ZX Spectrum

(Machine, Britain)

Got it in 1983, and used it extensively over the next five years, until we got the atarist... and even beyond that, when we'd run out of games for it, the girls would gladly switch back to the good old "pisaćka" (term Go coined). On it I wrote the first (23) versions of solitaire, the enrolment app for MPSŠC (three years in a row), wrote my first SF stories (first as programs, with text in REM lines, then on cassettes, using Ines editor by Žiga Turk, which I regularly bought), learned Z80 assembler (wrote the printer driver for the Seikosha dot-matrix printer we got in MPSŠC), tried some Pascal and even wrote some Forth (!).

And played a lot of games. Despite of, or rather thanks to, the meager graphical and sound capabilities of it, the programmers had to be very resourceful and innovative. What those games were doing is bordering on impossible - they were squeezing out every last bit (literally) of the poor machine's capacity and delivering amazing games.

It's quite easy to get nostalgic about it :).

The memory being sparse - it had only 16K free ram until I expanded it and got whooping 48K - we used all kinds of tricks to use less memory. First, it didn't store the text of the commands, it had a list thereof, so a five-letter command or function would take just one byte. Numbers, however, took their numeric representation plus five bytes of binary, so initializing a variable was costly. The famous

LET a=PI/PI

was actually too long, it took three bytes to the right of the equal sign; this was only two bytes:

LET a=SGN PI


Mentions: 06-VI-1983., 16-VI-1983., 28-VI-1983., january 1984., 07-XII-1984., april 1985., may 1985., 13-VII-1985., september 1985., january 1986., 01-IX-1986., 23-XI-1987., 29-XII-1988., 20-II-1992., 08-III-1992., 05-IX-1994., 29-III-1999., 29-III-2007., 30-XII-2008., 25-II-2017., 27-VII-2018., 12-VIII-2020., atariST, budžinbulevar, Gorana Sredljević (Go), house dictionary, MPSŠC, Rista Stančulov (Rile), solitaire, statcounter.prg, in serbian