One day Dad showed me his ZX80, which was his very own first personal computer. I was immediately captivated by its diminutive size, the awful keyboard, the screen flicker on each keypress, but also that it actually worked as a real computer and that you could easily write some useful, albeit simple programs on it. We didn't have much luck loading Dad's old tapes back into it at the time, but years later, when I had learned C and my programming skills had improved, I wrote my own converters that could parse the tape audio back into runnable .O files and reproduce the listings.
Its 16K RAMPACK didn't work for some time but during my university years I found some spare 4116's that brought it back to life. Later I wrote an Enigma simulator in Z80 assembler, just to see if I could pull it off, which I did. Took a lot of tries to finally get it loaded on the real device, but I felt so proud when my hard work was running so well on that little box!
Dad had always supported me in my endeavours and he enjoyed that I appreciated his dear old computer as much as he did. Sadly, he unexpectedly passed away last year. But I'm sure that he knows how I will continue to take loving care of his equipment. To me, it's Personal Computing in more ways than one. And I hope that I can one day pass it down to kids of my own, who will then hopefully like it as much as I do. For whatever these plucky computers may lack in horsepower, they make up for it by inspiring the mind to work around the limitations.
Miss you Dad, we've had so much fun together!
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