Hello from Germany
Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2021 10:19 am
Hello,
becoming 60 early next year I have the luxury of being already in early retirement.
My main hobby is currently my grand daughter who became 3 a few days ago.
But since there is still plenty of time available I wanted to get back to my first computer love which was a ZX81. I got one borrowed from a friend in the late 80ies. This is what I started programming with. Being very short on money at that time and without today's internet I was limited to literature I got by chance. Due the limitations of the small machine I soon discovered the need to look into machine code and then I got hold of the article "Klartext für den ZX81" ("plaintext for the ZX81" https://archive.org/details/klartext-fur-den-zx81). That was talking about programming in machine code (not assembler!) Very interesting but also very tedious to use especially when you had to use a tape player every time it crashed. Then I found a program showing hi-res graphics which totally blew my mind.
So much that I still think about it more than 40 years later!
But I somehow started my professional life in chemistry which was not too bad (and allowed my early retirement
). But starting a family brought many other priorities so I lost this subject out of sight. I continued doing a little programming (Pascal, PHP, Java, Python) but only as a hobby never professional. At least this gave me a good understanding on how computers work which helped in my career even if I stayed outside IT.
The hardware had all been gone over the years, so I re-started my adventure with the ZX81 using the EightyOne emulator in connection with FASM-ZX. This is again a mind blowing experience: "What has happened in all those years?"
It is so easy now to enter assembler code (and mix with Basic). If it crashes just correct your code and start again.
While I am making progress it seems I may run into issues which eventually may not root in my personal programming skills. This is where I hope this forum may help.
cheers
becoming 60 early next year I have the luxury of being already in early retirement.
My main hobby is currently my grand daughter who became 3 a few days ago.
But since there is still plenty of time available I wanted to get back to my first computer love which was a ZX81. I got one borrowed from a friend in the late 80ies. This is what I started programming with. Being very short on money at that time and without today's internet I was limited to literature I got by chance. Due the limitations of the small machine I soon discovered the need to look into machine code and then I got hold of the article "Klartext für den ZX81" ("plaintext for the ZX81" https://archive.org/details/klartext-fur-den-zx81). That was talking about programming in machine code (not assembler!) Very interesting but also very tedious to use especially when you had to use a tape player every time it crashed. Then I found a program showing hi-res graphics which totally blew my mind.
So much that I still think about it more than 40 years later!
But I somehow started my professional life in chemistry which was not too bad (and allowed my early retirement
). But starting a family brought many other priorities so I lost this subject out of sight. I continued doing a little programming (Pascal, PHP, Java, Python) but only as a hobby never professional. At least this gave me a good understanding on how computers work which helped in my career even if I stayed outside IT. The hardware had all been gone over the years, so I re-started my adventure with the ZX81 using the EightyOne emulator in connection with FASM-ZX. This is again a mind blowing experience: "What has happened in all those years?"
It is so easy now to enter assembler code (and mix with Basic). If it crashes just correct your code and start again.
While I am making progress it seems I may run into issues which eventually may not root in my personal programming skills. This is where I hope this forum may help.
cheers