My parents took us on a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Ireland from Zimbabwe. My cousin had a ZX-80. I think he's a very big shot in Tesco now and I'm just a programmer.
It was the first computer I ever saw. 1kb memory. Some game or other was made of black boxes on a white background.
Thereafter I never owned a Sinclair machine but spent hours having the privilege of watching friends or relatives play theirs to "show me how to do it." :-D I got the occasional chance to help type in a long program from some magazine.
All those people went on to do other jobs but I became a programmer much later when my family's fortunes changed and we got .... an Amstrad PC 1640. :-) I missed out on years of learning but I made up for it quite fast. Many years later when the 1640 was so old it was ridiculous, I got my parents to fork up for a generic 386 clone. I never ran Windows 95. I never ran Win NT or 2k. I got 21 5-inch floppy disks from my pal in South Africa with Slackware Linux 0.99 and that was my future course for the next 30 something years.
>21 5-inch floppy disks from my pal in South Africa with Slackware Linux 0.99
Cool! Closest I got to that was trying and failing to install S.u.S.E. (as it was called) 5.2ish from downloaded 3.5" floppy images. Never heard of Linux on 5.25" disks until now. A friend had a 5.25" drive in his computer for laughs until around 2010.
Now I want to rock up at work and plug in an external diskette drive into my macbook and move code around that way. Just rock up to the other team with a diskette, versions 1, 2, 3, final and final-final crossed out, ask "Hey can you do a quick review for this?" I'm gonna see if there's anything like that. I'm sure I have my old diskettes I used for school files somewhere still (that would be 2002-3, not long after I got my first USB stick). I can see they still sell USB diskette drives.
I often joke with people that I possibly have the last working Pentium MMX in the universe under my home desk. That thing has 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disk drives.
It was the first computer I ever saw. 1kb memory. Some game or other was made of black boxes on a white background.
Thereafter I never owned a Sinclair machine but spent hours having the privilege of watching friends or relatives play theirs to "show me how to do it." :-D I got the occasional chance to help type in a long program from some magazine.
All those people went on to do other jobs but I became a programmer much later when my family's fortunes changed and we got .... an Amstrad PC 1640. :-) I missed out on years of learning but I made up for it quite fast. Many years later when the 1640 was so old it was ridiculous, I got my parents to fork up for a generic 386 clone. I never ran Windows 95. I never ran Win NT or 2k. I got 21 5-inch floppy disks from my pal in South Africa with Slackware Linux 0.99 and that was my future course for the next 30 something years.