ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

General Chit Chat about Sinclair Computers and their Clones
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juancast
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ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by juancast »

Hello,

I had lots to do with the ZX81 in many ways as a user, I could share a long story of what I did with it and how it rewarded me in many ways, until the PCs appeared in the 90s and with sadness had to let go.

If there is interest, I'll post it, otherwise I'll let sleeping dogs lie...

Juan

( sorry, how can anybody remember without a name: it is Juan José Castillos )
RWAP
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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by RWAP »

It would be great to hear your story - it is always interesting to find out how the early computers have influenced people (many of us on here have returned to the ZX81 mainly through our interest being rekindled!)
sirmorris
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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by sirmorris »

Welcome, Juan! It would be a privilege to share in your story!
juancast
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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by juancast »

OK, guys, here it goes.

In the 70s and 80s of last century I was engaged in archaeological research and the work was going very slowly. Then the ZX80 was made available and I immediately bought it. It was great at the time and I used it for my research which got 10 times faster thanks to the programs I wrote in Basic for it. But then the ZX81 appeared and I really got hooked on it. I devoted many hours to getting into every aspect of it and I can say I thoroughly mastered it, its scientific potential was the main attraction. Then a small group of ZX81 fans got together at a Toronto, Canada, tavern and the Toronto Timex Sinclair Users Club was born. I was appointed Librarian, responsible for our Program Library which grew to several hundreds when we went North American and had members all over the place, I remember one of them was from rural Arkansas and had no grid power, so he used it with batteries, I always imagined the poor guy like a kind of Li'l Abner. The ZX81 with the 64K pack, the High Res pack, its unique little printer, the QSave gadget to speed up savings to 4000 Bauds (instead of the regular 250), its voice gadget that made it talk, a plug in standard keyboard, etc. etc. made it a fantastic personal computer. I published an article in SYNC Vol. 3 No. 2 (1983) about my research for which I was paid U$S 100. This edition of SYNC is available in the internet as a pdf. The month it appeared I showed up at the club meeting and to my astonishment the president announced that my article had been published and that their Librarian was a published author (because of a book mentioned therein) and I got a standing ovation, One the most embarrassing times of my life... I must say I bought about 20 ZX81s over the years, one still untouched is an issue 1, so I could modify each for a specific purpose, but all had of course the larger heat disipating aluminum plate to make it run cooler. I still have them as well as all the gadgets although I don't use them anymore, but the temptation is always there. I was so impressed with this computer that, as a Canadian, I wrote to the Queen suggesting Clive Sinclair should be knighted for all the good he had done for Britain, a polite reply from the Palace said that such messages were sent to the Prime Minister (Mrs. Thatcher at the time) for a decision. To my great surprise and gratification I saw in the papers a few months later that he had been knighted and shortly after I got a letter from Sir Clive himself thanking me for my efforts on his behalf. After I moved to Uruguay in 1984 where the ZX81 was just starting to arrive, I was immediately hired by the local Planetarium to give a series of lectures on Computers and Astronomy for Astronomy teachers because the ZX81 had a series of programs for astronomy that were really sensational. They paid me U$S 600 for it. As I was teaching and showing the programs, one of the teachers said that her son had been born exactly on the date of a moon eclipse, so could we verify that? As I entered the date with some trepidation, explaining that the date could be slightly off because there could be a margin of error, the eclipse appeared exactly at the date that was given. Everybody clapped their hands and became true ZX81 believers. The ZX81 had different ROMs you could plug in to make it run in FORTH or Assembly instead of Basic and even if you wrote in Basic, by running a special program, they became almost as fast as machine code. Also, the QSave saves were very reliable, failing only once in a long while, but I discovered that removing the chip form a TK85 (Brazilian clone of the ZX81) and plugging it in a ROM board behind the ZX81 and then using the QSave, then saves became 100% reliable all the time. When internet and PCs forced me to stop using the ZX81 it was a sad day, I had thought I would continue using it for many years but technology had moved quicker than anybody could guess. Still, I'm not a novelty seeker blinded by the need of manufacturers to always improve and make people spend money on their products, I'm writing and posting this message using a Pentium III computer with Windows 98 which has nothing to envy those new OS like those of Win7 or 8 or 10 or whatever, which are often slower, and has lots of advantages the new ones lack, for instance I can download anything from Youtube without any special programs using a weakness in their code, I have several ghosts made of my main hard disk in small HDDs, so in case of one failing, I'm instantly back in business. With Win98 I have downloaded thousands of movies frem the internet which I watch in a Win 98 PC and I plan to continue using Win98 as long as I can. I only occasionally use XP to convert some movies to avis, because the programs don't run in Win98, that's all. I hope I haven't bored you with all this but I still have a photo of Sir Clive in my Library and the ZX81 was a very special machine created by a genius of electronics.
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1024MAK
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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by 1024MAK »

I'll keep my post short :shock: and just say - Welcome to our forum Juan :D

All joking aside, that's a very interesting story. I'm glad you shared it 8-) Thank you.

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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by RWAP »

Very interesting post and reflects the excitement around computers in the 80s, well before they became an everyday item.

Welcome to the forums.
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Jungsi
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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by Jungsi »

Thanks for sharing this story! I also have good memories of the ZX81, since it was also my first computer :-)
My Blog (in German): http://www.jungsi.de
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TMAOne
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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by TMAOne »

Thanks for sharing that story, and welcome to the forum from a fellow Canadian.
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siggi
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Re: ANYBODY REMEMBERS ME ABOUT THE ZX81?

Post by siggi »

juancast wrote:I published an article in SYNC Vol. 3 No. 2 (1983) about my research for which I was paid U$S 100. This edition of SYNC is available in the internet as a pdf.
Here it is:

https://archive.org/stream/syncmagazine ... 3/mode/2up

:D
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