Well the person who posted it has now been banned.

No the zx81 is the father of the rubber key speccy. Clive Sinclair built a small calculator in the 70's, then he built a white thing called the ZX80 in 1980ish which is ultra-mega-super-shit, but quite rare and about $300 on ebay for a good one. Then in about 1981 he built the ZX81 which was hailed as the worlds first small, affordable home computer. Then came the ZX Spectrum in 1982. The zx81 uses a Z80 processor, so does the 48K(might be z80b or something).

Then he built a strange 3 wheeled motorbike with pedals thingy, kind of reminds me of an 80's version of the Sedgway Human Transporter an American invented a couple of years back. They'll be laughed at in 15 years time just like the laugh at the Sinclair C5 and everyone will point at the inventor and say "what a load of shit that was fool, you must have been on drugs mate!"

Edited by fretz at 00:35 on June, 19th 2003

I wouldn't know what is the zx81 ..
Wasn't it the microprocessor for the actual Spectrum computer ?



Oh there sure was, as far as I remember , the same as for the other memory ranges, but the screen had a non-linear pixel to memory mapping mode. A pixel was 1 bit, and there was some memory for groups of 8x8 pixels' colors
And yes, I was a Z80 ASM-head ( long ago, I was 13 y.o. when I got my first intel ) , but you could also write memory directly from BASIC , with the POKE instruction

I was referring to the ZX81, not the speccy. The ZX81 has 1K RAM, expandable to 17K with a 16K rampack.

The original Spectrum, the rubber key 48K, has the following (address's are approximate)....

0-16384 (16K) is the ROM
16385-24577 (8K) RAM for the screen,
24578-65535 (40K) RAM addressable by the programmer.

There is also a small amount of space at the top of the stack (about 512bytes) used by the ROM.

effectively its a 40K machine. The programmer is not able to manipulate address values 16385-24577 directly (there probably is a way of doing it if you are a total Z80 ASM-head but I have no idea how) therefore there is 40K of RAM available to the programmer.

Edited by fretz at 14:47 on June, 18th 2003

Actually, the Spectrum had 64 Kb of RAM ,48 of which could be used by programs, the rest of 16 beeing used by the "OS" , BASIC in most cases. But I also had a floppy Spectrum which could run CP/M too
There was also the 128 Kb vesion

I agree, why is 50mhz pitiful? I can recall being beat to a pulp by a ZX81 at 1K chess, with 1024bytes of memory and a processor speed of 3.5mhz or whatever.

All speeds are relative. In 20 years time you will be saying "but that 50Ghz is pitiful" because the current version of windows xxxp, or any other over-inflated-lazy-programmed-software-package requires 10gb of RAM and a 1 terahertz processor to run properly.

I now drive a 2.0 litre car, 5 years ago my 1.6 was acceptable, how did i cope?

The point of that thread was that (supposedly) he couldn't figure out why his comp wouldn't work nor what the "milky substance" was. Whether he really couldn't figure it out, or whether the whole thread was some kind of lame joke, I have no idea.

If he hadn't of been stupid and tripped over, or ate his breakfast in the kitchen then the milk wouldn't have gotten in there either

Morale of the story: Don't eat breakfast around your uncovered computer!

I just installed a 386 motherboard into my 286.

What was the point of that thread anyway? And another good example of humungous sigs. Especially that green and black one.

And why? I can browse the Internet, I can run a good word processor, I can play music, I can burn CDs, I can play great games with it. Why is that pitiful? What am I missing?

Your 300mhz one isn't too bad (the comp I'm on now is only 500mhz), but that 50mhz is pitiful. :-

Also, if he has to overclock his, then it's obviously NOT enough for him. If he spends the money on a new comp instead of fixing that PoS, then he can actually have it perform the way he wants and still leave the cover on! If the case had been on, then the milk probably wouldn't have gotten in, certainly not nearly as much.

Edited by Cypherswipe at 21:30 on May, 17th 2003

Then why don't we count the number of things I can do with my computers and compare it to the number of things these people can do with their phones? What do we learn? It's not important how fast it is, it's how you use it

Hey, you're talking to someone who probably have one if not two cellulars. One of those easily beat the 300 mhz...

So, what you're saying is anything below the GHz scale is not a 'real computer'? What is it I'm working with every day then? One of these 'things' has 300 MHz, the other 50 MHz. Has it ever occured to you that there might be people who don't need more?

Edited by Mr Creosote at 20:16 on May, 17th 2003

I wondered about that too. What's really funny is that he apparently plans to buy and install a new motherboard instead of spending the money on a real comp. (Hell, the old webtv unit sitting in my closet has more power than that overclocked PoS.)

My first thought was it was corrosion caused by a mouse urinating onto the motherboard or the inside of the case, I've seen this come through a couple of times in my workplace, some idiot forgets to put the slot covers into the open expansion slots.

As for the 166MHz, I overclocked a P1 - 120MHz on friday to 166MHz, so it does happen!

(Some people are too cheap to get a new computer so they ask us to chuck in a grunty new CPU fan and cross our fingers that it doesn't fry anyway.)

You've been watching too much porn yourself

That guys an Idiot, and how old is his computer if he overclocks it to 166 :S

Some idiot posted a thread asking for help figuring out why his comp wouldn't turn on and what this "unknown milky substance" was that was in it. After several people posted attempting to help him, he posts again saying that it actually was milk which got in there because he leaves the case off and now the milk has shorted out his motherboard. I wonder if he spilled his cheerios in there too.

Its about a guy who watched some porn on his new broadband connection, spanked off 'till his man-milk splurted over his computer, and then was confused why there was 'milk' oozing out of his floppy and he couldnt switch his PC on.