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IanBland · 2nd Aug 2017, 11:40 pm

radiotechnican-

Tiny screens? I had a massive 12" monitor for mine. Well, a black and white portable from Rumbelows, anyway. It was a massive investment for teenage me, £49.99, but necessary as I soon discovered like I suspect most similar users did, that the rest of the family are not overly keen on sacrificing watching the living room telly so that one of the family could join the white heat of the information technology revolution.

julie_m

We must remember that whatever the quality of the keyboard, typing on it is painful slow. It sometimes feels like the designers went out of their way to hobble the machine (not really fair of course, it was a bit of a miracle of design); part of the reason for the slowness other than the CPU running at less than 1/4 speed was that any modification to the length of the BASIC program area (i.e. typing another character) meant moving the memory map above it, including the variables area and the display file, every time. IIRC, you could actually make typing a bit faster by CLEARing the variable before editing the program, if there was a significant amount of them (e.g. long strings).

Even so, I always edited in FAST mode. Which was somewhat migraine inducing as the screen flashed and fizzled. It's a wonder it didn't fry the TV!

Talking of which, that little portable was a good investment. It was often my main TV as I moved around various rented flats and rooms in my 20s.

2nd Aug 2017, 11:40 pm	#35
IanBland Hexode Join Date: May 2015 Location: Northampton, Northants, UK. Posts: 380	Re: Sinclair ZX81 radiotechnican- Tiny screens? I had a massive 12" monitor for mine. Well, a black and white portable from Rumbelows, anyway. It was a massive investment for teenage me, £49.99, but necessary as I soon discovered like I suspect most similar users did, that the rest of the family are not overly keen on sacrificing watching the living room telly so that one of the family could join the white heat of the information technology revolution. julie_m We must remember that whatever the quality of the keyboard, typing on it is painful slow. It sometimes feels like the designers went out of their way to hobble the machine (not really fair of course, it was a bit of a miracle of design); part of the reason for the slowness other than the CPU running at less than 1/4 speed was that any modification to the length of the BASIC program area (i.e. typing another character) meant moving the memory map above it, including the variables area and the display file, every time. IIRC, you could actually make typing a bit faster by CLEARing the variable before editing the program, if there was a significant amount of them (e.g. long strings). Even so, I always edited in FAST mode. Which was somewhat migraine inducing as the screen flashed and fizzled. It's a wonder it didn't fry the TV! Talking of which, that little portable was a good investment. It was often my main TV as I moved around various rented flats and rooms in my 20s.