Wafer (dead)It's honestly kinda wild that the most programming I've done in the last couple of years was for a Z80.
Y'know. Right back where I began.
I often think about the path that I took into programming and even though I remember every step of it, the whole thing just seems like it could've almost not happened.
I realize now that a lot of it was just because of a relatively privileged upbringing, but still 1/?
Like, the Sinclair wasn't even the first programmable computer in the house. There'd been a Spectrum that got busted before I even laid eyes on it, my brother had gone through a C64 and an A1200. My mum bought an Acorn A3010 because she was a teacher. 2/?
I'd really gotten the most use out of the Acorn up to that point, but I had no idea how to program it.
Then the IT head at my mum's school was giving away unused ZX81s that had been bought just before the BBC happened.
This was the manual. 3/?
That started everything off. I'd go on to discover that the Acorn could run BASIC either natively or in a BBC emulator. By now, I've done some form of programming on every general purpose machine that I've ever owned, and then some.
Fin
Addendum: maybe I should stress a point for people that don't have a knowledge of UK computing history: I got my start programming on a computer released in 1981, three years before I was born, and I was doing it when other people were playing Tomb Raider.