04.29.07
Posted in Culture, Modern Life, Tech Nostalgia at 11:12 pm by thomas
As a follow-up to my post about the ZX Spectrum last week – I was feeling nostalgic and was googling up sites with information about the home computers of the 80s when I stumbled over this amazing book: The ZX Spectrum Book – 1982 to 199x
For starters, the book is about the same size as the original Spectrum computer and the cover is one big picture of the machine – when you unwrap the book, it looks like you have a ZX Spectrum on your table! That alone is pure genius.
The content is great, too. It’s a lovingly designed overview of some 230 classic games that made the Spectrum a benchmark in game development. All the expected games are there, The Hobbit, Jet Pac, Ant Attack, but then there are quite a lot of games that I never even heard of and that sound like they were a lot of fun. Time to go and load up an emulator and take a look…
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04.23.07
Posted in Culture, Modern Life, Tech Nostalgia at 10:35 pm by thomas
April 23 2007 marks the 25th birthday of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. No other home computer had more impact in Europe during the early 80s and no other single machine in history has inspired so many teenagers to become engineers, programmers and designers.
The computer itself was a stroke of pure genius. Small, powerful, cheap and it looked damn good compared to the beige Apple II clones of the time. It’s unique single-keystroke method of Basic programming was a huge advantage for beginners since it prevented typos from frustrating the programmer. It featured eight colors in two shades (Wow!), a little beeper for sound (Yay!) and an audio cassette interface that worked pretty much every time. Well, almost every time.
But the real genius of Clive Sinclair was the other thing in the box: The manual. The ZX Spectrum programming manual was probably the most comprehensive programming manual ever created for a computer by its manufacturer. Clive Sinclair cared about the users of his computer. He was a visionary who desperately wanted this machine to change how people learned to program, and the Spectrum manual documents this on every page.
And then of course there are the games. The Spectrum taught a whole generation how to program and had enough power and features to let them create the one thing they really, really wanted: Games.
Today the Spectrum is looking back at an astonishing software library of more than 14000 titles. Many of these games were the first of their kind and their rich heritage lives on in today’s entertainment software industry.
And many of our leading programmers are today looking back at the day 25 years ago when they opened that black, glossy cardboard box with the rainbow stripes in the corner, the day when their very own ZX Spectrum for the first time showed it’s fuzzy message on the TV in the living room:
© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd
Happy Birthday, Speccy!
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04.11.07
Posted in PhotoBlog: Camera Porn, Photography at 12:04 am by thomas
I thought I will maybe spend a couple of blog posts over the next months showing off some of the cameras in my collection. Let’s start off with one of the latest additions to my ever growing empire of vintage Kodaks: The Kodak Duo Six-20 Series II.
This camera was built some time between 1937 and 1939 and is now just about seventy years old. It’s in remarkably good shape for that age and I’ve already been running a couple of rolls of film through it and I have to say it feels like a factory new camera. The leather shows some wear and the original manual that came with it is in pretty bad shape.
At some point in its history, maybe after the Second World War, the camera was given as a present to Richie, probably a younger boy, since the manual is marked in pencil “For Richie” and contains a couple of handwritten notes on how to use the camera that sound like they were aimed at a boy in his early teens.
Well, Richie kept good care of his camera.
The Duo-Six20 range of cameras takes pictures on 620 format film that is identical in size to modern 120 film, but the spools are shorter and so 120 film has to be respooled onto vintage metal 620 spools to be of any use. The negative size is 6×4.5 centimeters, or about 1 5/8 x 2 1/4 inches. This together with the large and clear lens leads to very nice, high-resolution prints in a – to our modern eyes – slightly odd aspect ratio.
In 1937 this camera cost around US$55, which translates into about US$1700 of today’s money (using the unskilled wage range method), so this was a very expensive camera in its time, much more expensive than a typical 620 folder in the late 1930s, like the Jiffy ($9) or the Vigilant ($15).
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04.03.07
Posted in Games, Modern Life at 12:14 am by thomas
Sometime in late 1983 the owners of Sinclair Spectrum home computers in Europe were witnesses to the debut of the first true isometric 3D computer game – Ant Attack. The game was simply a revelation!
The author, Sandy White, has a page up about the Making Of of Ant Attack, and there you can also play the game in a Java Spectrum emulator. The page took me right back to my mis-spent childhood and I distinctly remember the first time I was loading up Ant Attack and how the 3D environment of the game fascinated me.
There it was! The tiny Spectrum suddenly contained a three-dimensional world you could run around in. This was so different from all the 2D platform games of the time and was certainly an inspiration for me to stick with programming as a life choice.
The page is also interesting as it shows how Sandy programmed the game – handwritten and hand-assembled machine code on a notepad! Those were the days, indeed.
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