Micro-microcomputers!

May 13, 2009 · Posted in At the Micro Shop, Computers and Humour

Once upon a time computers were mouse-less!

Hard to imagine, I know, but we relied completely on the keyboard and our fingers. And believe me - it wasn’t easy, especially when the keyboards were designed for people with very small fingers (about the size of mouse paws, ironically!)

All fingers & thumbs

This cartoon was inspired by having once owned a Sinclair ZX81. Just to remind you what it looked like, here’s a picture:

zx81-hand

These were extremely versatile little devices. For example, if you had a wonky table you could stuff it under the leg that was too short. I’ve also seen them used as door-stops.

If you’re not interested in fascinating technical stuff, switch off now!

The PC I’m using to write this has a fairly modest (by today’s standards) 1 gigabyte of memory. That’s:

1000,000,000 bytes

The ZX81 had one kilobyte of memory. That’s:

1000 bytes (actually it’s 1024 for any pedants reading this)

So my computer has one million times more memory than the ZX81.

To give you an idea of how small a thousand bytes is, at the end of this sentence I’m going to look at the statistics of this document to see how many characters, i.e. bytes, it contains up to this point:

1077!

But let’s not knock the ZX81 too harshly, or its inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair. He was/is a genius. I guess you don’t get to be Chairman of the board of directors of Mensa for seventeen years without a brain cell or two!

Unfortunately, you had to be a bit of a genius (and double-jointed) to use the ZX81.

(Cartoon from Microholics, Page 13)

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