I too built my ZX81 from a kit. Bought the RAM pack and the thermal printer.
As for programming, I joined a ship in 1983 and the Second Officer had brought his ZX81 and a RAM pack along with him. We spent a few interesting hours/days writing a program to calculate the Great Circle Distance and Initial Bearing between any two points in the world. This was in part a navigational type calculation, but you would not normally go that distance as a pure great circle, my interest, as Radio Officer, was related to HF radio communication. We had two problems, one the wobbly RAM pack and the other the unreliability of saving and then reloading the program using a cassette recorder. There was a third problem in that on a least one occasion the Steward had unplugged the ZX81 in order to Hoover the carpet..... Luckily we were not developing anything to do with life support.
I still have the ZX81 plus RAM pack and printer. I also have both PSUs, although the larger one has a terminal block to facilitate using it to power my pcb drill.
I too built my ZX81 from a kit. Bought the RAM pack and the thermal printer.
As for programming, I joined a ship in 1983 and the Second Officer had brought his ZX81 and a RAM pack along with him. We spent a few interesting hours/days writing a program to calculate the Great Circle Distance and Initial Bearing between any two points in the world. This was in part a navigational type calculation, but you would not normally go that distance as a pure great circle, my interest, as Radio Officer, was related to HF radio communication. We had two problems, one the wobbly RAM pack and the other the unreliability of saving and then reloading the program using a cassette recorder. There was a third problem in that on a least one occasion the Steward had unplugged the ZX81 in order to Hoover the carpet..... Luckily we were not developing anything to do with life support.
I still have the ZX81 plus RAM pack and printer. I also have both PSUs, although the larger one has a terminal block to facilitate using it to power my pcb drill.
