Hello from France !

Introduce yourself to your fellow forum members - what was your journey into the Sinclair world?
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bceldran
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2023 7:29 pm

Hello from France !

Post by bceldran »

Hello, I'm Bruno and I'm a SW engineer from France.

My father got a ZX81 when I was 8, and I made my first computer steps with it.

When I tell my daughters that we stored the games we copied from the manual on audio tapes, they ask me "what's a tape ?"
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marste
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Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2014 9:58 pm
Location: Italy
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Re: Hello from France !

Post by marste »

Forget tapes, my doughter didn't even know what a 3.5" floppy disk was when I showed to her!! (a 3d printed "save icon"?) LOL
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TMAOne
Posts: 212
Joined: Thu Aug 16, 2012 6:56 pm
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Re: Hello from France !

Post by TMAOne »

Yup--it's a sure sign we're getting old. I had to explain myself when I told my daughter about encyclopedias being on CD. She knew what a CD was, but what the heck is an "encyclopedia"?
Moggy
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Joined: Wed Jun 18, 2008 2:00 pm

Re: Hello from France !

Post by Moggy »

Oh dear what would they make of the things that were part of computing when I was a much younger Moggy, such as ferrite core and Williams-Kilburn Tube memory devices not to mention thermionic valves and Baudot readers for code entry. :oops:
Ravenger
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue May 11, 2021 5:27 pm

Re: Hello from France !

Post by Ravenger »

My first computer program was written at school on optical cards in 1977 in Maths class. :shock:

Each line of the BASIC program had an 80 character optical card.

We had to write the program out, look up the ascii values of the characters, convert that into binary, then colour in the appropriate 'holes' in each column on the optical card in the binary pattern that represented each character, using a soft pencil.

These cards would be bundled up and sent to a university somewhere for batch processing.

A couple of weeks later you'd get a dot-matrix printout on that green striped paper of your program's output, but I tended to get back something like "?SYNTAX ERROR AT LINE 30" :oops: :lol:

To be honest, at the time I had no idea what I was doing. It was only a few years later when Micros appeared in school and I got a ZX81 and learned to program properly that I realised what it was all about.
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XavSnap
Posts: 1940
Joined: Sat May 10, 2008 4:23 pm
Location: 'Zx81 France' Fb group.

Re: Hello from France !

Post by XavSnap »

Salut Bruno,

Bienvenue sur ce forum.

Juste une chose, quand tu parles à ta fille (ou tes filles), elle te répond toujours en anglais ou-bien ta fille est anglaise?

J'ai toujours eu du mal avec "daughter"... "what's up daughter"

😁
Xavier ...on the Facebook groupe : "Zx81 France"(fr)
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mrtinb
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Location: Denmark
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Re: Hello from France !

Post by mrtinb »

Ravenger wrote: Mon Jan 23, 2023 10:24 pm My first computer program was written at school on optical cards in 1977 in Maths class. :shock:

Each line of the BASIC program had an 80 character optical card.

We had to write the program out, look up the ascii values of the characters, convert that into binary, then colour in the appropriate 'holes' in each column on the optical card in the binary pattern that represented each character, using a soft pencil.

These cards would be bundled up and sent to a university somewhere for batch processing.
That sounds like the description Earl Evans of Retrocomputing Roundtable describes his first programming class.
Martin
https://zx.rtin.be
ZX81, Lambda 8300, Commodore 64, Mac G4 Cube
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