Peter Hughes

Settle an old man's curiosity: what was your first computer?

If you're thinking of retrobriting that yellow C64, watch David's video first. I did the peroxide cream under UV on a breadbin in 2019 and got streaks I'm still looking at. His method is far more even. Gloves and goggles, please. Cheers, Pete

1981, a ZX81, 1K of RAM and the RAM pack wobble

Back in 1981 my dad came home with a ZX81. I was 13. It had 1K of memory. Not one gigabyte, not one megabyte, one kilobyte: about the size of this paragraph. It plugged into the telly and you saved your programs to a cassette recorder, at roughly 250 bits a second, give or take, with a screech that made the dog leave the room. The keyboard was a flat membrane you pressed like a lift button. In FAST mode the screen…

Recapping an Amiga 1200 and evicting a Varta: a weekend log

Back in 1993 I bought my A1200 from a little shop on London Road in Sheffield with money I had been told was for a new boiler. The boiler waited. The Amiga did not. Thirty-odd years later it had started doing two things that every A1200 owner learns to dread: the sound had gone thin and quiet on one channel, and when I opened it up there was a faint fishy smell. If you know, you know. This is my log of putting that…

My first computer was a kit, a soldering iron and a very patient dad (ZX81, 1981)

Somebody asked in the chat what everyone's first computer was, and I started typing a reply and it got out of hand, so here it is as a proper post. Put the kettle on. Back in 1981 I was thirteen, and my dad worked shifts at a steelworks in Rotherham. He was not a computer man at all, but he had seen an advert for the Sinclair ZX81 in the paper and worked out, on the back of an envelope, that the kit version was…