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Comment by scarygliders | Hacker News Reader

Nostalgia for the days of assembling your home computer.

My first home computer was a Sinclair ZX81. With the 16K RAM Pack which crashed the machine if it was wiggled even slightly - and now I have horrible flashbacks remembering a time when I spent a couple of hours typing in row upon row of hexadecimal (plus CRC check code for each line!) from the pages of a magazine to get a Space Invader type game on the ZX81. And then the RAM Pack crashed the machine before I could save to cassette tape - BOOM!

A high school friend of mine had a Compukit UK101 [0] which he assembled himself. Quite a quirky and bulky machine that was.

[0] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8099/Compukit-UK101/

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I also started with ZX81. For a while, I didn't have a cable for tape recorder. A couple of magazines came with my ZX. Inside, there were some listings of games in BASIC. So, to play a game, a had to retype the code every time I restarted the computer. After a while, I started changing the code to see what will happen.

That's how I learnt to code.

Yep, it was a great time to be growing up as a kid wasn't it. All through those years of home computers. ZX81-->VIC-20-->C=64-->Amiga 500-->Amiga 1200 (I still have that one).

Progressing from BASIC to Z80 to 6502 to Motorola 68000 to C and so on. Learned Turbo Pascal and COBOL in college. Such nostalgia! :)

> I have horrible flashbacks remembering a time when I spent a couple of hours typing in row upon row of hexadecimal (plus CRC check code for each line!) from the pages of a magazine to get a Space Invader type game on the ZX81. And then the RAM Pack crashed the machine before I could save to cassette tape - BOOM!

This. And the other horrible one. Typing in hundreds of lines of hex only to realize there was a digit you either typed wrong or was wrong in the listing, so when you ran the code it just froze.

Same! I saved up a long time to buy that ZX81 + RAM pack. And lost a lot of hours to the wiggle and crash! I used to put the machine on a book and hang the RAM pack off the back to maintain the connection. Good times...

> Quite a quirky and bulky machine that was.

But apparently, unlike the ZX81, it actually had a proper keyboard, so there's that. ;)

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