Hi Terry ! My father bought it in kit and built it. It used to be my very first computer. Loads of hours of fun with this little black machine. I remember the loading speed with a tape was about 1Kb per minute !
My dad bought our ZX81 from Farmers in Auckland in 1982. They had a special offer on the ZX81 (with PSU), 16K RAM pack and 2 games for $200. I still have it to this day but it's not my main ZX81. The main one I use has composite mod, 32K built in RAM and an SD card reader that's soldered onto the edge connector.
My mate got one of these for xmas back in 1981 back in Sheffield, UK - our family couldn't afford it. I'd have been 9 years old and I was hooked from the first program entered on that squidgy keyboard! Fast-forward 43 years and I'm still working in IT, albeit on the other side of the world in Australia. Eventually he upgraded to a 48K ZX Spectrum and our school got the BBC Micros, so I didn't have to put up with that keyboard too long haha. I ended up being the unpaid computer expert at my secondary school, since the teachers were out of their depth!
8:25 Was UHF not standard by the 1980s in Britain and New Zealand? The US had a law requiring any TV of a certain size ( I think it was 20") must include an UHF tuner in IIRC, 1963. I do recall at one point in the 70s, my family owned an old TV without a UHF tuner and so we had an external UHF tuner that output the RF on channel 2. So you had to switch to channel 2 and then tune the external UHF tuner to watch the cartoons on the UHF stations.
I found your channel in a rather strange way. I have a Panasonic JR-100up, I bought it second hand in 1984 with just the computer, RF modulator, (it is a seperate item that plugs into a DC sockect and the video out socket on the computer), and the PSU. No manuals or software. I must be the only person in England, (if not Europe), with one. LOL. Ever since I got the internet in 2015 I sometimes do a Google search for it and see if there is ANY information. I usually find nothing of any use. However, today it showed a link to the VCF forum. (I'm not a member), where I found you mentioned the JR-100 in 2007. From there I found you are still active AND have a YT channel. So here I am. Subbed.
It would have been difficult in that day to just create the basic on rom, but they not only did that, but incorporated the many different actions per key, and incorporated that into the basic with syntax checking. You couldn't enter a line unless it was syntactically correct. Other computer didn't have that for 10 to 15 years later. These computers were cheap, but there design was brilliant. I had the zx81, and TS2068. After that I was in the Navy and missed all the QL stuff. I think the QL with the disk drive built in would have been awesome at the time.
Really the ZX81 was the birth of home computing in the UK.
Hi Terry ! My father bought it in kit and built it. It used to be my very first computer. Loads of hours of fun with this little black machine. I remember the loading speed with a tape was about 1Kb per minute !
We had the patience of Job those days! (-:
My dad bought our ZX81 from Farmers in Auckland in 1982. They had a special offer on the ZX81 (with PSU), 16K RAM pack and 2 games for $200. I still have it to this day but it's not my main ZX81. The main one I use has composite mod, 32K built in RAM and an SD card reader that's soldered onto the edge connector.
My mate got one of these for xmas back in 1981 back in Sheffield, UK - our family couldn't afford it. I'd have been 9 years old and I was hooked from the first program entered on that squidgy keyboard! Fast-forward 43 years and I'm still working in IT, albeit on the other side of the world in Australia. Eventually he upgraded to a 48K ZX Spectrum and our school got the BBC Micros, so I didn't have to put up with that keyboard too long haha. I ended up being the unpaid computer expert at my secondary school, since the teachers were out of their depth!
8:25 Was UHF not standard by the 1980s in Britain and New Zealand? The US had a law requiring any TV of a certain size ( I think it was 20") must include an UHF tuner in IIRC, 1963. I do recall at one point in the 70s, my family owned an old TV without a UHF tuner and so we had an external UHF tuner that output the RF on channel 2. So you had to switch to channel 2 and then tune the external UHF tuner to watch the cartoons on the UHF stations.
It was not standard in NZ until the mid or later 1980s from memory. In 1980 we only had 3 TV channels and I'm pretty sure they were all VHF
@@tezzaNZ Thanks.
I found your channel in a rather strange way.
I have a Panasonic JR-100up, I bought it second hand in 1984 with just the computer, RF modulator, (it is a seperate item that plugs into a DC sockect and the video out socket on the computer), and the PSU. No manuals or software.
I must be the only person in England, (if not Europe), with one. LOL.
Ever since I got the internet in 2015 I sometimes do a Google search for it and see if there is ANY information. I usually find nothing of any use. However, today it showed a link to the VCF forum. (I'm not a member), where I found you mentioned the JR-100 in 2007. From there I found you are still active AND have a YT channel. So here I am. Subbed.
It would have been difficult in that day to just create the basic on rom, but they not only did that, but incorporated the many different actions per key, and incorporated that into the basic with syntax checking. You couldn't enter a line unless it was syntactically correct. Other computer didn't have that for 10 to 15 years later. These computers were cheap, but there design was brilliant.
I had the zx81, and TS2068. After that I was in the Navy and missed all the QL stuff. I think the QL with the disk drive built in would have been awesome at the time.
Yes, that's a good points.