Date Posted:07:23:46 10/16/04 Sat Author: Joe Subject: Sinclair ZX81 In reply to:
Chris
's message, "Wacky inventions, tiny little cars" on 02:23:20 10/16/04 Sat
I think I played around with an earlier version of the Sinclair. I remember the membrane "keyboard." I remember hooking it up to a black and white TV and typing in a version of robots to play, then trying to save the code to an audio tape on a old-style tape recorder.
I remember the Sinclair belonged to Sam Lee Jr. (shudder)
Then I graduated to an Apple IIc. I never owned a Commodore.
>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.
