h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I remember him banging on about WSI in about 1986. The official Sinclair site is, I'm afraid to say, a bit of a sad affair, selling as it does two types of tiny little radios, and providing a link for C5 spares.

(mind you, there is a cool picture of a C5 a bunch of loonies tinkered with and then drove at 150mph to set the electric powered landspeed record! )

"not only can I imagine trying to use assembler on that lcd screen, I have done."

Well when I were a lad we 'ad to program computers in octal, by flicking switches!

Mechanical switches?

Aye.

You were lucky. We had to use wires. And program in binary.

They never 'ad binary when I were lad. We c'dnt afford ONEs. We 'ad to write all our programs wi' just zeros. But we were 'appy.

"I don't know about *controlling* a nuclear power station - the amount of heat my laptop generates, it could probably *replace* a nuclear power station."

Thanks for typing that Jim! It made my engineer's brain turn flipflops! Perpetual motion ahoy!

H.

Talking about using a Z80A chip to control a nuclear power station might not be as daft as it sounds....

After all, NASA's busy searching for old 8086 chips to keep their shuttle fleet in the air! Scary isn't it, the desktop computer your looking at now is probably several generations more advanced than the space shuttle and what are we using them for? Posting smileys

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/1985138.stm)

Voyager 2 has an onboard computer with less than 1K memory as I recall and that's close to leaving the Solar System.
It's just all fancy graphics these days.
You still can't beat Lunar Jetman for a game

(Orcus, 1985 Lunar Jetman World Champion - self appointed )

Your Guide Entry has just been picked from Peer Review by one of our Scouts, and is now heading off into the Editorial Process, which ends with publication in the Edited Guide. We've therefore moved this Review Conversation out of Peer Review and to the entry itself.

If you'd like to know what happens now, check out the page on 'What Happens after your Entry has been Recommended?' at EditedGuide-Process. We hope this explains everything.

Thanks for contributing to the Edited Guide!

Congratulations! About time too! The conversation in here was starting to wander off topic a little (for a change!)

Whaddya mean about time? It was only available for reccomendation today.

Tsk. I dunno, Impatience!

Nice one Hoovooloo.

Thanks!

Is it me, or has this entry prompted an outbreak of Spectrum nostalgia among certain Researchers. I note that at the time of writing Croz U96736 is, according to his handle "currently performing a Quirkafleeg" (presumably due to the presence of some small furry animals... Readers of Fat Freddie's Cat will know what I mean) and U40285 Dr. E. Vibenstein has just apparently suffered an R Tape loading error, 0:1.

Is anyone else suddenly Speccified?

H.

Well, I now have the theme music from Manic Miner as my ringtone .

Congratulations, Hoo! I really liked it too (I've just got a bonus pick, so someone beat me to this one).

on the entry!


I always loved that room-name: 'We must perform a Quirkafleeg!'

I can't remember the film, now, but i am absolutely *convinced* i heard someone say it in one once!

Anyone know it?


JSW *RULED*
spiff

I have just read with great interest your article it is interesting how this article could develop if all the various opinions were follow up. Personally I think you made a very good job by keeping it brief factual and interesting. It would be very easy to get carried away, I recall reading an article in Sinclair user about a user who had a ZX81 expanded to 1 Meg of RAM if that’s not getting carried away I don’t know what is.

Hi 206701 (or can I just call you 206?).

Can I make a suggestion? Click that button on the screen marked "Preferences", and give yourself a name of some kind. 206701 is so impersonal, you know?

Also, go to your personal space and click "edit" and put some text there. Doesn't matter what it is, "hello it's me" would be plenty. It'll allow people to leave a message for you there in future. Specifically it will allow an Assistant Community Editor (ACE) to come and say hi and recommend all sorts of things you can do to make your experience of h2g2 better. I hope you enjoy the site as much as I do!

Now, onto your comments...

Thanks! Believe me, the temptation to get carried away was great indeed.

A MEG of RAM on a ZX81! Fantastic! How did they address it? The Z80 only had an eight bit data bus and eight bit registers, so it could only address 64K of memory at a time (ROM or RAM), so presumably they did page-switching or something - but at 64K per page thats (counts on fingers...) SIXTEEN pages! And what on EARTH could you write for a ZX81 which would need such prodigious resources??? The mind fairly boggles...



H.