Author’s note
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80, and I’m only slightly ashamed to admit it. The ZX-80 was supplied in kit form, and had one kilobyte of RAM. To make it do anything interesting at all, you had to program it laboriously in machine code, by entering the hexadecimal values of the instructions and data. This was such a common passtime (honestly) that you could buy books on it, with titles like “How to Program Your ZX-80 Laboriously in Hexadecimal.” With this mastered, you could make the little machine do all manner of fascinating things: play chess, calculate your income tax return, synthesize speech, and anything else to which a 2 MHz processor could turn its attention. This was only true, of course, if you had an obsessive attention ...
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