Tagged: Memoir

Kempston joystick interface

Why the Kempston interface mattered if you owned an original Spectrum, a birthday-money joystick disaster from October 1985, and a homebrew rebuild for a fraction of the 1985 price.

Indo Speccy

A £10 "untested" rubber-keyed Speccy bought sight unseen in East Java, a government import ban standing between me and a bag of axial capacitors, and a £36 chip for a £10 computer.

Look at me everybody, I’m a computer programmer!!!

My brother typed in a Hello World loop from the orange Sinclair manual. I changed one line, hit RUN, and turned around for an audience that wasn't there.

The Golf Course

A whole issue of INPUT magazine, typed in blind and left to render for the length of a coffee break — and a brother who wanted to know why none of it was a game.

It’s a fair swap, not!

A borrowed copy of Dynamite Dan, a copy-protection scheme that beat "The Key", and a brother who traded it away for Engineer Humpty on the strength of the cover alone.

When AI Meets the ZX Spectrum: And Suddenly 48K Looks Rather Large

I set Claude Code loose on a ZX Spectrum game with $100 of credits and the new Fable model, expecting a doddle. Here's why 48K of 1982 hardware humbled it in ways a modern REST API never could.