I'm starting this post by going a little off-topic here but bear with me... G3NGD - now there's a great pseudonym! There's a separate topic out there about pseudonyms, and this one has a ring to it that shouts engineering and technology.
Stepping back into the discussion at hand, I was really into electronics construction when the ZX81 came out. As a 12 year old who voluntarily stayed back after school for electronics tuition and computer programming (which was quite progressive for a comprehensive in the Thatcher years!), and spending most of my spare time with a soldering iron in my hand building projects from my Dad's collection of Practical Electronics magazines, I suppose these days I'd be called a geek. Or words to that effect... Back then I was just a weirdo, but I really didn't care and I stuck with it. I only found out the ZX81 was available in kit form after I'd been using it for some time, and remember feeling a bit deflated that I hadn't built my own.
But the memories are flooding back! Remember fast mode? Useful to an extent, but I couldn't get away with it, the screen flickered every time you pressed a key. And for some reason, nearly 40 years on, I remember the command "poke 16510 0" - I used to use it every time I wrote a basic programme, it set memory location 16510 (corresponding to the first line number of the programme) to zero. And if you wanted to programme in machine code, because the 81 was set up for basic, you had to "hide" the code in a REM statement at the start of the programme, containing the same amount of characters as your machine code (thinking about it now, it was to all intents and purposes an early Trojan...). Then you'd have to type the code in letter by letter. I seem to think that the memory location of the first character of the REM statement was at 16514, so you had to use the command RAND USR 16514 to tell the machine where the code was. Told you I was a geek...
Cutting out 30-odd years... many years later I discovered Microsoft QBasic hiding away in a Windows 95 CD ROM and was instantly transported back to the 80's. It had so many similarities to ZX Basic you could pick it up in minutes. The geek was back! I wrote some cracking little personalised programmes with it to help my kids with their maths.
I'm starting this post by going a little off-topic here but bear with me... G3NGD - now there's a great pseudonym! There's a separate topic out there about pseudonyms, and this one has a ring to it that shouts engineering and technology.
Stepping back into the discussion at hand, I was really into electronics construction when the ZX81 came out. As a 12 year old who voluntarily stayed back after school for electronics tuition and computer programming (which was quite progressive for a comprehensive in the Thatcher years!), and spending most of my spare time with a soldering iron in my hand building projects from my Dad's collection of Practical Electronics magazines, I suppose these days I'd be called a geek. Or words to that effect... Back then I was just a weirdo, but I really didn't care and I stuck with it. I only found out the ZX81 was available in kit form after I'd been using it for some time, and remember feeling a bit deflated that I hadn't built my own.
But the memories are flooding back! Remember fast mode? Useful to an extent, but I couldn't get away with it, the screen flickered every time you pressed a key. And for some reason, nearly 40 years on, I remember the command "poke 16510 0" - I used to use it every time I wrote a basic programme, it set memory location 16510 (corresponding to the first line number of the programme) to zero. And if you wanted to programme in machine code, because the 81 was set up for basic, you had to "hide" the code in a REM statement at the start of the programme, containing the same amount of characters as your machine code (thinking about it now, it was to all intents and purposes an early Trojan...). Then you'd have to type the code in letter by letter. I seem to think that the memory location of the first character of the REM statement was at 16514, so you had to use the command RAND USR 16514 to tell the machine where the code was. Told you I was a geek...
Cutting out 30-odd years... many years later I discovered Microsoft QBasic hiding away in a Windows 95 CD ROM and was instantly transported back to the 80's. It had so many similarities to ZX Basic you could pick it up in minutes. The geek was back! I wrote some cracking little personalised programmes with it to help my kids with their maths.
