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Archive for the ‘History’ Category

The Kompo Club

17 Jun

I’ve recently renovated my Home-office.  New floor, new cupboards, bookcases, the lot.  Its so much better than the previous one.. and I can see out of the window from where I sit now ;0)

During sifting through the obligatory six and a half tons of stuff collected for no apparent reason, I came across a magazine called The Compo Club. Now, I say magazine – its 6 pages long and is a magazine that I published while I was at school. Its very faded because it was done on those old ‘bander’ copier things, way before photocopying was the norm.  I can even remember the smell of chemical coming off the paper 😉

It sets out to tell the story of a bunch of home computers, such as Beeby B, Spex and others. It brought back memories of all those home computers that were about in the 80’s – I had a ZX81 (still got it in fact), a Spectrum, and an Amstrad CPC464 with a colour monitor!  What did you have?

Anyways, I’ve added a link to a scanned version of the magazine here, for posterity.

 
 

When I was a lad…

13 Mar
Sinclair ZX81

Sinclair ZX81

A couple of days ago, I noticed an article on the BBC news website, that talked about the birth of computing
in the UK. It featured a picture of a ZX81.

Seeing the picture brought back memories, because this was the first computer I actually purchased.

With its 1K (yes thats kilobytes) of ram, people did amazing things. It taught me to write code in an efficient manner, otherwise it wouldnt fit. It taught me to focus on providing a solution (which was usually a game!) rather than worrying on it being pretty. These are skills that programmers new to the industry have a hard time understanding as they write code thats way bigger and more convoluted than they need to be, with way more style than substance.

Heres a link to the original bbc article. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12703674