Via the BBC: ZX81: Small black box of computing desire .
I remember wanting one of these as a kid.
I had fallen in love with computers due go exposure at school to an Apple ][ and then a Commodore Pet with 4k (maybe 6?) or memory and a cassette drive.
I had a TRS(“trash”)-80 as a young kid. It had a tape drive that literally used cassette tapes for data storage. Probably 1 out of every 10 times it tried to access the drive it failed. Later I had a commodore 64 that I loved dearly. There are games from the C64 that I’d love to get a modern version of (Archon 1/2, Mail Order Monsters, a bunch of others).
The first computer I played around with was a room-sized IBM that was used to handle an Air Force Detachment’s payroll in Ankara, Turkey, when I was about 17. The computer was located on a floor above the ‘base’ library and teen club. One day, I met the Airman who mentioned that he ran a computer and I, as an SF freak, asked to see. I ended up learning to program–in COBOL–and the first program I wrote (along with the airman) was one to play 21. It was buggy as hell, but it worked, more or less. And what’s a couple thousand punch cards to play a game with 52 cards, anyway?
I considered going into programming after I left university, but though I passed the exams for entry into a couple of jobs, decided against it. About five years later, Apple ][ was out and reasonably-enough priced. I picked up Assembly, Basic, and Pascal, but was working too hard in another line to keep up after that. Now, aside from some macros to make my life easier and putting in peripherals, I’m strictly a user.
