or was it just advertising hype. Did it change you life?
For our younger viewers, a ZX80 was the first or one of the first mass market home computers and was sold in the sunday papers (if I recall correctly) as being able to make you a mental athlete. Hours were spent keying in programmes in basic to conver centigrade to meters or something like that whilst the owners thought they were at the leading edge of computing (which in some ways was true - in the mass market sense).
2006-10-01 05:09:31 · 4 answers · asked by I loathe YH answers 3 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
We who are of the generation that grew up with ZX80s, BBCs, Spectrums, Amstrads and Commodores are some of the most computer literate out there, to us programming and working with the internal nitty gritty of the computer world are second nature, because we were there when we were not so seperated from the basics by flashy operating systems, I remember typing in thousands of lines of basic, only to have the programme crash, then having to go back over every single character...oh the joys, oh the nostalgia!
2006-10-01 05:21:54 · answer #1 · answered by Frax 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
We were a priviledged generation. We learned how to use computers when we were young. If you wanted to play a game you had to type it in. We learned to program because it had BASIC built in. We grew up to get high paid IT jobs in the city ;-)
Kids who got ZX80s probably came from nice familys, with supportive familys with a bit of spare cash. So they proably did well, statisticly, compared to other kids...
Kids today have consoles, which only play (often extreemly graphic and violent) games. Example: The US Army released a free game called Americas Army as a recruiting tool... Kids today don't learn from computers much other than the blast radius of a fragmentation grenade.
2006-10-02 10:20:45 · answer #2 · answered by TechHead 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
ZX 80?
Do you mean a trash 80? (TRS-80) Radioshack's entry into personal computers around the same time as Commodore's Vic 20
I was lucky enough to go from my ELF (an early 70's computer that's output was a blinking LED) to a Morrow MD3 which used CPM.
2006-10-01 05:17:05 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
That was the very first computer that I built (Saved the VAT that way)
It had 1KB of memory.
I now build 2 -3 computers a week part time
Yes, it did change my life.
2006-10-01 06:57:32 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋