While the city slept, Hywel Jenkins (
[email protected]) feverishly
typed...
Oh yeah, baby. 8 colours, 4 voices (3, unless you count white noise
as a voice),
Hah! Yes, I remember that now. My friend had a Vic-20 and I used to go down
to his house and have hours of fun programming the voices... especially the
white noise!
[...]
I did get paid by "Commodore User" magazine for my first bit of
software (remember when they used to print listings?) in 1983.
Oh yes, I remember. I remember spending ridiculous amounts of time
painstakingly typing them in with the cling-film keyboard, only to find they
didn't work!
There was one program that did work though and it was wonderful! It actually
made sound on the ZX81! Don't know if you remember, but the ZX81 had two
modes called "fast" and "slow". "Fast" turned off the screen output so more
of the processor was available, then you went back to "slow" mode so you
could see the output. If you slightly detuned the TV and turned the volume
up, the transition between "fast" and "slow" made a sound. This program used
different combinations of "fast" and "slow" to make different musical notes!
£25 was a huge amount in them days.
Indeed it was. That's half what my ZX81 cost me!
ZX81 was dumb. What was it - 1k? It was more a toy for electronic
enthusiasts than computer people, wasn't it?
1K RAM. 8K ROM (IIRC). No sound (except as described above!) and no colour,
although I used to tell people it had four colours, "black, white, and two
shades of grey".
To be fair, it wasn't much, but it was still a pretty good computer
(especially for the money!) It was much better when I bought the 16K RAM
pack. But most of all, it's where I first learnt to program. Not long after
I bought it the Spectrum came out, so all the ZX81 software vanished from
the shops, so if I wanted it to do anything other than stop a small part of
my desk getting dusty I had to program it myself. Wrote some pretty neat
little games on it.
Some time later I progressed to a Spectrum (48K version. The guy I bought it
off originally had a 16K which bust. He realised that the only discernable
difference between the 16K and 48K models was a sticker on the box, so he
borrowed a box off someone with a 48K model and sent it back to Sinclair to
be replaced. A nice shiny 48K one came back!) and proceeded to upgrade it.
It already had a sound amplifier (essential!) which I soon rigged up to a
bigger speaker, and a joystick port (2 ports actually. One for "cursor keys"
and a Kempston one). I saved up my pennies and bought a proper keyboard for
it, then later got a speech synthesiser. One of the ultimate add-ons I got
for it was a disk drive, which had a memory dump button. If you were playing
a game (eg. The Hobbit), you could save the exact contents of memory to disk
by pressing the button, then go back to the spot in the game by loading it
back in.
Many years later I swapped all my Spectrum stuff (including two carrier bags
full of games) for an Amstrad PC1512-DD... I still think the other guy got
the better part of that deal! :-(
Ah well... reminisence time over...
Cheers,
Nige
