Computers I Once Knew

When I was about twelve I got my first computer, a ZX81 made by Sinclair, in Scotland of all places.

Wikipedia

The purchase price was NZ$199 and you could do very basic programming (literally Basic programming, as in the language) to run simple games etc.

It came with a whopping 1kB of memory.  To put this in perspective, the computer that I am writing this blog on has eight million times the memory in RAM (8GB), with a further billion times as much memory on built-in hard disc storage (1TB) - all this on a fairly run-of-the-mill new business laptop.

In science and engineer we often refer to 'orders of magnitude'.  A widget maker that processes ten times as many widgets per hour as its predecessor is one order of magnitude faster - quite some achievement on a production line and sure to get the inventor a promotion.

This pales into insignificance when compared with changes in computer speeds (computer accelerations?).  My current laptop is nearly seven orders of magnitude faster at processing calculations as the old ZX81.  If my 1982 computer was a car, say a nippy Toyota Corolla hatchback with a top speed of 150km/h (down hill, with a following wind) that would mean the current 2014 model Corolla could do 1200000000km/h, which is just over the speed of light.

But of course the ZX81 wasn't quite that bad.  It could easily be expanded to a generous 16kB of RAM by plugging in a notoriously wobbly black box into the back of the all-in-one basic unit.  And if you didn't inadvertently wipe your laboriously typed code by knocking the RAM module you could save it.  On what you ask?  A standard screechy, hissy audio cassette tape of course!

Little wonder I never became a programmer.