Date Posted:02:23:20 10/16/04 Sat Author: Chris Subject: Wacky inventions, tiny little cars In reply to:
Joe
's message, "conference bike" on 16:21:49 10/15/04 Fri
When I think about wacky inventions and tiny little cars, then immediately the name of Clive Sinclair comes into my mind. Sinclair's ZX81 was my first real computer. It was a really wonderful thing. It had an affordable price and opened the whole world of computers for me. Later, I programed a ZX81 emulator for the Atari ST and dedicated it to Sir Clive Sinclair.
Can you imagine that the ZX81 had 1 Kilobyte of memory only? And it had no extra video ram. Program and video memory had to be shared and fit into the 1 Kilobyte RAM. The video ram area was flexible in size. The more characters you wrote on the screen, the less memory you had for your program. Later, there was an additional 16 Kilobyte RAM pack. We believed it was GIGANTIC in size. The ZX81 had an 8-bit Z80 CPU with 3.5 MHz. Today's PC memory sizes are larger by a factor of 1 million (!), and CPU clock speeds are 1000 times higher.
