I learned to program, using a ZX81 and its excellent manual, at the age of 14. Did a computing degree and been writing software and wrangling data ever since... thank you very much Dr Vickers for helping me kick start my career!
I’m your twin in Paris. Exactly the same situation at the same age and I still do the same job till now. I’ve seen a little ad, about 4x5 cm in a magazin and I said : So it’s possible to buy a computer for 499 Francs !? Next Christmas I got my first computer.
That book you wrote, Dr Vickers, empowered and enriched so many lives. Thank you. You made coding so easy a literal child could do it. Some of those children never stopped. The chain of consequences you've inspired is both an eternal contribution and a worthy legacy. Thanks again.
I learned a lot from Sinclair's products. My dad had the Stereo 60 HiFi system. I built the matchbox radio, Cambridge calculator, MK14 and ZX81 kits as I grew up. I wrote a disassembler for the ZX81 and disassembled the ROM and found all the floating point maths routines Steve mentioned. I then wrote a Basic compiler that produced Z80 machine code that called the ROM routines to do the floating point maths. IIRC the floating point stuff was like a programmable calculator with several registers and a byte code interpreter to sequence the simple floating point operations to build up the complex ones, like trig functions, without using lots of ROM space, as it would have done if it was pure machine code. Very clever. Great to hear from the guy behind it.
Dr Vickers, all my life I wanted to meet the man behind the excellent ZX81 and spectrum manuals, and say a big big "thank you" for introducing me to the world of computers and programming in my age of 18. I never became a programmer, instead I became a hardware engineer in electronics, now approaching my retirement, however I always treasure those endless hours reading your excellent analytic and humorous manuals, mostly the ZX81 one. PS: nice touch this Frere Jaques in minor scale, in the ZX spectrum manual. Thank you.
BASIC is the drug that got me into the Software Engineering industry. Thank you for making that language accessible for us, without it, we’d never get paid for our hobby as a job.
Oh, what a pleasant surprise! I just leaned over, grabbed the manual behind me and there it was, "ZX81 BASIC PROGRAMMING by Stephen Vickers". It's probably fair use to quote the last paragraph of chapter 1: "Whatever else you do, keep using the computer. If you have a question 'What does it do if I tell it such & such?' then the answer is easy:type it in & see. Whenever the manual tells you to type something in, always ask yourself, 'What could I type instead?' & try out your replies. The more of your own stuff you write, the better you will understand the ZX81. (This is called unprogrammed learning.) Regardless of what you type in, you cannot damage the computer." (I was only 8 when I first tried it out, and couldn't read the manual, but rather learned by unsupervised unprogrammed programming)
You’ve reminded me of the one and only thing that annoyed me about that manual… the use of ampersands everywhere instead of “and”. I presume it can only have been to save paper, I wonder how much it did.
I built a 1K ZX81 from a kit when I was a senior in high school. 40 years later in my career as a software developer, I still love to program in large part because of that wonderful machine and excellent manual. Thank you, Dr. Vickers!
To implement something from scratch is not easy. But then to explain it in a way that's accessible to a complete newcomer, that's a mark of remarkable insight. It's great to listen to these men who basically helped start our whole careers.
As a kid who wasn't doing to well at school, thank you Mr Vickers! That book (ZX81 Manual) was the best teacher I ever had. It was just me and the ZX81. Gently taking me through the computers functions, without any rebuke. My teachers at the time were condescending and rude. My confidence greatly improved, after completing the book. It made me realize I could do a lot, and had a good brain.
Dr Steve, the ZX81, my first computer, made me who I am. It has been a pleasure to see you tell this story and I want to thank you so much for everything you did. Rodnay Zak's manual and your excellent manual set me on my path for my life.
I have just been using a reel of solder I 'acquired' from Sinclair Radionics in the '70s when it was in St Ives. I inherited a ZX80 and ZX81, with manuals, from my father, and a SInclair Executive and Scientific, a Black Watch (and various other things) from my brother who worked at Sinclair.
11 year old me found your manuals simple enough to understand the basics (pun intended) and yet detailed enough when my knowledge and skills advanced. Hell, I'm in my 50s now and started reverse engineering zx code as a hobby during lockdown and I'm still referring back to them! Thank you Steve, you kick-started my love of computers. p.s. it only took me 40 years to fully realise why 10 LET A = PI/PI saved a few bytes over 10 LET A = 1, but that was probably the highlight of 2020 for me!
@@CaptainSlowbeard lol. The way the zx basic stores numbers is duplicated. Once in ASCII for us to see (but unused otherwise) then 0x0E and a 5 byte floating point representation. On the speccy LET A = 0 would be (hex) F1 41 3D 31 0E 00 00 00 00 00 LET A = PI - PI is F1 41 3D A7 2D A7 4 bytes saved, counterintuitive isn't it?!
ZX81 was the computer I learned programming on. It was so much fun and so interesting. And the manual was so well written, simple and clear. This man is a genius!
Thank you so much. My ZX81 introduced me to coding properly. (we did it at school on beebs and pets) but I could really explore BASIC on ZX81. The manual was excellent, and so was the Spectrum - didn't need that as much but always handy to have.
I seem to remember one of the early Sinclair manuals have a tour of the three letter acronyms ROM, RAM, CPU, etc also referred to the LRF. That's the Little Rubber Feet. If that was you, thank you!
Cutting edge stuff is still hardware limited though, like I'm sure Nvidia could make a graphics card today with way better ray tracing performance if it cost 10 times as much, but they don't think there's a market for it at that kind of price.
I never had a ZX81, but did have the 2068 throughout my youngest years and basically learned to read by coding on it. In retrospect it was a terrible computer with the worst keyboard ever, but it was mine! The BASIC manual that came with it was great, but my favorite manual of all time was the manual for IBM BASIC. I just loved how it was bound and printed.
We are the fallen - bury me alive. There's no use in crying All my tears won't drown my pain Free me from your sorrow I can't grieve you again I watched you let yourself die And now it's too late to save you this time You bury me alive And everybody's gotta breathe Somehow don't leave me, die Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies All I did was love you Now I hate the nightmare you've become I can't let you fool me I won't need you again I watched you let yourself die And now it's too late to save you this time You bury me alive And everybody's gotta breathe Somehow don't leave me, die Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies And everybody's gotta breathe Somehow don't leave me, die Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies Make me feel this love we used to hold All I see is black and cold As I try to pull you down To the ground, the ground And everybody's gotta breathe Somehow don't leave me, die Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies (you bury me alive) And everybody's gotta breathe Somehow don't leave me, die Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies
So much of the current programming style and programming languages is based on traditions and left overs from the old days where memory was soooo much more expensive.
zx81. If fully expanded it NEEDED a fresh glass of milk sitting on the corner holding its RAMpack to act as a heatsink.... We had spectrums that occasionally caught fire. Lovely little computers. (I still preferred the commodore ones.Way less fiddly,and the cassette recorder was way more trustworthy.)
Back in the early 80s I decided to get a computer, but it ended up being a TRS-80 Coco 2. The 1kB of ram in the Sinclair did not appeal to me and the Coco 2 has 16kB. Radio Shack had both Sinclair and obviously TRS-80 computers.
For the ZX81, the 16k Ram pack was regarded as pretty much essential. In the UK at the time('81) I think the computer was £99 and the Ram pack was another £30 something. I worked three days a week stacking shelves in a local supermarket after school, and sometimes Sat on the fruit and veg counter to be able to afford it. Probably equivalent to about a grand in today's fiat money.
@@Jeff44 I had a paper route. Can't remember but I think I paid $240CAD for the Coco 2. I think my money was spent between that and a Miyata 90 road bike. I think the Sinclair was something like $99. I don't think it was very popular here. A lot of homes had a C64. I think I still have a Vic 20 in the basement. Someone gave it to me years ago.
Mandatory to ALWAYS leave a comment regarding the dislike being disabled for videos we dislike (not this one). It must by the highest voted comment for videos we all disagree with. We will turn the comment section into our dislikes. Until they disable those because they are scared!!!
You say that as though Google haven’t explicitly said that they want people to read the comments instead, or look at the ratio of likes to views, to see how popular a video is now that they’ve hidden the Dislike counter.
I learned to program, using a ZX81 and its excellent manual, at the age of 14. Did a computing degree and been writing software and wrangling data ever since... thank you very much Dr Vickers for helping me kick start my career!
I’m your twin in Paris. Exactly the same situation at the same age and I still do the same job till now.
I’ve seen a little ad, about 4x5 cm in a magazin and I said : So it’s possible to buy a computer for 499 Francs !?
Next Christmas I got my first computer.
That book you wrote, Dr Vickers, empowered and enriched so many lives. Thank you. You made coding so easy a literal child could do it. Some of those children never stopped. The chain of consequences you've inspired is both an eternal contribution and a worthy legacy. Thanks again.
I’m one of those children. Thank you Dr. Vickers!
Well said, completely agree. Thanks Dr Vickers!
Dr Vickers, thank you for teaching me Basic with my very first computer.
I learned a lot from Sinclair's products. My dad had the Stereo 60 HiFi system. I built the matchbox radio, Cambridge calculator, MK14 and ZX81 kits as I grew up. I wrote a disassembler for the ZX81 and disassembled the ROM and found all the floating point maths routines Steve mentioned. I then wrote a Basic compiler that produced Z80 machine code that called the ROM routines to do the floating point maths.
IIRC the floating point stuff was like a programmable calculator with several registers and a byte code interpreter to sequence the simple floating point operations to build up the complex ones, like trig functions, without using lots of ROM space, as it would have done if it was pure machine code. Very clever. Great to hear from the guy behind it.
I've never heard of anyone buying the ZX81 kit. I seem to remember they were £70 instead of £80 for the assembled computer.
Dr Vickers, all my life I wanted to meet the man behind the excellent ZX81 and spectrum manuals, and say a big big "thank you" for introducing me to the world of computers and programming in my age of 18. I never became a programmer, instead I became a hardware engineer in electronics, now approaching my retirement, however I always treasure those endless hours reading your excellent analytic and humorous manuals, mostly the ZX81 one. PS: nice touch this Frere Jaques in minor scale, in the ZX spectrum manual. Thank you.
BASIC is the drug that got me into the Software Engineering industry. Thank you for making that language accessible for us, without it, we’d never get paid for our hobby as a job.
Oh, what a pleasant surprise! I just leaned over, grabbed the manual behind me and there it was, "ZX81 BASIC PROGRAMMING by Stephen Vickers". It's probably fair use to quote the last paragraph of chapter 1:
"Whatever else you do, keep using the computer. If you have a question 'What does it do if I tell it such & such?' then the answer is easy:type it in & see. Whenever the manual tells you to type something in, always ask yourself, 'What could I type instead?' & try out your replies. The more of your own stuff you write, the better you will understand the ZX81. (This is called unprogrammed learning.) Regardless of what you type in, you cannot damage the computer."
(I was only 8 when I first tried it out, and couldn't read the manual, but rather learned by unsupervised unprogrammed programming)
You’ve reminded me of the one and only thing that annoyed me about that manual… the use of ampersands everywhere instead of “and”. I presume it can only have been to save paper, I wonder how much it did.
@@scottishwildcat It might have been done to reduce the file size as much as possible.
@@scottishwildcat Yep, I always pronounce ampersands as "'n'" in my inner voice, so it's really distracting to read...
I built a 1K ZX81 from a kit when I was a senior in high school. 40 years later in my career as a software developer, I still love to program in large part because of that wonderful machine and excellent manual. Thank you, Dr. Vickers!
I learned to program from that manual and every penny of my wages since 1986 have been as a result of that knowledge… Thank you very much!
To implement something from scratch is not easy. But then to explain it in a way that's accessible to a complete newcomer, that's a mark of remarkable insight. It's great to listen to these men who basically helped start our whole careers.
Wow, so it was THIS guy. I wrote some very short Z80 programs for my ZX81, then HAND ASSEMBLED them with the opcodes in the ZX81 manual.
Spectrum was my first computer. The manual was wonderful!
I grew up on the ZX81 and Spectrum. Will always have a soft spot for them.
As a kid who wasn't doing to well at school, thank you Mr Vickers! That book (ZX81 Manual) was the best teacher I ever had. It was just me and the ZX81. Gently taking me through the computers functions, without any rebuke. My teachers at the time were condescending and rude. My confidence greatly improved, after completing the book. It made me realize I could do a lot, and had a good brain.
ZX Spectrum manual still on my bookshelf here!
Dr Steve, the ZX81, my first computer, made me who I am. It has been a pleasure to see you tell this story and I want to thank you so much for everything you did. Rodnay Zak's manual and your excellent manual set me on my path for my life.
Steve Vickers - one of the Spectrum heroes! I know the ZX Spectrum inside out. Invaluable resource.
What an interesting, modestly and wonderfully told story!
Dr Steve Vickers was my lecturer for Intro to Comp-Sci... Amazing person, patient and knowledgeable! I do miss the classes :(
I have just been using a reel of solder I 'acquired' from Sinclair Radionics in the '70s when it was in St Ives.
I inherited a ZX80 and ZX81, with manuals, from my father, and a SInclair Executive and Scientific, a Black Watch (and various other things) from my brother who worked at Sinclair.
I used to live in St Ives, lovely town! assuming you're on about the one near Cambridge
@@bripbrap Yeah, there are several, aren't they?
I tip my hat to Dr. Vickers for his great work on both the ROMs and the manuals.
11 year old me found your manuals simple enough to understand the basics (pun intended) and yet detailed enough when my knowledge and skills advanced. Hell, I'm in my 50s now and started reverse engineering zx code as a hobby during lockdown and I'm still referring back to them!
Thank you Steve, you kick-started my love of computers.
p.s. it only took me 40 years to fully realise why 10 LET A = PI/PI saved a few bytes over 10 LET A = 1, but that was probably the highlight of 2020 for me!
Try SGN PI :)
you can't leave the rest of us hanging! Why does that save bytes??
@@CaptainSlowbeard lol. The way the zx basic stores numbers is duplicated. Once in ASCII for us to see (but unused otherwise) then 0x0E and a 5 byte floating point representation. On the speccy
LET A = 0 would be (hex) F1 41 3D 31 0E 00 00 00 00 00
LET A = PI - PI is F1 41 3D A7 2D A7
4 bytes saved, counterintuitive isn't it?!
That manual is still on my bookshelf to this day. cheers!
At age 13 the ZX-81 manual was the first technical document I ever read and it is still an absolute standout.
Yep, learned it on my Spectrum with the manuals, especially later, when I discovered the Z80 assembly in the final pages...
Thank you.
ZX81 was the computer I learned programming on. It was so much fun and so interesting. And the manual was so well written, simple and clear. This man is a genius!
Thank you so much. My ZX81 introduced me to coding properly. (we did it at school on beebs and pets) but I could really explore BASIC on ZX81. The manual was excellent, and so was the Spectrum - didn't need that as much but always handy to have.
Thanks for the Spectrum the first computer I bought with my own money!
Thank you to let me remember the days I owned a ZX81.
Absolutely fascinating. I love people explaining how they worked around problems with limitations or in general solved things.
I seem to remember one of the early Sinclair manuals have a tour of the three letter acronyms ROM, RAM, CPU, etc also referred to the LRF. That's the Little Rubber Feet. If that was you, thank you!
The real eye-opener for me was 'Mastering Machine Code on Your ZX81 by Toni Baker.'
Never looked back after reading that book.
I never made it more than halfway through, despite repeated attempts…
Plus one for the appreciation for the manual 8-)
The first computer I owned was a Timex-Sinclair 1000. I have very fond memories of working on it.
A big thanks! This manual started my career.
It's funny how the costs have flipped from penny pinching transistors to now huge budgets for software.
Cutting edge stuff is still hardware limited though, like I'm sure Nvidia could make a graphics card today with way better ray tracing performance if it cost 10 times as much, but they don't think there's a market for it at that kind of price.
Heh. I wonder when Numberphile will do a video on approximating logarithms with Chebyshev polynomials. Seems quite specific.
11:55 YES! Gasman! I love him! Such a wonderful presence in Oxford, and always has a great new project going on!
Very interesting!
Clearly my age, but it seems like everyone in the world first learned to program on a ZX81, a speccy or a BBC micro
For me it was Tandy TRS80 then I skipped the ZXs and took a quantum leap to the Sinclair QL, which I loved.
Steve, I think you're short-changing yourself on the Mahler thing. I'm pretty sure just writing those books was pretty world-changing in itself.
Dr. Steve Vickers Thanks so much for your coding and this short history lesson. : = }}
I never had a ZX81, but did have the 2068 throughout my youngest years and basically learned to read by coding on it. In retrospect it was a terrible computer with the worst keyboard ever, but it was mine! The BASIC manual that came with it was great, but my favorite manual of all time was the manual for IBM BASIC. I just loved how it was bound and printed.
It is thanks to the Sinclair ZX80 manual that I know what 'procrustean' means and the etymology of the word.
Being from Ely this was so cool to hear :)
OK - I will watch this, with great interest. If it wasn't for the speccy manual, I would have never learned what a Pangolin is.
We are the fallen - bury me alive. There's no use in crying
All my tears won't drown my pain
Free me from your sorrow
I can't grieve you again
I watched you let yourself die
And now it's too late to save you this time
You bury me alive
And everybody's gotta breathe
Somehow don't leave me, die
Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies
All I did was love you
Now I hate the nightmare you've become
I can't let you fool me
I won't need you again
I watched you let yourself die
And now it's too late to save you this time
You bury me alive
And everybody's gotta breathe
Somehow don't leave me, die
Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies
And everybody's gotta breathe
Somehow don't leave me, die
Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies
Make me feel this love we used to hold
All I see is black and cold
As I try to pull you down
To the ground, the ground
And everybody's gotta breathe
Somehow don't leave me, die
Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies
(you bury me alive)
And everybody's gotta breathe
Somehow don't leave me, die
Too consumed by your own emptiness and lies
Ah, Mr Vickers.
We meet at last.
Yrs, the hapless youth who got the job of maintaining and porting the Spectrum ROM.
i was 11 when I bought my ZX81. still have it.
So much of the current programming style and programming languages is based on traditions and left overs from the old days where memory was soooo much more expensive.
It is an excellent manual. I wonder how he was able to explain so clearly. Always focussing on the user ?
Hurray, subtitles !
What a legend. Brilliant 😀
When will you have a video with Linus??
Another positive comment for the manual.
zx81.
If fully expanded it NEEDED a fresh glass of milk sitting on the corner holding its RAMpack to act as a heatsink....
We had spectrums that occasionally caught fire.
Lovely little computers.
(I still preferred the commodore ones.Way less fiddly,and the cassette recorder was way more trustworthy.)
Back in the early 80s I decided to get a computer, but it ended up being a TRS-80 Coco 2. The 1kB of ram in the Sinclair did not appeal to me and the Coco 2 has 16kB. Radio Shack had both Sinclair and obviously TRS-80 computers.
For the ZX81, the 16k Ram pack was regarded as pretty much essential. In the UK at the time('81) I think the
computer was £99 and the Ram pack was another £30 something. I worked three days a week stacking
shelves in a local supermarket after school, and sometimes Sat on the fruit and veg counter to be able
to afford it. Probably equivalent to about a grand in today's fiat money.
@@Jeff44 I had a paper route. Can't remember but I think I paid $240CAD for the Coco 2. I think my money was spent between that and a Miyata 90 road bike. I think the Sinclair was something like $99. I don't think it was very popular here. A lot of homes had a C64. I think I still have a Vic 20 in the basement. Someone gave it to me years ago.
Shame the Spectrum+ didn’t have the same manual.
Great story about the music, at the end! Seems like programmers and engineers are fond of doing useless things just to prove they can.
Everyone finishing the video before posting a comment
But nervrmind.
Nice story!
I’ve pissed off many by say RTFM
Mandatory to ALWAYS leave a comment regarding the dislike being disabled for videos we dislike (not this one). It must by the highest voted comment for videos we all disagree with. We will turn the comment section into our dislikes. Until they disable those because they are scared!!!
You say that as though Google haven’t explicitly said that they want people to read the comments instead, or look at the ratio of likes to views, to see how popular a video is now that they’ve hidden the Dislike counter.
Congrats to everyone who is early and found this comment!
First