Computacalc ZX

[Lardo Boffin]

This arrived today with a zeddy and thought I would share a couple of photos.

Its a bit squashed but hopefully I can improve on that a bit:

But check out the price of gas in the early 80’s!

£83 for six months!!!

And I bet people were still grumbling…

[siggi]

The program can be found there:
https://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/tape/ComputaCalc

Siggi

[Lardo Boffin]

Apparently a rare one! Nice.

[Vorticon]

I wonder how many people used the ZX-81 for business purposes back in the day...

[Moggy]

I wonder how many people used the ZX-81 for business purposes back in the day...

Sinclair user magazine (before it became just another games rag) ran a series of articles regarding this and two that stick in my mind were a company who used it for book-keeping and payroll duties and a one time Olympic athlete who used a fitness/nutrition program. I own a couple of memory/EPROM boards made by an American called Paul Hunter, which is a familiar name among some here and included in my purchase is some correspondence between himself and the original customer for the boards who ran a couple of garden centres in Washington, with a TS1000 being the prime mover re records/book-keeping etc.

There was also a picture in most of the publications at the time, I recall, of a ZX81 based system for work c/w external keyboard, a stacking module system of things various connected by ribbon cable,dot matrix printer and an acoustic coupler modem for inter company communication.

Quite a few universities used it for some experimental works and published papers I also recall and I think it was Anglian water (not quite sure) who only in recent years retired a ZX80 that was used in some water quality/purity regard.

A lot of this goes unnoticed these days possibly because most "zeddites" were children at the time (unlike myself) and therefore only interested in game playing as opposed to any actual computing which is a shame because for all it's supposed short comings the little 81 is actually well equipped scientifically speaking with a full trig, logic and maths package as well as an operating system all packed into an 8k chip. A modern PC, calculator ap notwithstanding, possesses none of the above unless you invest in an expensive maths package so the tools were there albeit sadly unused.

When using Toddy Forth79 the 81 has benchmarked faster than standard Forth machines of the era designed for business use and when using Forth can easily tackle complicated equations and other maths problems, something I dabble in myself, and it can do them in seconds. Somewhere on the forum, just as a side issue, is a link to a sudoku program C/W with a solution finder and just for a giggle I entered what is supposedly the hardest puzzle in the world to solve. The zeddy worked it out in about 10 seconds in slow mode and would be four times quicker in fast mode so not really a slouch in some cases.

Vorsprung durch technik as the saying goes.

[GCHarder]

Some scientific uses see this thread...

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3419

I checked and the website is still available.

See also...

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1722&p=17762&hilit= ... ter#p17762

Uses a TS1500 to control air conditioning units.

There were also ham radio applications and robotics. I also recall a sail boat navigation app was also available.

And don't forget about the Nuclear Power Plants.

Regards;

Greg

[Moggy]

I have to say Greg that having read magazines such as Sync etc and looking at the advertisements and programs therein I always felt that the American users attempted things more serious and were more ambitious regarding Sinclair's first two offerings than folk this side of the puddle.

[Vorticon]

I never found the games on early 80's computers to be particularly compelling as I was not much of an arcade game player, and so for the longest time the only games I owned were Video Chess and Scott Adams Adventure (on the TI 99/4A). I recall doing statistical analysis on lab data in TI Basic in college and painstakingly copying the results by hand on paper for later reference. I later found out that there was a statistics module for the TI, but it was much more fun to program the thing myself!
The ZX-81 had a much lower price point than the TI, at least in 1981, but for some reason was not advertised much in Canada and the US. For the price of the TI console alone I could have gotten a ZX-81, a 16K rampack and the thermal printer and I would have been able to do Pascal, assembly and Forth with that setup, something that would have required hundreds of dollars more before it could be done on the TI (memory expansion, disk system, printer). So for the discerning business, it made a whole lot of sense financially to use ZX-81 systems. Very few did apparently...