My dad returned from work one day with a ZX Spectrum 16k for me, I was overjoyed. He worked with a guy who said computers were the future, and that he should splash out (what was a fair amount of money in those days) for one and encourage me to use it.
30 years later and my career is programming, thanks in part to this wonderful machine.
I remember plugging it in and being amazed at the things you could do with it. I avidly bought the various magazines of the day, and typed in the program listings they published, and was amazed when they worked. I do remember the frustration though of loading programs from casette tape, and the number of time they would fail loading after waiting for 15 or 20 minutes.
I still have it in the attic at my parents house, might get it out when I next visit and see if it still works...
15 minutes? Didn't it take about 5 minutes to fill the RAM from tape on a 48k machine?
Edit: It seems that 48k worth of ones (which were twice as long as zeroes) is about 6 and a half minutes.
Nope, the lowest 16k of address space was ROM all right but on top of that the ZX 48k had a total of 48k RAM (as the model name implies.)
The lower 16k RAM was in fact a bit special in that it was shared with the graphics chip (which read the lowest 8192 bytes of RAM constituting screen memory and interrupted the CPU while doing that) System variables (POKE for the win) sat on top of that. The upper 32k RAM was a bit faster since CPU had it all for itself.
Sorry you're absolutely right. I'm getting mixed up with the use of 64k chips in the 48k model[1], which was a cost cutting exercise allowing sinclair to use potentially faulty 64k RAM in the 48ks.
My dad returned from work one day with a ZX Spectrum 16k for me, I was overjoyed. He worked with a guy who said computers were the future, and that he should splash out (what was a fair amount of money in those days) for one and encourage me to use it.
30 years later and my career is programming, thanks in part to this wonderful machine.
I remember plugging it in and being amazed at the things you could do with it. I avidly bought the various magazines of the day, and typed in the program listings they published, and was amazed when they worked. I do remember the frustration though of loading programs from casette tape, and the number of time they would fail loading after waiting for 15 or 20 minutes.
I still have it in the attic at my parents house, might get it out when I next visit and see if it still works...