Wednesday, February 09, 2005

An old friend, the ZX81

A friend of mine read my bio on the Developmentor web site and reminded me that I forgot to mention the ZX81 in my history of technologies I worked with. If you remember this machine, it was popular in the early 80s. It had 1K RAM , expandable to 16K (which I had bought). It seems so amazing that we could even do anything with it but we did. Saving the programs on an audio tape was really a pain but cheap. The internet was not even there but I managed to transfer a program through the air! A friend of mine was doing some radio show on a local FM station. We decided to tell our audience to start recording on tape the ZX81’s super cool program I had written. As he broadcasted 5 minutes of awful sounds, I recorded it and could reload my own program on my ZX81. Thinking of it, I was probably the only one listening to this anyway! The ultimate geeky evening but it was a lot of fun. Here is a link for the ZX81 http://www.zx81.nl/

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