Of course, I didn't have this fancy screen, but instead had a similarly sized black and white TV with an analogue dial to tune it to the right frequency. Even by the standards of the time the keyboard was dreadful, and typing on a mechanical typewriter was far easier. Also the way that keywords were linked to specific keys made the typing experience counter-intuitive.
I did try connecting a tape recorder in order to save programs and load them back, and had only partial success. The whole process of using cassette tapes was clumsy and error prone. Storing more than one program on a tape required keeping track of the mechanical position counter, which wasn't always very accurate. Tapes would often wear out, such that the program would only partly load and then hang indefinitely, and sometimes tapes would also get mangled during the very frequent fast forwarding and rewinding.
I tried typing in a few example programs from the user manual. Typically they were less than twenty lines long. One program I remember was called "NIBBLE THE CHEESE", and there was of course the obligatory Hello World program:
10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10
It's hard to imagine now, but at that time there was a novelty simply in being able to press buttons or enter small programs, and things visibly change on a TV screen as a result of your actions. Prior to that time TV was just something that you passively watched, and couldn't interact with in any sense other than changing channels (of which there were only three).
Still, despite the humble nature of this machine it represented the beginning of the age of the personal computer, and everything which goes along with that. I sold my ZX-80 in approximately 1988 to a school friend who was an electronics fanatic. He wanted to use it to control a set of LED disco lights.
More pictures of vintage computers can be found here.
3 comments:
I am pretty sure that a ZX80 at age 9 gives Bob a very high geek factor!
Not by contemporary standards. Kids start even earlier now, and have access to better software and far more learning literature than was available in the 1980s. Any of today's kids with sufficient aptitude could probably pick up BASIC programming far more quickly than I did, due to the wealth of materials available, support forums and tutorials on video sites like YouTube.
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