3 ms·

Presumably ZX rather than ZS? Three months salary sounds high - its main appeal in the UK was the very affordable price point and consequently their ubiquity le

Presumably ZX rather than ZS? Three months salary sounds high - its main appeal in the UK was the very affordable price point and consequently their ubiquity leading to plentiful third party games. Were you in the UK? My Dad was in IT so I got exposed to a few earlier computers. What snagged me was discovering his ZX81 and reading enough of the manual to discover that I could write software myself! I think my Dad was a bit taken aback when I showed him my first program!

nottorp 4y ago
> Were you in the UK? Lol of course he wasn't. He was in Eastern Europe judging by price/salary.
- dcminter 4y ago
  Or they weren't being absolutely literal, or their Uncle wasn't well off (the UK has and had a lot of inequality), or indeed it was a Spectrum clone or import and they were not in the UK. Edit: I'm almost more surprised by the game being pong! Makes sense if it was a not-entirely-compatible clone, but otherwise there was a vast array of games and copying them was trivial (tape to tape). I'm not positive I ever saw pong for the Speccy!
  - ajuc 4y ago
    My uncle worked as an electrical engineer in a helicopter factory in Poland, he was middle class. It was communism so our salaries were just so shitty compared to the west. Also there was no way to get games from the west, people pirated anything they could get and there were newspapers and radio auditions that distributed program listings (some radio even broadcasted C64 or ZX Spectrum programs in a format you could record on tape :) ). I think he wrote the Pong himself or typed it in from some newspaper. Later after communism fell we could at least import pirated games. I got C64 as a first communion gift in 1992 and it was still a great gift at the time and it still costed about half a monthly salary. Only in late 90s/early 00s Poland catched up to the PC etc.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ajuc 4y ago
Yes, ZX Spectrum. I live in Poland, it was still communist at the time, anything from the west was crazy expansive, everybody thought my uncle was crazy when he bought the computer, but he was always a hobby electronic and early adopter.
- kcplate 4y ago
  Some of the best software devs I have ever met were some old graybeards who cut their coding teeth under the old Soviet umbrella. My theory is that the scarcity of cutting edge hardware forced folks to squeeze ever drop of capability out of the hardware that they had available to them via the software.
  - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
    Limitation breeds creativity.

nottorp 4y ago

> Were you in the UK? Lol of course he wasn't. He was in Eastern Europe judging by price/salary.

dcminter 4y ago
Or they weren't being absolutely literal, or their Uncle wasn't well off (the UK has and had a lot of inequality), or indeed it was a Spectrum clone or import and they were not in the UK. Edit: I'm almost more surprised by the game being pong! Makes sense if it was a not-entirely-compatible clone, but otherwise there was a vast array of games and copying them was trivial (tape to tape). I'm not positive I ever saw pong for the Speccy!
- ajuc 4y ago
  My uncle worked as an electrical engineer in a helicopter factory in Poland, he was middle class. It was communism so our salaries were just so shitty compared to the west. Also there was no way to get games from the west, people pirated anything they could get and there were newspapers and radio auditions that distributed program listings (some radio even broadcasted C64 or ZX Spectrum programs in a format you could record on tape :) ). I think he wrote the Pong himself or typed it in from some newspaper. Later after communism fell we could at least import pirated games. I got C64 as a first communion gift in 1992 and it was still a great gift at the time and it still costed about half a monthly salary. Only in late 90s/early 00s Poland catched up to the PC etc.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ajuc 4y ago

Yes, ZX Spectrum. I live in Poland, it was still communist at the time, anything from the west was crazy expansive, everybody thought my uncle was crazy when he bought the computer, but he was always a hobby electronic and early adopter.

kcplate 4y ago
Some of the best software devs I have ever met were some old graybeards who cut their coding teeth under the old Soviet umbrella. My theory is that the scarcity of cutting edge hardware forced folks to squeeze ever drop of capability out of the hardware that they had available to them via the software.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  Limitation breeds creativity.