I got started programming with a borrowed ZX-81. It was magical, and also absolutely terrible. You could only load and save via tape, which took ages. If I reca

I got started programming with a borrowed ZX-81. It was magical, and also absolutely terrible. You could only load and save via tape, which took ages. If I recall correctly, both the power cord and the giant rectangular 16K RAM expansion we were lucky enough to have plugged into the back of the computer could completely reset it if accidentally brushed against. Books of programs you could type in had a starburst with "1K" in it for those smaller programs that would fit in the limited default RAM. Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTNlMwTi1PTlVxc2M/view?resourcekey=0-kaU6eyAmIVhT3_H8RkHfHA https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTNlMwTi1PTlVxc2M... My uncle would always come up with fun ideas. I remember after we typed in a "put in the angle and velocity and try to shoot a cannonball over the mountain to hit a target", him sitting there and eventually figuring out the necessary parameters to have the projectile land on the target in a single step. The ZX Spectrum (also borrowed or secondhand) we had next was a huge improvement, although still only used tape. Somehow waiting half an hour for "Commando" or "Top Gun" to load from tape made the games seem all the sweeter. When we finally got an (again borrowed) Apple II clone with a disk drive, we thought persistent storage was magical and enthusiastically ported the "High score" routine from one program we typed in to a bunch of others. Actually, we didn't even have a real Apple II. It was a CV-777, although the fact that the chips in these pictures -- https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/npgkhr/cv777_canadian_apple_clone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/npgkhr/cv777_canadi... -- don't all have Asian writing on them make me wonder if it was a clone of a clone or something. Anyway, good times. Always fun to be reminded of a time when I was absolutely fearless: I remember writing an assembly routine on the ZX Spectrum by writing it out on paper, and hand-converting the Z80 opcodes by looking them up in the manual, and expecting it to work.