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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had this when I was a kid. I basically had a ZX-Spectrum from Sinclair and all I learnt was by reverse engineering things. I'd load a tape or whatever and try figure out how it does what it does.

Although it taught me from an early age to dig to find things, you can't beat having learning material...

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I am happy I learned it via reverse engineering. It gave me skills that allow me to learn new things fast and it showed me that nothing is magic. You would be surprised how many uni cs graduates find a lot of computer things magic but do not have the tools in their head to discover they are not.

I am also of the opinion videos are the worst and laziest way to convey deep technical information; yet it is really popular. If someone wrote this into a post, I would he able to digest and try out in a very short period of time, with videos it is pretty uncomfortable. I wonder why it is so popular aside that most people who watch it will never try it out to begin with.

Some good technical info here: https://problemkaputt.de/zxdocs.htm

Sure, I agree with you. But I find sometimes my lack of deep understanding and why things are the way they are. For that you often need to have learning material.

With you there, though I didn't start with the Sinclairs. Videos are such low bandwidth compared to listings in the back of a magazine with an article breaking it down step by step, or figuring it out from reverse engineering and messing around the memory map. With nowhere to turn for instant answers you had to. I'm glad I did.

YT works for game reviews, and the odd conference presentation, for everything else I'll seek out a post.

It's true about videos, but this was never intended as a technical resource. Instead I wanted to show how working on one of these machines felt.

I showed this video to some work-mates, mostly younger than I am, and some of the questions I got were really revealing: 'Does it boot into Basic?' 'But if there's no disk, where does it put the compiled program?' These machines are _completely alien_ to the modern mindset, and so I wanted to actually demonstrate working on one in practice, rather than just write it up. There's plenty of technical docs out there already.

The ZX81 was actually my first computer, and I loved it. I pretty much read the manual in a weekend, and spent hours upon hours learning how to program (and getting stuff in and out cassette tapes).

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