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.
