It is not PC for the PC to Check Your PC
We were at my parents for the weekend and we all got presents. The youngest got a self-propelled Thomas the Tank Engine which fires out plastic smoke balls from its chimney. The boy is very wary of this and walks around behind it in a suspicious crouch with an occasional smile. My daughter was given a Lego Viking boat complete with rapid-fire catapult and snaky sea-monster. This is because my dad is aware that all children in the country will be “doing” the Vikings at some point. I had to put it together last night and tipped all the bits out onto a tray. It was most daunting. Even the horns on the helmets were separate and had to be pushed into place. It took an hour and a half to finish by which time daughter had gone to bed so the complete diorama was set-up on her table. She just woke up in time to see me off this morning and was most happy. What goes around … I remember coming down early one morning to find a huge Lego suspension bridge which my dad had made the night before. It was complete with string for cables and a slender deck which without proper suspension would not have stood up. In the chaos of a visit to the grandparents I don’t often notice much but I did see him explaining pre-stressed concrete bridges to his granddaughter with the aid of … yes … more Lego. He also showed her the model of a Shaduf he had made out of twigs for her cousin AND a windmill that really worked. This reminds me of the Kon Tiki story which I must have mentioned here before. Dad made me a model of the Kon Tiki using twigs and branches we got from the Malvern Hills. It was for a competition at school but I was adamant that it should not be entered because he had made it, not me. Years later I made a model using Balsa and sandpaper of which I was very proud but it got lost in the move – I say lost but I mean in the sense of wrecked as the bits arrived at the new house. I should try again sometime.
Anyway, my present was not wrapped, just handed over in a plastic bag. My old ZX81 complete with 16K RAM pack. There are two games with it – A flight Simulator and some space shoot-em-up; I don’t think I’ve got any tape machine which I could use to load them but it will be interesting to try it for five minutes. I have no manual but it is online here so a test might be carried out tonight if I can wrestle control of the TV away from the boy who wants to watch Wallace and Gromit over and over. I was thinking about how we used to try and squeeze as much into the 1K as we could. Even with a 16K expansion pack, it would not be difficult for one person to understand what every bit and peek and poke actually did to the registers in the CPU. I even wrote a few bits of simple machine code – I had Rodney Zak’s book on Z80 programming though I went onto 6502 later. This helped with my one commercial machine-code program. Well actually it was assembler but who makes that distinction these days? I didn’t get that excited about machine-code; it seemed unnecessarily complicated when you had high-level languages which probably was fore-shadowing. Now I have unlimited space for programs, the thought of going in and doing things at the lowest possible level seems quite exciting. At college, one of the dead-end course involved real-machine code programming to the extent that we had to program using bits of wire and connections to the pin-outs of the chips. It felt like torture at the time but what I wouldn’t give to have one of those boxes now. Still, you can simulate everything on a PC these days so that might be an option … after the Change ringing simulator and Six Pianos and the Fractals and everything else. Time to go and crash this PC
We were at my parents for the weekend and we all got presents. The youngest got a self-propelled Thomas the Tank Engine which fires out plastic smoke balls from its chimney. The boy is very wary of this and walks around behind it in a suspicious crouch with an occasional smile. My daughter was given a Lego Viking boat complete with rapid-fire catapult and snaky sea-monster. This is because my dad is aware that all children in the country will be “doing” the Vikings at some point. I had to put it together last night and tipped all the bits out onto a tray. It was most daunting. Even the horns on the helmets were separate and had to be pushed into place. It took an hour and a half to finish by which time daughter had gone to bed so the complete diorama was set-up on her table. She just woke up in time to see me off this morning and was most happy. What goes around … I remember coming down early one morning to find a huge Lego suspension bridge which my dad had made the night before. It was complete with string for cables and a slender deck which without proper suspension would not have stood up. In the chaos of a visit to the grandparents I don’t often notice much but I did see him explaining pre-stressed concrete bridges to his granddaughter with the aid of … yes … more Lego. He also showed her the model of a Shaduf he had made out of twigs for her cousin AND a windmill that really worked. This reminds me of the Kon Tiki story which I must have mentioned here before. Dad made me a model of the Kon Tiki using twigs and branches we got from the Malvern Hills. It was for a competition at school but I was adamant that it should not be entered because he had made it, not me. Years later I made a model using Balsa and sandpaper of which I was very proud but it got lost in the move – I say lost but I mean in the sense of wrecked as the bits arrived at the new house. I should try again sometime.
Anyway, my present was not wrapped, just handed over in a plastic bag. My old ZX81 complete with 16K RAM pack. There are two games with it – A flight Simulator and some space shoot-em-up; I don’t think I’ve got any tape machine which I could use to load them but it will be interesting to try it for five minutes. I have no manual but it is online here so a test might be carried out tonight if I can wrestle control of the TV away from the boy who wants to watch Wallace and Gromit over and over. I was thinking about how we used to try and squeeze as much into the 1K as we could. Even with a 16K expansion pack, it would not be difficult for one person to understand what every bit and peek and poke actually did to the registers in the CPU. I even wrote a few bits of simple machine code – I had Rodney Zak’s book on Z80 programming though I went onto 6502 later. This helped with my one commercial machine-code program. Well actually it was assembler but who makes that distinction these days? I didn’t get that excited about machine-code; it seemed unnecessarily complicated when you had high-level languages which probably was fore-shadowing. Now I have unlimited space for programs, the thought of going in and doing things at the lowest possible level seems quite exciting. At college, one of the dead-end course involved real-machine code programming to the extent that we had to program using bits of wire and connections to the pin-outs of the chips. It felt like torture at the time but what I wouldn’t give to have one of those boxes now. Still, you can simulate everything on a PC these days so that might be an option … after the Change ringing simulator and Six Pianos and the Fractals and everything else. Time to go and crash this PC
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