More Science Week Stuff
Posted on November 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology.
Looks like the Science Week guys are hardcore! They’ve hired Edelman to help with PR. I like the idea they came up with. Basically Irish Bloggers have to answer some stuff about their favourite inventions as blog posts during the coming week and we might win a Wii.
Today’s question is “What was the favourite invention from your childhood”.
This is an easy one. The home computer, specifically the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
An entire generation of software developers and electronic engineers exist because of this awesome machine and competitors like the BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Dragon 32, Oric 1, Atari 400/800, TI 99/a etc
Until the arrival of the Spectrum (and slightly earlier ones like the ZX81, ZX80, TRS-80), the most advanced thing most people had seen was electronic tennis on the telly. I still remember heading up on a school tour to Dublin, going into Tomorrow’s World in the Grafton Arcade and touching a ZX81 for the first time. My parents then bought me a 16K Spectrum for Christmas 1982 and my world changed forever.
Forget all the games we used play and copy using a precursor of bittorrent called tape-to-tape-recording. For me, the Spectrum experience was about programming and building add-on cards. I learned Basic, then Forth and then Z80 Assembler.
I had my 15 seconds of fame by having three games published in Sinclair magazines. I was half way through my masterpiece when college intervened. I did Electronics in UCD because of the Spectrum (I didn’t like the look of Cobol and RPG on the Comp Sci syllabus) and here I am now, still working in tech and still getting excited every day by the incredible things people build.
I enjoy seeing kids using gaming consoles and playing flash games on the web but I wonder will they ever have the excitement we did back in the 80’s when we saw the output of this:
10 FOR n=0 TO 255
20 PLOT n,88+80*SIN(n/128*PI)
30 NEXT n
Who knows, maybe the OLPC aka XO will do the same for Africa. I still have my doubts.
12 Replies to "More Science Week Stuff"
Bernie Goldbach on November 14, 2007
I wonder how they’re hoovering the responses. IrishBlogs.ie has picked up the meme but if someone blogs about the answer on Jaiku or Flickr, will it count as an entry?
conor on November 14, 2007
I doubt they’ll be monitoring but I think it should count. Google picks up Jaikus pretty quickly so hopefully they have some alerts set there.
Dermot Casey on November 14, 2007
Conor
on what planet was RPG and Cobol on the Comp Sci syllabus. I did Comp Sci in UCD (around the same time I’d think/) It was Pascal, C, C++, Lisp, Prolog and other interesting things language wise. You engineers did Fortran for gods sake 
Dermot
conor on November 14, 2007
The guide I had to Comp Sci UCD when I was in 4th year secondary school (’84-’85) definitely had Cobol and I’m pretty sure it had RPG cos I had to look up what it was.
Yeah we were scourged with Fortran in Eng. We also had a theoretical assembly language that we had to write programs in. Grrrrr. There were some Z80 practicals in final year and I taught myself C in the same year and never looked back.
conor on November 14, 2007
You could always tell the Comp Sci people in my first job. They were the ones trying to build commercial apps using Modula 2
Donncha’s Wednesday Links at Holy Shmoly! on November 14, 2007
[...] gets nostalgic about the Speccy for Science Week. Damien has more posts about great [...]
pat phelan on November 14, 2007
I still have mine, fond memories of manually tuning the pitch on the tape recorder to load programs
conor on November 14, 2007
Yup, mine is in the attic and still worked the last time I checked.
James Galvin » Blog Archive » Science Week’s Carrot-Dangling does not Address “Root” Problems (I swear that was unintentional) on November 15, 2007
[...] buzz that lasts a week, and at best, a few people walk away knowing a little bit more about the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with no greater appreciation for [...]
Dermot on November 16, 2007
Conor
RPG and Cobol all gone by the end of the decade. I wonder about the change and its speed. Very different course. Commercial apps with Modula 2 now theres a novel idea (bit like the person I know who recommended Smalltalk over Visual Basic for in house development). Theoretical assembly language sounds as bad as the real thing (we had two courses in assembler that I hated).
And Fortran. I spent part of second year supervising Engineering Labs in Fortran (having to spend the night before with a textbook and a login to system figuring out how it worked)
Now I’m getting nostalgic
Dermot
conor on November 16, 2007
I mentioned the XO/OLPC and I wonder if it could be the ZX Spectrum for the new millenium? Not just for developing countries but for all. A large part of it is written in Python which we use on LouderVoice and is a great first language for kids to learn.
An alternative would be to teach kids about Mashups and web technologies so they could easily build brand new applications e.g. off the back of their Bebo friend list and Google Maps.
Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Science Week Ireland blogging competition Day 1 entries on November 13, 2007
[...] Conor on the ZX Spectrum. [...]