LD HL,(16396)
Address of screen buffer.
Back pages asm instructions.
From zero to matrix in a thin red and black book.
I doubt our kids ever felt that trip. Im sorry about that.
Sir Clive Sinclair has died
411–420 of 455 posts
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
My story is so similar to yours (and I’m sure many others). Santa brought my house a Spectrum 48k Lo Profile when I was a kid with a cool KnightRider style keyboard. Over the years I haven’t seen it talked about much if at all, so I always assumed it was a fairly niche model. After hearing about Sir Clive, I looked it up to find out how many sold and was surprised to learn that it never actually existed as a standalo…
There's a huge difference between these 8-bit computers and PCs that came later, or even the CP/M machines contemporary to them. When you booted a ZX-80, 81, Spectrum, a VIC-20, a PET, or an Apple II+, you went straight into a BASIC interpreter (or REPL, for the initiated). You could enter a program, or issue commands at will. We rarely think about this, but the first UI you see in those machines is a programming lan…
The first IBM PCs I was exposed to as a kid in the early/mid 1980's booted into BASIC if you didn't insert a disk into the 5.25" floppy drive.
I think if you booted in this mode, BASIC had no access to the floppy drive at all so you couldn't save your work (or we kids didn't know how). Better to boot from a floppy, then after it finished booting, swap the floppy for another one to save the silly BASIC games we were writing.
Later on, we saw models with two floppy drives, so you could leave the floppy containing DOS and BASIC in drive A: and save your work onto the disk in drive B: Eventually, PCs began to come with hard drives and these naturally became drive C: So if you've ever wondered why Windows typically refers to the hard drive containing the OS as drive C: it's because drives A: and B: were the floppy drives.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sir Sinclair FYI since I've seen this mistake a few times in this discussion: Sir Clive or Sir Clive Sinclair. "Sir" and "Dame" are attached to the given name, never the surname. I don't know why it's different from other titles, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to explain, just states the rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir
Formal surnames attached to a family are a later invention than aristocratic titles. In fact, surnames were originally introduced for the sole purpose of identifying individuals for the purpose of taxing them. When the English tried this on the Welsh, they mass rebelled by all choosing the name "Jones." This was especially the case for commoners, or non aristocrats, who only had first names, and had to be uniquely id…
Along similar lines, the name of the famous renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci is "Leonardo". He was born in the city of Vinci, so calling him "Leonardo from Vinci" was an easy way of distinguishing him from the other Leonardos around. Nobody during his lifetime would have addressed him as "Da Vinci".
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to give a talk on coding a few years back. I brought in my Acorn Atom to show people what I started on. 12Kb of memory, no hard drive, no sound card, no network, monochrome display. The BASIC language it knew had maybe 10 keywords, and the Assember had another couple dozen commands. Everything in the computer was simple, easily understood, and robust (turning the computer off wiped everything except the ROM - e…
Agreed. I taught myself to program on my Acorn Atom, I still remember the "Aha!" moment when I finally understood what I needed to make a simple "Space Invaders" program on my (minimal) 2K Acorn Atom, (later sold by "Bug Byte" software).
I wrote a version of Missile Command that I got reasonably working, until we got called down for tea and my cousin "helpfully" turned the computer off.
I still give him shit for it
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
The QL failed because (amongst other things) they had outsourced the basic interpreter to another company for the ZX series and decided to bring it in house for the QL :(
No: The BASIC on the QL was one of the best BASICs ever. What killed the QL was imho those fucking awful microdrive cartridges. Unreliable, slow and quick to fail.
Yep, the retelling I heard from the David Karlin (I worked with him after Sinclair went bust) was the micro drives didn't meet the spec that he designed the gate array to.
The only real hardware bit that we could rib him about was the serial port design, but I can't even remember what was wrong with it now (handshaking?)
I do wish I'd snaffled the QDOS listing that got thrown away during an office move.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I didn't know is if you are knighted, you have to give up your birth citizenship.
That seems to be a US rule [1], not a condition imposed by the knighting jurisdiction. Maybe some other countries have similar no-titles rules, but I couldn't find any (might be searching for the wrong terms). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Emoluments_Clause
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Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#417In Brazil we had only clones, as the military dictatorship wanted to bootstrap a local industry. The only exception I remember was HP-85, which was classified as a scientific instrument or something other than a personal computer. The first computer I had at home was a CP-200, a ZX-81 clone with an inverted video signal (white on black) and calculator keys made by Prologica (who also cloned the ZX-80, the Intertec Su…
Here in Uruguay we had the original Spectrums, but Microdigital's clones were more affordable. The TK-90 was my first computer, upgraded a few years later to a TK-95. Those are the computers I learned to program in, so I'm grateful both to Clive Sinclair and to the folks at Microdigital for helping me get into my career!
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the availability of tech like the Pi now, I wonder what it would take to build a modern, child-friendly device in the same spirit around it: something that offered a fun and instructive introduction to programming, in a box that was self-contained, safe and practically indestructible. Design a case with a sealed keyboard? Expose standard power and display connectors with robust ports? Write some child-friendly…
TLDR - Kids who want to learn to program already have access to the tools to do this... It's just that most kids don't want to learn to program. Wasn't this what the One Laptop Per Child (OTLP) project was trying to achieve? The problem is that when the ZX, C64 etc were around there was no alternative. If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridg…
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Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Formal surnames attached to a family are a later invention than aristocratic titles. In fact, surnames were originally introduced for the sole purpose of identifying individuals for the purpose of taxing them. When the English tried this on the Welsh, they mass rebelled by all choosing the name "Jones." This was especially the case for commoners, or non aristocrats, who only had first names, and had to be uniquely id…
Along similar lines, the name of the famous renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci is "Leonardo". He was born in the city of Vinci, so calling him "Leonardo from Vinci" was an easy way of distinguishing him from the other Leonardos around. Nobody during his lifetime would have addressed him as "Da Vinci".
By the same token, it is strange that one of the pioneering visionaries of computing is commonly known as Ada Lovelace, even though her actual surname was 'King' (née Gordon) Her full title was 'Ada King, The Right Honourable The Countess of Lovelace,'
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#420RIP Sir. I was gifted the 48K when I was 6 yrs old - it changed my life. I am here because Sir Sinclair built a machine whose setup instructions said: Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes the copyright message. T…
I'm curious how a generation of us grew up curious what a computing machine could do, just because it had all those fancy keys to press. They pushed us into creating stuff.
But these days, we have smartphones with a hundred times more computing power, but it fails to trigger any creative curiosity into kids these days.
Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any co-relation with how many ways the device could interact with the operator vs the level of creative curiosity it triggers?