September 12, 2006

My first computer


I made a little trip to a conference in California recently and on the way back stopped home in Minnesota. Mom wanted me to clean out some boxes in the basement. There were many dear treasures there that somehow I have been able to live without for the last 17 years. Maybe the funnest thing was finding my first computer, a Timex-Sinclair ZX-80, shown above. Oh, the times we had together, and don't forget the 16 kilobyte memory extension (it's in the picure above, hanging out the back. It wouldn't even hold an empty MS-Word document today). I got annoyed with pressing the plastic dimples on the original keyboard and so I bought a surplus keyboard through the mail. I took apart the treasured ZX-80 and figured out the keyboard wiring and then connected the new keyboard using the same system. Worked great from the very start. I painted all the extra symbols onto the keyboard using little bottles of Testor's paint and a toothpick.

1 Comments:

At September 14, 2006 7:57 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can't get my mind around 64k. my system memory usage goes up by that much when I drag my mouse. I was working with those amounts of memory on my Apple IIe and I was happy as a clam!

kudos to you for installing an alternate keyboard.

 

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