Electic dreams

The early days of personal computer in the US may have been dominated by the likes of Apple II, the Tandy TRS-80 the Commodore Vic-20 but in the UK there were a number of other suppliers that preceded the days of the IBM PC. These were the likes of the Sinclair, Atom (BBC Micro), and Research Machines (making early CP/M based PC's).

Of these the first computer I ever owned was a second hand Sinclair ZX81 and I wish I had perhaps persevered with it a bit more. My problem was that I had no way of storing any programs I'd written, something at the time which was normally done on cassette tape. This meant that I had to type each and every program in fresh every time and anyone who ever struggled with the ZX81's rubbery keypad would understand just how frustrating this could be and just how limited the results for 20 minutes of typing could be. Having said that I still have fond memories of the old ZX81 and plugging away writing simple BASIC programs.

The most remarkable thing about the machine was it's low cost - about fifty pounds. Just imagine if the personal computer had evolved more along the lines of the ZX81 instead of the expensive beiges boxes costing thousand of dollars than invaded our desktops and homes instead.

In a recent Guardian article it came to light that Sir Clive Sinclair, the UK's personal computing pioneer, does not actually use a PC as he believes that they are wasteful (in memory and CPU cycles), take ages to boot and that he'd rather pick up the phone than communicate via email. Funnily enough these are thoughts I've already expressed in previous entries in this blog.

Anyway, hat's off to Sir Clive. A real thinker and a guenuine innovator.