Re: Sinclair ZX81 -- ExUBF's Parlor_Free wheel as far as u can from UBF

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Date Posted: 12:41:44 10/16/04 Sat
Author: Chris
Subject: Re: Sinclair ZX81
In reply to: Joe 's message, "Sinclair ZX81" on 07:23:46 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.

That was probably the ZX80. Both the ZX80 and ZX81 had membrane keyboards and were not very different. Then came the legendary rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum which was a big improvement (color!), but I moved from the ZX81 directly to the Commodore 64. At that time I had a little "mail-order business" with a friend and my brother; we sold our programs (games and uitlities); it was a very troublesome work to produce the audio tapes. I remember that the not-so-famous membrane keyboard broke when just the mass of mail orders came in. At that time you couldn't simply get a replacement keyboard or buy keyboards in a magazine. So we constructed our own keyboard with a matrix of wires, separated by rubber foam, so at least we were able to type, letter by letter, SAVE "CRAZY KONG" ;-) Then, we had to press "record & play" on our old cassette recorder, and the video output would be replaced by a psychedelic mess of moving black and white stripes, since audio and video output were combined (Sinclair had used every trick to economise on components). And you are right, at that time there were not computer monitors (at least not for ordinary people), but we used ordinary TV sets, all computers had TV modulators. We used the immemorial black-and-white TV of my grandmother, you know, these massive mahogany tv cabinets with such a fuzzy display that you get dizzy after a few minutes, but we often stared at it for hours, only centimeters away (did the word "ergonomics" exist at that time? but we were young and did not care), even watched carefully these psychedelic black-and white patterns when loading programs from audio tape, because they revealed whether the volume was not too low or too high. If the volume had been chosen a little bit too low or too high, you would have to repeat the whole loading process, that could last 10 or 15 minutes. One of the self-made programs we sold was a quick-save utility that allowed saving on audio tape with a much higher speed.

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Replies:

Patterns -- Mike K., 02:51:17 02/15/05 Tue
- Re: Patterns -- Chris, 04:03:24 02/15/05 Tue