The tech gadgets I can afford

A long, long time ago, in a city not that far away …

Back then

No I am not going to go all Star Wars in you, at least not now.  It was a considerable time ago when I was still in college.  I was at a rather small college in the middle of Boston, Massachusetts, called Northeastern University – Boston-Bouvé College.  There, I was pursuing a BS in elementary education.  There was one professor, who saw I had an aptitude for mathematics and liked things to be logical (he became my advisor).  He encouraged me to take a minor in Computer Science.  There was one difficulty, at the time there existed no minor in CS for Elementary Education majors.  My professor, Tom, decided this could be easily solved by making one, on my parents’ dime.

A computer Minor?

I started taking any computer science course I was the least bit interested in.  After each course, and during it, I would report back how Elementary Education “friendly” the course was and whether or not I thought it was necessary.  (remember these are the reports of a teenager – I was 18 or 19).  After too many ups and downs, I finally finished the first minor in Computer Science for an Elementary Education Major at Northeastern University.  I actually had enough credits at his point to have been both a CS and EE major, unfortunately I didn’t go that route.

The work starts

I had not even graduated yet and I had started writing documentation for how to save and load a program from a ground-breaking invention, the Sinclair ZX-81 computer.  The documentation was for administrators in Elementary Schools of the Boston Public School System, who would be using these come September.  This was an amazing computer.  It had a whopping 8k (yes kilobytes) of on board memory.  The ZX-81 had a membrane keyboard as an input device. To top that all off – it had a price that could be beat and add-ons.

To understand this completely, envision the setup:

  • Computer – Sinclair ZX81
  • Add-on memory pack of 64kb
  • Monitor – your TV
  • Membrane keyboard
  • Save and Load programs from cassette tape

 

An interesting event

My roommate at the time (living off-campus) was an engineering major.  He asked if he could try the new computer – I said sure!  At the time, there was a new craze going on, which I still fail to completely understand.  There was this guy who had invented a cubic brain-teaser.  The guy’s name was Rubik and they called it Rubik’s cube.  I won’t even try to explain it.  The reason I bring it up is that my roommate had one and was caught up in the “craze.”  He decided that since he had vast computing power at his fingertips (the Sinclair ZX81), why not write a program that would automatically solve Rubik’s Cube for you. To everyone’s surprise, he did exactly that.  He wrote his program in machine language to save space (he couldn’t use more than 64kb).  After 2 months, he had written a program that would solve the puzzle by itself, 3 dimensionally.  The program displayed a 3D image as it solved the puzzle.  This was 1985, and it was cool beyond belief!

The point though is the Computer

This computer, although bought out fairly quickly by Timex, was plain amazing.  We ended up not using either the computer or the documentation I wrote, because the Boston Public Schools decided to us IBM-PC’s instead.