Recently it was my 40th anniversary 40 years to the day since I bought my very first computer – a Sinclair ZX81.
Seeing that ad reminds me of the hundreds of rolls of silver thermal printer paper I got through. I can still remember the smell!
Little did I know that the strange, annoying, frustrating and endlessly fascinating little black box would have such a major influence on my life.
First I learned ‘Sinclair BASIC’, the built-in programming language, and then I progressed to learning assembly language – machine code – which was faster, leaner and a whole lot more difficult as it was just a series of hexadecimal (base 16) that made the processor do cool stuff.
Oh how I remember those accidental endless loops!
With an on-board memory of just 1 Kb, machine code was the only way to write a program that actually did anything!
1 Kb! 1024 bytes. That is an unimaginably small amount of memory now. My current desktop has 1TB. To put that into perspective, my 1TB hard drive could hold a billion of my early ZX81 programs!
Soon I bought an expansion block to increase RAM to a massive 16 KB! That’s when sloppier programming started! 🙂
I loved my little ZX81 and stayed up all hours staring at the black and white display on our tiny portable TV. To her credit, Delia didn’t complain too much about my computer obsession, probably thinking it would be a passing fad.
My next birthday present to myself was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which had been launched a few months earlier in April 1982.
It had colour, sound, a better rubber membrane keyboard and 48 Kb of memory!
What a wonderful machine it was too.
I wrote some great programs on my old Spectrum. Even an ordering system for my workplace which worked far better than the multi-thousand Pound ‘solution’ they ended up buying, and subsequently abandoning after less than a year. But that’s another story!
Who remembers the sound of programs slowly loading in from a cassette tape?
If you are old, like me and feel nostalgic, or if you are young and curious about what computers were like all those years ago, here is a video of the 48k Spectrum loading one of the biggest games of its time.
Speaking of games, the hours I spent playing Manic Miner, Jet Pac, Jet Set Willy, Elite and so many more – all the while thinking that 8-bit graphics was state of the art!
I even programmed a few of my own using the genius STOS pregramming language for arcade-style games and The Quill for Adventure games. I never tried to sell them though. Perhaps I should have got into online marketing a bit earlier!
The entire process of loading the game from cassette tape took three and a half minutes!
Until, that is, Sinclair invented the weird and wonderful floopy disks that were a step forward, but ultimately were sadly short lived.
I toyed with the idea of getting the high-end Sinclair QL in 1984, but wasn’t completely sold on it, so waited until 1986 before forking out what seemed a fortune in those hard-up days, for a ‘real’ computer – an Atari 520ST.
I fell in love with the Atari ST from the first time I unpacked it, and ended up owning three until the lure of the PC finally got too much to resist.
I have no idea how many PCs I’ve owned since Delia and I drove a 320-mile round trip to buy that first one from a company called Evesham Vale in 1993. Probably about 15, including a couple I built myself.
As a quick historic side note for those too young to remember, what we now know as a PC was launched by IBM in August 1981 and was called an IBM PC. They developed the architecture for a modular computer that could swap components on a plug-in motherboard.
A young Bill Gates first licensed, and then developed for IBM something called PC-DOS (later MS-DOS) to allow humans to make the machine do something. DOS was hellishly difficult for normal people to use and only computer nerds could begin to fathom it. So in 1985, Microsoft launched Windows as a graphical, user-friendly interface that broadly converted on screen actions that people could understand into DOS code that the computer could run.
Windows was what made the PC a ‘consumer’ product. And very soon, other manufacturers copied the idea and called their machines IBM PC Clones.
In case you are wondering, I haven’t deliberately ignored Apple computers,I just have never owned one myself. Having just written that, it is interesting that despite having owned two iPad, I still don’t think of them as computers. Perhaps that’s because they integrate themselves into your life in a different way (and I wouldn’t have a clue how to program one!)
Computers and computing are very different 40 years on. I wonder what they will have evolved into in another 40 years?
