My brother worked for a time in a store which starting selling the ZX81 and brought one home to learn how to use it for demonstration purposes (though it might have been a ZX80). I had a go, having learned both Basic programming and Fortran at school (rather unusually for the seventies), but my attempts to program it were foiled by the rather meagre (1Kb) memory as I kept coming up against error messages about lack of memory. When I did finally get the program into memory, there was insufficient memory to run the damn thing.....
I don't remember what it was supposed to do, but possibly find prime numbers.
Julie,
Are you sure that it was the ZX81 you are thinking of and not the Sinclair Spectrum? The ZX81 had a near indestructible (and difficult to use) keyboard and is still the only coffee-proof computer I have ever come across.
My brother worked for a time in a store which starting selling the ZX81 and brought one home to learn how to use it for demonstration purposes (though it might have been a ZX80). I had a go, having learned both Basic programming and Fortran at school (rather unusually for the seventies), but my attempts to program it were foiled by the rather meagre (1Kb) memory as I kept coming up against error messages about lack of memory. When I did finally get the program into memory, there was insufficient memory to run the damn thing.....
I don't remember what it was supposed to do, but possibly find prime numbers.
Julie,
Are you sure that it was the ZX81 you are thinking of and not the Sinclair Spectrum? The ZX81 had a near indestructible (and difficult to use) keyboard and is still the only coffee-proof computer I have ever come across.
