Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

Hello, I'm Bruno and I'm a SW engineer from France.

My father got a ZX81 when I was 8, and I made my first computer steps with it.

When I tell my daughters that we stored the games we copied from the manual on audio tapes, they ask me "what's a tape ?"

Forget tapes, my doughter didn't even know what a 3.5" floppy disk was when I showed to her!! (a 3d printed "save icon"?) LOL

Yup--it's a sure sign we're getting old. I had to explain myself when I told my daughter about encyclopedias being on CD. She knew what a CD was, but what the heck is an "encyclopedia"?

Oh dear what would they make of the things that were part of computing when I was a much younger Moggy, such as ferrite core and Williams-Kilburn Tube memory devices not to mention thermionic valves and Baudot readers for code entry.

My first computer program was written at school on optical cards in 1977 in Maths class.

Each line of the BASIC program had an 80 character optical card.

We had to write the program out, look up the ascii values of the characters, convert that into binary, then colour in the appropriate 'holes' in each column on the optical card in the binary pattern that represented each character, using a soft pencil.

These cards would be bundled up and sent to a university somewhere for batch processing.

A couple of weeks later you'd get a dot-matrix printout on that green striped paper of your program's output, but I tended to get back something like "?SYNTAX ERROR AT LINE 30"

To be honest, at the time I had no idea what I was doing. It was only a few years later when Micros appeared in school and I got a ZX81 and learned to program properly that I realised what it was all about.

Salut Bruno,

Bienvenue sur ce forum.

Juste une chose, quand tu parles à ta fille (ou tes filles), elle te répond toujours en anglais ou-bien ta fille est anglaise?

J'ai toujours eu du mal avec "daughter"... "what's up daughter"

Ravenger wrote: ↑Mon Jan 23, 2023 10:24 pm My first computer program was written at school on optical cards in 1977 in Maths class.

Each line of the BASIC program had an 80 character optical card.

We had to write the program out, look up the ascii values of the characters, convert that into binary, then colour in the appropriate 'holes' in each column on the optical card in the binary pattern that represented each character, using a soft pencil.

These cards would be bundled up and sent to a university somewhere for batch processing.

That sounds like the description Earl Evans of Retrocomputing Roundtable describes his first programming class.