This gave me goosebumps:
You have no idea, none, how much I wanted a microdrive as a teenage geek. I would have happily chopped off my little finger yakuza-style to get one. And this guy, the luckiest man alive, has 8 of them!
And what is it about rose tinted spectacles that I would be happier now to be given a ZX Spectrum +2 with a Kempston joystick than a fully loaded Dell XPS?
I automatically deride anything that Nicholas Negroponte is involved in as snake-oil (Media Lab Dublin, I laughed when they announced it, I laughed when they closed it). But the $100 laptop has the potential to create a whole new generation of programmers from places you would never have dreamed, just like the Spectrum, BBC Micro and C-64 did for us as kids. Let’s hope he doesn’t screw it up.
I think maybe we’ve all forgotten the impact those machines, and “The Computer Programme” on the BBC had on a multitude of British and Irish kids. I shudder to think what I would be working at now if my parents hadn’t had the foresight to get me a Spectrum when I badgered them incessantly for it. And I know I’ve blogged this before, but it is still the funniest thing on the whole damned internet.
[tags]ZX Spectrum, microdrive, Geoff Wearmouth, comp.sys.sinclair, The Computer Programme, OLPC, Hey Hey 16K[/tags]
July 18, 2006 at 10:16 am
Jesus, I don’t even know what a microdrive is? As a user of technology I’m fairly adept but all the real techy stuff just loses me, although I have learned how to do basic html stuff for the blog so there’s hope yet!
July 18, 2006 at 10:30 am
Microdrives are 23 years old so not a huge surprise that you’ve never heard of them!
July 18, 2006 at 2:02 pm
This is so true Conor, being that I am currently only 21!!!
July 26, 2006 at 12:16 am
I didn’t have any of the ZXs ..neither did I have the TI machines with synthesisers (we did have C64 in secondary school and Commodore PETs) but yet I now work in IT…
July 26, 2006 at 7:25 am
Thing is – those C64′s and PETs and BBC Micro’s in schools had a huge effect too. Without machines at that price, Irish schools would never have had the money to buy a decent set-up.
I still remember St Kieran’s in Kilk going from a single Apple II to a room full of C64′s in the mid-80′s and the excitement it caused. OK, I did get digs at the headmaster for buying Commodores rather than BBC’s but at least he had the right idea.
Then I went to UCD and had three years of mainframes and Fortran. Nearly put me off computers for life. Luckily my 4th year project was on a PC and all was happy again in the land of Conor.