Happy birthday Spectrum!

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:46:00 +0200

The first computer that I ever laid my hands on celebrates its birthday today. The venerable Spectrum 48k is 30 years old counting from the launch day and google UK decided to honer this day with the image you see on the right. That brings back some very good memories.

What a marvellous machine it was, how it made me dream, how eager I was to learn how all those letters and numbers came together to form something that seamed so much more complex.

It's been a long time since I played with a ZX Spectrum but emulators come to the rescue of the nostalgic. I'm using fuse to remember the good old fun (there's a good one for Android named Marvin).

Here's a my half a minute Hello World in ZX Spectrum BASIC:

10 BORDER INT (RND*6)
20 INPUT n$
30 PRINT "Hello ";n$;"!"
40 GO TO 10

And for for those of you that didn't go through a "spectrum" phase, here is more or less what it would look like:

I remember reading a book named Chaos (I forgot the name of the author), a book about fractals and strange attractors and implementing the algorithms in book. It's was wonderful to see those beautiful images show up on the TV.

Those were some good days of exploring the wonders of programming…

pages tagged history

Happy birthday Spectrum!