An ode to my first ever computer...

[Rinzler]

LOL - dug this out while rooting around my files the other day. You'll probably only get this if you're British and over 35!

Ah, the ZX81 from Sinclair,
The first computer I had,
Some sci-fi kit that wasn't quite shit,
Surely this was no mere fad.

And wonderful it was,
This box of tecchy delight,
Touch pad keys, you could rest it on your knees,
And brimming with 1K might.

At first it was a charm,
You could even code your own program,
'Let x=1', type 'Stop' then 'Run',
It would just amaze and astound your nan.

And games there were, such games!
Like number sort and shoot the 'D',
The loading screen would make mum scream,
Cos it looked bad, and the thing was on HP.

But soon needs must, and upgrade time!
And you'd invest in the 16k ram pack,
Yet it came at cost when your program was lost,
Cos it wasn't attached with blu-tack.

Because fuck! that thing would wobble,
And sometimes things wouldn't just load,
You'd type all day, then 'Save' and pray,
That this time the tape wasn't blowed.

So in time it began to pall,
Especially when you saw next-door's C64,
Upgrade to a Speccy, maybe an Acorn Eleccy,
Or that Oric on Dixon's shop floor.

Thus it passed, as things do in time,
That zx machine from Sinclair,
And though you may giggle at all its little niggles,
To do so would be unfair...

Because though Clive crashed and Sinclair was dashed,
By the QL and C5 debacles,
The spirit of Sinc lives on, I think,
And may indeed lift us from the shackles.

For such shackles there are today,
In this world under Microsoft's heel,
But Mr Gates, if there's one thing he hates,
It's that Linux OS appeal.

For the man who made Linux once had a toy,
A product of Sir Clive's Surrey abode,
A Sinclair QL, which, true, didn't do well,
But upon this the man learnt to code.

So I say thanks to this hope of reason,
To Linus and his skill with machine-level hex,
And thanks to Clive, and how he did strive,
From what started,
With the Sinclair,
ZX!

[Styx26]

I'm not old enough or British to get it, but the poem was enjoyable and rhymed in a clever way. I have similar feelings when I think about the first computer my family had; Windows 94 MS-DOS with single A Floppy Drive. I kept playing this Russian block game over and over... ah the memories...
(grins sheepishly) Didn't mean to incur any insults, honestly... Thanks for sharing this!

[Saerrael]

Ah, I loved this. And it took me back to the very first computer my family ever owned ; an Atari 800XL. Memories of tapes and cassettes and learning Basic... Thank you for sharing, DeMalachine.

[Beguile's Mistress]

Sid!  The Commodor 64!

[Rinzler]

Ah, I loved this. And it took me back to the very first computer my family ever owned ; an Atari 800XL. Memories of tapes and cassettes and learning Basic... Thank you for sharing, DeMalachine.

Learning basic was such fun. Especially when one went into Rumbelows and had a quick go on one of the display computers:

10 Print "Penis"
20 Goto 10

Very few of the staff knew what the Escape key was for in them days.  ;D

[Saerrael]

Learning basic was such fun. Especially when one went into Rumbelows and had a quick go on one of the display computers:

10 Print "Penis"
20 Goto 10

Very few of the staff knew what the Escape key was for in them days.  ;D

Hahaha!

I kinda wrote interactive stories back then. God, all the strings, gotos and what not...

[Crazy]

IF THENs and FOR NEXTs - I wrote some rather lengthy text adventures back in the day.

I learned to code on an Atari 400 and a Tandy 1000 SX.  1300 lines of Tic-Tac-Toe! 

I remember it was a big deal when they invented the floppy disk.  People were blown away by the disk drive.

Tape deck took forever,  Please wait five minutes...  and if it failed to load it would say that forever.


Good poem,  I understood most of it,  and the rhythm was right on!

[Rinzler]

The turning point for me, code wise, was when I got an Acorn Electron - BBC BASIC! God, that was an awesome BASIC - PROCs, user-definable functions, and the ability to include lines of 6502 assembler code too! Figured out how to do sideways scrolling and screen-memory collision detections, though I was kind of lazy, and can remember making lots of calls to the OS  :-[