231–240 of 455 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell - are you praising Sinclair, or shredding him? (I'm on the wrong side of the pond to have any real knowledge of him.)
Shredding him. His business acumen was nil and his cost cutting nailed shut the coffin of every venture he started. I don’t get the hero worship.
I know which I'd want to be my legacy.
What is the modern alternative to ZX? Something which encourages tinkering and reasonably priced.
My parents were having a clear out and found my old (2nd hand when I got it!) Speccy, just last week. It's been in a box but I feel compelled to see if it's in working order still (no leaky caps please or dodgy joints, at least there's no old PSU to worry about)
RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.
There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Indeed. After I saw this sad news and your comment, I was reminded of an earlier HN comment¹ I had written about the joy I experienced as a young child learning to program on a ZX81 and my regret that my children’s generation are not growing up with the same opportu…
If you do want a similar experience (at least superficially) to a spectrum 48k, get a Pi 400, don't connect it to a network, but don't expect the same outcome as you had -- the world is different, there are very different things competing for attention, and different rewards for time spent.
RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.
There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Indeed. After I saw this sad news and your comment, I was reminded of an earlier HN comment¹ I had written about the joy I experienced as a young child learning to program on a ZX81 and my regret that my children’s generation are not growing up with the same opportu…
The 8 year old is the most enthusiastic about it. He is second grade at school and knows addition, and subtraction, and his times tables but has not started multiplying more than single digit numbers.
Right now they are mostly placing blocks around and decorating the world, but they are very interested in the lua scripting. I have no doubt that they will soon be attempting to read that read the Roblox API docs. Actually, they'll be watching youtube video tutorials.
Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that while the old 8 bit days are gone, there are plenty of ways kids can build things and tinker with computers and software.
PS: buy your kids a Steam Deck.
An old joke says it was passing through customs as a “washing machine programmer, not a computer, see, its all rubbery”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He brought faulty RAM that had errors just in a single half and then he used just the other (correct) half - nothing wrong with that. Such cost cutting made it affordable to a large number of people - had it costed a couple of time more it could be a hard sell for my Eastern European parents. Fortunately, that didn't happen and now, 40 years later, I have a nice career and I'm still enjoying dealing with computers ju…
Actually that’s not strictly true. Test methodology was “see if it worked and ship”. Many many of the computers were returned and replaced immediately. And a lot of the new ones you got were the broken ones which were sent back and the chips replaced. I’ve seen a new one which still didn’t work which had been reworked at least once and sold as new again. My father had a nice business for a few years doing adhoc repai…
Though this shop just did it for profit margin. Sinclair did it to make computers available to the masses.
I owe him a career, I suspect a lot of others do as well.