[Graham G3ZVT]

I taught myself Z80 assembler with the aid of two books I bought round about 1983 I prided myself that my "pinnacle of achievement" was a real-time slow-scan TV application on my ZX81, as you typed on the keyboard it fetched the bitmaps for the characters from ROM called subroutines for tones corresponding to black or white pixles, called the tone for line sync did that 120 times, then the coup de grace, 8 lines of an 8 level greyscale before calling the frame sync routine.

It generated a 8X8 character matrix and I was really pleased with it as it was achieved without reference to any prior art, but I was also frustrated because I didn't know anyone who I could bounce ideas with.

In truth my code was probably naive and inelegant. It taught me concepts like endianness and two compliment.

I sometimes wonder if with the right mentors I would have got into development and coding for a living, some unlikely types of my acquaintance did!