You had me at “Hello World”

The Sinclair ZX81 – with all of 1K of RAM.

What a wonderful 80′s headline. Power. Apparently that’s what everyone was into in the 80′s: power dressing, bouffant power coiffes kept in check by nuclear powered hairspray leaving a sticky film on power padded shoulders. Whether you were an American Psycho-esque inner city slicker with a corner office, or the teenage geek next door screwing around with bits of computer, the cats on Madison avenue figured that power was what you were after. And they were going to offer you that, whether it was actually present in the advertised product, or not. Because the funny thing about the ZX 81 is that it had 1K of RAM – remarkably underpowered even for its time. I’d imagine the guitarist of Kiss could negotiate more functionality out of his instrument (if you count trashing hotel rooms) than a prospective computer geek could extract from this basic little PC with 1 K of RAM. But as it turns out it was not power, but something closer to – dare I say it – love that afforded the ZX 81 its cult following.

Filed under: Hardware, The 80s, William Gibson, ZX 81

15 minutes of anonymity

As I sat down to register this blog, I yet again had to go through the rigmarole of picking user names, log-in names, nicknames and passwords. For the sake of simplicity I decided to stick to my good ol’ real name which I can look up in my passport in the unlikely event of ever forgetting it. I blogged under a pseudonym once before; to my mind for protecting the familia from the details of a few wild week-ends, but in the end it probably more accurately protected me from myself and my amateurish self-publishing. There is a lot to be said for the safety afforded by anonymity, but as the British blogging community realised last week, anonymity has suddenly become something of the past.

Filed under: Writing Online, Anonymity, Blogging, Literary Awards, Nightjack, Orwell, Orwell Prize