An old git remembers #2 - first computer

When I was 12 (1982) my parents bought me my first computer. It was a Sinclair ZX80 that had had a ROM upgrade to be almost identical to the new ZX81. It was £50 second-hand, a lot for my family, and I had really no idea what I was buying. It was small, and white, with an awful touch-pad keyboard and it plugged into my black and white tv using what I'd later call an RF cable.

I was immediately hooked. I could type in things and see them appear on the screen! As you typed the screen flickered off, the machine unable to poll the keyboard and maintain a screen image at the same time. But that didn't matter, that was normal.

If you read my blog on storage space, you might remember that we travelled back to the days of the 5.25" floppy disk, which held 160,000 bytes of information. Whilst solid storage is something different to Random Access Memory (RAM) I mention this in comparison: the ZX80 had but 512 bytes of RAM - the storage your computer uses while on but loses when you turn it off. That's enough to hold 512 characters of text and not enough to hold any graphics or sound - something the ZX80 was incapable of anyway - and much less storage than could hold the text in this article. In fact, as you typed, the screen grew shorter and shorter until you were typing into a single line and could see no other, as screen memory was shared with your RAM.

It didn't matter. I endeavoured to learn how to program in the simple BASIC language that was part of the operating system (although I certainly didn't understand it in those terms at the time). Variables, loops, conditional branching all opened their secrets to me until I had a fairly well-defined idea what programming was. Not that I could do much, not because of the RAM limitations as much as my inability to save and load anything. The ZX80, you see, used a standard cassette desk to save and load to standard tapes. I wasn't alone in never getting it to work - that ability would come with later machines.

I'm also not alone in suggesting that the limitations put upon programmers at this time led to better levels of coding. We learnt to be amazingly Scrooge-like in how we used our limited resources, which led to better, faster, more compact code. The code-monkeys today with their acres of memory, graphics memory, hardware 3D capabilities and suchlike are simply spoilt. Or maybe I'm just jealous. It's like anal sex that way.

Niggers, Injuns and Huckleberry Finn

No, not the title to my most inflammatory blog yet, more the intro to a quick message regarding the new imprint of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by NewSouth Books. Put together by Professor Alan Gribben - eminent, no doubt - this offers all four volumes in the same edition for the first time and a little bit of specific text editing. It's the latter that's caused all the problems and negative reactions.

Professor Gribben has seen fit to change the terribly offensive N-word (Nigger) with the apparently less offensive word 'Slave' and the I-word (Injun) with 'Indian'. Frankly, when you've enslaved one race and stolen the other's country it's only right to be polite to them afterwards. The Professor's reasons are rather different however, he believes that the repeated usage of the offensive terms has led to the story not being read by African Americans -his full reasoning behind his decision is reprinted here.

I respect his choice, which he is after all free to make, more than many of the knee-jerk responses I've read. It seems reasonable to me that someone who has been on the wrong end of an offensive racial epithet may not enjoy reading a book - however good - which uses that epithet every page. You can explain the historical context of the words to people so effected until you're blue in the face, they're still going to feel bad reading Nigger or Injun constantly and just go and read a different book where it doesn't occur.

I'll let you into a secret. When I wrote the title to this blog I was a knee-jerk reactionary - historical textual purity was all I'd really considered. But after reading about it, looking at people's responses, and the Professor's eloquent introductory explanation, I've changed my mind. As long as pure copies are always kept, and people know how NewSouth Book's edition has been edited, I no longer see it as such a terrible thing. Who'd have thunk it?

There is a complete (virgo intacta) version of this book available for free on the Kindle store (software for viewing Kindle books is available for free on many platforms) - Niggers and Injuns best avoid. Gulp.

An old git remembers #1 - storage space

I just got an email from Ebuyer, they're offering a 2Tb Western Digital "Green Caviar" hard disc drive (hdd) for £69.99. This is an impressive price for an impressive amount of space. Sorry for the techie bit, but 1 byte holds one of 256 numbers 0-255, and this is used, for example, to signify a text character. 2Tb is just over 2,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Like anal sex, this got me thinking. My first ever hard disc was bought in 1988 (as far as I can remember) and cost £400 for a mere 20Mb of storage space. That's just over 20,000,000 bytes, fact fans. To put that into perspective, I have single MP3 files that are bigger than that now, and high definition videos that are thousands of times bigger. The punchline? I bought it second-hand at that price.

Further back than that - I'm guessing around 1983 - my mate Mark (Teddy) Edwards who had a rich dad and a remarkably flat face bought a floppy disc unit for the astonishing price of £800. This huge lump of a machine held around 160,000 bytes on a single side of a 5.25" (very) floppy disc and was very, very slow. But it was a joy to use besides the awful cassette tape storage solutions of the day, I was very envious.

So, from around 1983 to 2011 we've gone from an £800 unit to a £69 unit that holds over eleven million times the information. It strikes me that in many areas I've been disappointed in the progress of technology during my lifetime - where are the retinal scan goggles, the virtual reality recliners and the holographic 3D technologies I dreamt of as a lad? - but in the world of storage things have been different. They've shown fast progress which has easily kept pace with the average amount of storage we all need - or even superseded it.

Happy new year.