How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop…
I feel so old now…
replies(2):
Someone wrote chess for it.
[aside] It was a Sinclair ZX-81, and I was 11 at the time. My parents bought the kit and a second-hand black & white TV with a dial-tuner (no pushbuttons to change the channel) as an Xmas present ...
I loved the TV, it was my TV when we only had one other in the house. I watched everything on that TV (even snooker and swore I could tell which ball was which)... After a couple of months, my dad started to get annoyed I'd not bothered to build the computer, so I was dispatched to the shed to build it.
A few days later (hey, I was in school), the thing worked and I was working my way through the (rather excellent) manual that came with it, getting to know it. One of the logic chapters had an example:
[P]RINT 1+1=2
(It was tokenised input, so you just pressed P and PRINT would come up in the built-in BASIC). Anyone here can see that the answer would be logical-true because 1+1 does equal 2, and indeed the computer printed "1" on the next line.
Anyway, flush with this futuristic knowledge, I set it all up using the family TV in the lounge, and we went through the same thing, just to prove to everyone that it worked...
[P]RINT 1+1=2
1
"I knew it. You've buggered it", said my dad in disgust as he got up and walked out the room. I tried to explain the (new to me) concept of logical truth to him and how the computer represented it, but I don't think he ever really believed me...
[/aside]
Anyway, that Sinclair ZX81 fundamentally changed my life. Computers and computing opened up a whole new world. Some 45 years later I'm about to retire from Apple as one of their most senior engineers, having been here for the last 20 years. Anyone with any Apple device is running some of the software I've written over the years which is kind of cool, but it's time to bow out.