Sinclair ZX80

I bought my ZX80 from a teacher who spotted that I had a knack for programming. He sold it to me for something like $120 — a lot of money for a kid, but I found a way.

It came in a white plastic case, barely bigger than a paperback book. One kilobyte of RAM. A membrane keyboard that you had to press with some deliberation. A BASIC interpreter in 4K of ROM. That was it.

And it was everything.

The display would go blank while the machine was computing — a quirk of the design that you just learned to live with. Programs were saved to cassette tape. Load times were measured in minutes, and success was never guaranteed. You learned to be patient, and you learned to debug, because when something didn’t work you had no choice but to figure out why.

I wrote my first real programs on this machine. Loops, conditions, INPUT and PRINT. The logic that still underlies everything I’ve ever built started here, on a black-and-white TV in a small room, typed out one careful keystroke at a time.

This one came back to me decades later — found it at an estate sale in reasonable condition. Getting it powered up again and seeing that cursor blink on screen was something I wasn’t prepared for.