Your childhood is now 40 years old (ZX81)


levi

Still fresh, damnit!
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A nice look back at one of the machines that we played with in our childhoods. As it says, the ZX81 was hard to get hold of and had a disappointing keyboard (although no more disappointing that that of the ZX80 according to my recollection), but it did pave the way to the ZX spectrum which even as a user of competing systems during my youth, I have to admit it helped kick start the idea of many homes having a computer.

 
I restored/upgraded my childhood ZX81 (TS1000 in NA) not too long ago, posted about it a few times in another thread.



 
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I actually never played with a ZX81/ZX80, are there any childhood memory of games you played on it?

I did play with systems that had a Z80 CPU, like Sega Master System / Mega Drive; and my trusted calculator Ti-83 which I liked programming for (which looks somewhat similar to the quality of games on the ZX81).
 

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Apparently the only games genuinely still kind of worth playing on the old '81 is 3D Monster Maze and 49er. There's been more that's come to the surface since (a Brazilian kind of Pitfall game) and some releases this century for the old machine, but back in the day, most of us sufficed with 3D Monster Maze and it's T-Rex.
 
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I remember watching my older sisters play hangman on it, but at the age I was, just having characters pop up on the screen as i randomly hit keys seemed amazing.
 
Microsoft release date back to 1975 with Altair BASIC. I wasn't born then either. But yeah, I didn't personally see any microsoft software running until about 1989 when I saw my first IBM compatible PC. I got my most experience with it working in IT support in a factory that was running a mix of DOS2, DOS6, Windows 3.1 and Win NT 3.51 in the early 90s. But I've never bought a machine with microsoft software on it, and the only machines I've inherited second hand containing it I've blatted with linux before even booting it up.
 
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