perhaps this machine is responsible for most people learning programming)
Oric Atmos ( only the french would add a keyboard click that sounded perfect)
Amiga 500
Atari 520 ST ( it may have had 520K of memory but only 64k was useable as ram, the rest was only good for storage. A bit like a stack really.
My first PC .. Home made
The end of the 80's great things were happening and people like myself, had got bored with spending nights hacking games etc and moved on to more business orientated software. Databases, spreadsheets etc. Myself I wrote accountancy stuff and also mini cad systems. But along came a fellow who I think we owe lots to his name “ALAN SUGAR” he took on IBM who dominated the world then with its PC, and brought to us a low end PC for the home user, and small businesses . With in a year games were popping up and the PC was here to stay, accessable to everyone. Many a PC addict made a living building Home made PC's. It was that easy.
Next programming basic, Machine code ( assembly ) perl, fortran cobal, I done them all and it was boring in the end nothing new. And then came what I was after a structured language that kind of made immediate sense. Pascal. There was no internet then just what you call univercity Databases that you contacted by phone modem . So if you contacted a database in Norway or Japan , you actually paid for a phone call to Norway or Japan. Also if you wanted to download some code it could take around 30 mins, so as you see it was very expensive hobby.
The internet popped up. And here now modems are now the focus of attention as 16k modems are not good enough, So over the years they get faster as we are using dial up so much and phonebills are massive, but still us diehards are there every night exchanging routines for mouse interupts, or screen mapping. Lol good days.
Now even Dhal Llama has a cloud server. So whats next I wonder.
