3 ms·
To put it in the context, ZX81 came with 1KB RAM. A screenful of a BASIC program could easily fill the whole available memory and the computer would hang. You h
by sedatk 6y ago
To put it in the context, ZX81 came with 1KB RAM. A screenful of a BASIC program could easily fill the whole available memory and the computer would hang. You had to plug a 16KB expansion RAM to make it usable.
- roseway4 6y agoYou were lucky if the 16KB expansion pack stayed put. The connector was notoriously wobbly and unreliable, resulting in a crash and many more hours of copying game code from a magazine.
- ianmcgowan 6y agoMy RAM pack was liberally held in place with blutack - I saw something in the last month or so about a ribbon cable extender that fixed the wobble disconnects. That would have been great on day 3 of typing assembler into a REM statement - we only had one TV in the house. Probably where my penchant for working in the middle of the night comes from still :-)
- zimpenfish 6y agoYeah, my father built me a RAM pack ("I'm not paying that much when I can make one myself!" - he did a lot of embedded work with Z80s back then) and used a ribbon cable for the connector to avoid the wobble.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- elvis70 6y agoAnd this included the VRAM, or rather the variable-size display file! Count 25 bytes + 1 byte per character [1] Hopefully, BASIC tokens were included in the character set. [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/7974 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/7974