That Damn Kyte!

It’s all too believable. Sitting in my Inbox is this mail to myself on 19th Dec with a list of future Blog ideas

Yahoo Mail Beta and Metalink
Sage, Tatung Einstein and a nice website :-

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=607&st=1
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=647&st=1
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=86

I thought I might get round to these when the holidays were over (I was trying to be a good boy and only pick up my mail every couple of days), but Tom Kyte works through ideas, answers and new blogs so quickly, he got there first.

Well, I’m back from New York now. It wasn’t a great flight home and we’re hopelessly jet-lagged at the moment, but everyone enjoyed the trip.

old-computers.com is pretty good for looking up old computers you might have worked on, particularly if they’re of the mini or personal varieties. Although the first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX81, the first I used was a ZX80 (see Wilfred’s follow up blog for a picture). Like Tom mentioned in his blog, every keyboard has been something of a disappointment since 😉

The links above are to machines I worked on at games companies. Like Tom, we didn’t actually run the code on the machine we developed on – we used assemblers to compile the code and then it was downloaded to the Spectrum using a dedicated cable. In the main that meant running on bigger machines that shared the Z80 of the Sinclair machines, but sometimes we used cross-assemblers. All very neat and generally developed in-house. It was particularly exciting moving from the ZX81 at home to a Sage II at my first work-place.

Oh, well, back to unpacking I suppose 🙁