Happy 45th Birthday to the Sinclair ZX81!
-
@tsturm I did much of the design, but there were half a dozen of us writing the code. The challenging bit was to find something for the boss to write that was interesting and important but not critical path, as he kept having to stop writing code to go off and do boss things.
@TimWardCam In my case it was a team of about 6 core developers.
I was helping to set up a computer lab at a company of a friend of my parents as a weekend job and I was like - "Hey these Mega STs are cool, I'm writing some games in assembler on my ST!"
The programmers stopped what they were doing and all looked at each other, then looked at me. "Do you want to work here for the summer?"
That's how I ended up spending an intense summer writing I/O chip drivers in 68K assembly.
-
@tsturm I did much of the design, but there were half a dozen of us writing the code. The challenging bit was to find something for the boss to write that was interesting and important but not critical path, as he kept having to stop writing code to go off and do boss things.
@TimWardCam Talking about this puts me into a nostalgic mood. 68K systems were so much fun to program for. A great clean CPU architecture.
-
@TimWardCam In my case it was a team of about 6 core developers.
I was helping to set up a computer lab at a company of a friend of my parents as a weekend job and I was like - "Hey these Mega STs are cool, I'm writing some games in assembler on my ST!"
The programmers stopped what they were doing and all looked at each other, then looked at me. "Do you want to work here for the summer?"
That's how I ended up spending an intense summer writing I/O chip drivers in 68K assembly.
@tsturm Oh yes, the ST as well, that was fun too.
-
@TimWardCam Talking about this puts me into a nostalgic mood. 68K systems were so much fun to program for. A great clean CPU architecture.
@tsturm Give or take when you put odd numbers into an A register on one of the earlier chips ... but yes, much cleaner than anything else that was around.
-
@tsturm Oh yes, the ST as well, that was fun too.
@TimWardCam Oh wow. I had forgotten that this was also a GST product.
-
@tsturm Give or take when you put odd numbers into an A register on one of the earlier chips ... but yes, much cleaner than anything else that was around.
@TimWardCam Nothing is perfect, but in university they made me learn x86 assembly and I will never complain about any other assembly language after that.
-
@tsturm Oh yes, the ST as well, that was fun too.
@TimWardCam Is there a written history of GST and its impact on that era of computer history?
-
@TimWardCam Is there a written history of GST and its impact on that era of computer history?
@tsturm Not that I'm aware of. We were just a bunch of kids having fund and being paid for it.
-
@tsturm Not that I'm aware of. We were just a bunch of kids having fund and being paid for it.
@TimWardCam That's the best way to do it.
-
Happy 45th Birthday to the Sinclair ZX81!
Release Date: March 5, 1981
@tsturm 'twas not my first computer but a classmate had one so it was the first one I met in person
