Recently in a fit of retro-vision I did one of those online hunts for information, in this case it was for the book that got me in to programming. You know those searches which take you to so many weird corners of the Internet.
Obviously I found lots of interesting sites and nearly got side tracked off in to many weird directions. But after lots of searching I found this site
Kio's Sinclair ZX Computers Archive. It had a scanned copy of the User Guide in pretty high quality. I have compiled the 86 odd JPEG image files
in to a PDF and you can grab it from here.
Be warned it is a large 20MB download.
This little pillage in to the realm's of the past got me thinking about my previous computers and what I have used over the years. So for your viewing pleasure here is a list.
1989-1996
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Amiga 500
I was about 5 years old when we got the family computer. We got this upgraded at about 1992 to the 500+ which I believe gave it an
extra 512KB of RAM. We used this mainly as a gaming machine since we had a local store selling ONLY Amiga games. The company went bust
and closed the store. I remember this because I went along in the weeks when they were closing down and they gave me loads of stuff for FREE. |
1992-1999
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Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ 48K
It was around this period when we got the upgrade to the Amiga and I was about 8 years old that I got hold of several ZX Spectrum's second-hand.
This is what got me started in computer programming. It was a brilliant little machine. You would have to plug it in to your TV for use as a monitor and use a cassette tape for data storage. It was limited in ways but flexible at the same time. I found it quite a fascinating subject. I then had a dive in to AMOS BASIC for the Amiga. But I found the Spectrum BASIC easier to work with at the time. |
1996-1999
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IBM 386 PS/2 Model 55SX
When I was 12 years old I was given this as a gift. Second-hand at the time. I will always remember the sound it made when you turned it on. First of all that picture is not
exactly right, mine had a blue power switch. You had to yank the power switch up on the front and it would make a clunk and you
would hear the beast warm up. Then the floppy drive calibration test would start and the you would hear the hard drive accesses as clicks. It
was loaded with DOS 5/6 and Windows 3.1. When I got this I started exploring and found QuickBASIC or QBASIC for short and started making
DOS games and apps. I also learned about x86 assembler during the end of this period. |
| 1999-2002 | Pentium III 1GHz IBM Compatible PC
I had a break and got some money when I was 15/16 years old, so I decided to blow a grand on a new computer. This was the first NEW computer I had bought for myself.
So I got all the latest parts to build one of the latest computers of the time. I believe it was a Pentium III E-series processor running at 1GHz with 256MB SDRAM and a 13GB ATA133 HDD. It was about this time when I started
writing webpages in HTML and programming in C. |
| 2002-today |
I've gone through plenty of IBM Compatible systems during this time and programmed in many different languages, also
since this isn't retro I dont think I will include much info at this time. |
So that's it, I might blog more about some of the subjects that have turned up along the road. Until then.
Napalm
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