RIP Sir Clive

[Valentin Albillo]

(09-20-2021 01:33 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  I had wanted to have my own computer long before that, but a Commodore PET 2001 or Tandy TRS 80 (or an Apple II...) were far out of reach. And neither of them would have taught me as much about electronics, computing and software as "pimping" the ZX81 did.

Same here, but on the software front rather than hardware. At the time the ZX81 was released I had already extensively used a real computer (not a glorified calculator), the HP-85, a quality machine but tremendously expensive, way way out of my reach.

Then the ZX81 entered the picture and I could easily afford one, with 16K RAM expansion and all. The hardware was quite poor: the keyboard, the wobbling 16K expansion which made me lose my programs all the time whenever I pressed a key too hard or something else. But, it had a pretty decent if very slow BASIC *and* creating machine code (Z80A assembler) directly on it was perfectly possible (and even easy), which ran at (for the time) tremendous speed. That I couldn't do with the HP-85, with its proprietary Capricorn CPU and no easily-available info on its instruction set or any way to create binary programs using just the bare-bones machine, you needed the very expensive and hard-to-get Assembler ROM (though I eventually managed to do it nevertheless.)

Thus, I thoroughly studied the Z80A instruction set and soon was able to assemble by hand a number of utility routines (mainly graphics ones) and fast-running full-machine-code video games and hybrids of part BASIC, part machine-code. Matter of fact, I intend to upload a number of them to my site as part of my newly-created Project HAM.

It was extremely fun, I learned a lot about machine-code programming, and I heartily thank Sir Clive for it. May he rest in peace.

Regards.
V.