I owned a ZX81! I've actually still got it up in the loft. The basic machine came with a whole 1K of RAM - and there was the RAM pack that took it up to a mind-boggling 16K. I also had the thermal printer, which produced its output on what resembled a silver toilet roll. I seem to recall it needed a beefed-up power supply for the printer. I also invested in a Kempston keyboard - it stuck over the ZX81's touch pad and had "clicky" keys that seemed to work intermittently. I vaguely remember the first thing I programmed was a formula that plotted a sine wave. Anything more than a few lines of Basic required the 16K Ram Pack - and does anybody else recall that you had to keep the machine completely still while typing, otherwise the TV screen would flicker and you'd lose the lot and have to start again?
And let's hear it for the ZX81's contemporaries, like the Commodore PET, VIC 20, Oric 1, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum etc. (Cue the background music from the Hovis advert...)
I owned a ZX81! I've actually still got it up in the loft. The basic machine came with a whole 1K of RAM - and there was the RAM pack that took it up to a mind-boggling 16K. I also had the thermal printer, which produced its output on what resembled a silver toilet roll. I seem to recall it needed a beefed-up power supply for the printer. I also invested in a Kempston keyboard - it stuck over the ZX81's touch pad and had "clicky" keys that seemed to work intermittently. I vaguely remember the first thing I programmed was a formula that plotted a sine wave. Anything more than a few lines of Basic required the 16K Ram Pack - and does anybody else recall that you had to keep the machine completely still while typing, otherwise the TV screen would flicker and you'd lose the lot and have to start again?
And let's hear it for the ZX81's contemporaries, like the Commodore PET, VIC 20, Oric 1, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum etc. (Cue the background music from the Hovis advert...)
