The eighties were a turbulent time. Political turmoil grew out of the Cold War, which wasn’t loss on this teenage programmer. The vocal leaders of the US and the USSR bubbled up often in the pop culture of the era and the esclation of war. It shouldn’t be surprising that I’d create an animation depicting that escalation.
When I first created my Mini ZX81, I had modeled a Timex Sinclair 1000 (TS1000) as well. My intent was always to render them together, but other projects kept getting in the way. Finally getting back to it last week, the results came out better than I expected.
Mixing things up a bit, I thought I’d start off the new year without a game program. Instead, January’s program is Computer Talk, or Comp. Talk for short. Comp. Talk is one of several educational programs I wrote for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. Perhaps it was just the thing to do back in then. Many computer books, especially those that taught programming, had a mix of program genres. Whatever the reason, I wrote Comp. Talk as a way for the ZX81 computer to introduce itself and show a bit of what it could do.
A few things have changed over the list eight years. As I wind down the use of my ZX81 site, incorporating it my main one, much of below is invalid. That doesn’t mean that changes weren’t important at the time. Ideas come and go, and it is good to remember where we came from. Below is a recap of what was.
This years marks the 30th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX81 home computer. To celebrate, over the next year I plan on updating my ZX81 site with site updates and monthly spotlights.
It’s been busy of late. I’d been on vacation for almost 3 weeks with just a few days of work in between. My parents were in town (hi Mom) a couple of weeks ago. Then I was out of town for my wife’s family. That wasn’t really a vacation, though. But I’m back in town and finally getting around to checking my site and doing a little a blogging. So, here are some random thoughts for the day!
Well, I had a weird power outage here at the house today. Once of those drops that goes down a couple times before staying off. Seems most of my electronics made it through okay. However, my daughter’s computer took a powder. It wouldn’t turn on and the LED on the back was blinking. Ugh.
Wow, I ran into a slight problem that I really didn’t expect. I ran out of space on my laptop’s 100G (technically 93GB)! Now, I’ve filled a 200G drive before, but I was converting my Hi-8 video’s to DV format. But, I really didn’t expect to fill my laptop anytime soon. Seems that copyin