What is on Your Mind?

Over the years I have written light hearted poems about computers and computing...
Hopefully this will put a smile on your face...
If you like it I might post another one...


My XMAS prezzy.
---------------

'Twas 1982, after the Falklands campaign,
Christmas was about to come round once again,
I fondled a prezzy with my name on the tag,
A fairly big box, wrapped up and placed in a bag.

Christmas day came along and like a kid I was up,
To get to this box before my new pup...
Got his teeth into it to chew it to bits,
Just like he did to my electronic assembly kits.

Well I ripped off the wrapping as fast as I could,
Just to be confronted with a box made of wood,
I opened this box and to my surprise,
There was another wrapped box in front of my eyes.

I eagerly tore of this wrapping with ease,
To get to the box that was beginning to tease,
On removing the wrapping my jaw dropped to the floor,
Te see a Sinclair Spectrum made me look on with awe.

I opened it up and saw all those bits,
A bunjy keyboard, sockets and various slits,
A tape, some cables, a power supply too,
Books inside also, that amounted to two.

It was six in the morning and I had little sleep,
And all I could think of was assembling this heap,
So that I could play games and learn how to code,
In Sinclair BASIC, which was its standard mode.

I connected it up and to my surprise,
My wife had purchased its latest disguise,
The 48K version without add-on RAM,
Larger games could be played, with more slap bash and wham.

Set up the TV so that now I could see,
All those 8+ glorious colours in front of me,
Switched on the thing and what did I get,
A blank black, then blank white screen on my TV set.

Connected my tape player to the mike and ear holes,
Of this new computer using the cable jack poles,
Read the book on how to load in the code,
LOAD ""<ENTER> the book said was its normal mode.

Put the tape in the player, and then pressed ~Play~,
LOAD ""<ENTER> showed red and blue lines on the outside of the display.
This changed to yellow and blue along with strange sounds,
Soon this was over and the program started doing its rounds.

Went through the tape and had now got the bug,
To learn how to code and also become smug,
Just like the big boys who coded for PCs,
Which at that time were enormous IBM XTs.

This Spectrum was on permanently until I decorated my room,
At the beginning of this year, this was to settle its doom,
Of being put away, back into its box of which I've still got,
Along with the original accessories, books and the lot.

It was on 24/7 monitoring amateur packet,
And had been on for years listening to this racket,
Until sadly my decorating got the better of me,
So back into its box it is going to be.

I'll open it up when I feel like a weep,
Remembering Christmas Eve 1982 without any sleep,
Then so eager to get my hands onto this treasure,
The one thing that gave me many, MANY hours of pleasure...

(C)2005, B.Walker, G0LCU.

BYE BYE Spectrum...

Now did that raise a smile?

I've still got my SPECTRUM somewhere.......

I last used it to reset the TV after one of the kids thought it a good idea to delete all the analogue channels after the country went digital only broadcast and the TV refused to fire up without a channel to have as a default.


Good on Sir Clive. The only problem was it permitting GOTO in the BASIC language. GOSUB was there and would have been much better to leave it at that. It's a shame that csh allows GOTO because that causes me no-end of headaches when we try to convert code to ksh as we migrate applications.



Robin

At the time I was studying Theology... and ordered for my at the time wife a Sinclair QL...
When she left 2 years later I found myself with the QL not knowing what to do with it... Took me another 3 years to find an interest and then I started programming in superbasic...

Hi rbatte1...

Nice! Been there done that. I used the Speccy RF output to set up colour TVs many years ago.

I wrote a TestCard program in BASIC with an Assembly piece of code the write lines and
colour bars inside the border loaded into a REM statement.

RANDOMISE USR <address>

I remember it well... ;oD

---------- Post updated at 08:00 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:44 PM ----------

Hi vbe...

Way COOL.

I still have my QL AND my Brother M1109 ribbon printer that I purchased with it.
Both bought in 1984. The printer is connected to my AMIGA A1200 which has been
on 24/7 for about 18+ years now. YUP that printer still works and is 30 years old.

Just pulled out the Microdrives I got with the QL; do you remember:-

Abacus.
Quill.
Easel.
Archive.

The four free cartridges that the QL came with...

It took me hours to get the bizarre QL serial port to work with the printer too.

The printer works flawlessly on my A500/A1200 via the parallel port.

I found a 6800(8)(0) disassembler written in QL SuperBASIC. Slow, but way cool.

Ahhh, the memories...

Makes me remember my old Sinclair ZX81 with 16k RAM extension.
My last programmings were a real good machine-code translator, and then a couple of action games in ZX-Basic, translated to fast machine code, and saved to tape.
But no sound, only black on white. And hitting a (foil!)key too tight caused a loose contact in the 16k RAM box, and a hanging or reset: the typed code of the last hours was lost.
A friend had a ZX Spectrum with 48k. It's Basic was more powerful and faster. And lots of games available...
Another friend had a C64...

Had a C64, but didn't really understand or take advantage of it, just used it for games. A real old IBM PC with ROM basic is where I started. Now that was *slow*. An interpreter so slow you could see the letters scrolling like teletype...