Sinclair ZX Spectrum Prototype

I'm an avid retro-enthusiast and have an extensive collection of computers, going back to the 70's. I've also kept every computer I've ever owned personally.

This year I'll be doing a retro-exhibit at the MQ in Vienna, putting the machines up and getting them running for folks to interact with and explore. The idea is to show people that, in fact - old computers never die, their users do!

The key thing is that, even if you don't have a use for that old computer - there are a hundred million other human beings out there that might, and to some of them it'll be just as useful as it was the day it was taken out of the box and turned on for the first time. Consumerism requires participation in the fallacy that 'old things have no use' - but as we can see from the resurgence in interest around the retro- scene, this is just a lie.

One of the things that has made this so interesting to me is the experience of having to set up each machine, again, with all its requisite tools. As a developer, to me this of course means having assemblers, editors, compilers, and so on - and it is quite a challenge. But once its up and running, there is no greater joy than hacking on an old machine, with no Internet and only the tools in front of me. It has been one of the coping mechanisms I use to get over the pain, suffering and misery of modern software development, where it seems every month some kid has re-invented the tools we old folks discarded years ago, and for it to become fashionable such that there is no choice, to be current, than to keep up with the rat race of compilers and libraries and editors and frameworks, oh my ..

If you've still got an old machine somewhere, do yourself a favour and get it set up again. It can really help with developer funk.

I only got to play with one during summer holidays in Spain since my uncle had one. I remember being very surprised about the microdrives.

It's a pity Sinclair tended to make at least one bad design choice per device. Eg the Z88 was about the most amazing device of its time if only it had had something else than eproms for storage.

The end credits/epilogue of MicroMen is a lovely bit of visual poetry https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM?t=4900

Steve Vickers taught first year Java (and more) at the University of Birmingham and I was lucky enough to be taught by him, he was a great teacher, we'd learn Java by implementing parts of his larger Turtles application (similar to LOGO).

I remember there was a semester long competition that he held wherein you would have to write a turtles program to generate an interesting output, I thought my tesseract was quite good, and then a student who spent most of time in lectures playing LocoRoco had animated an entire movie, of a turtle enrolling at the university, I realised then that I was a very average programmer.