💬 Friday thread: your first computer

Sir Clive Sinclair, the British computer pioneer, died this week. He was an innovator whose ZX line of personal computers had a dramatic influence on public uptake of the technology in the early 1980s.

The first computer I ever owned was a Sinclair ZX-81. I even wrote about my experiences with it in my new book.

I picked it up in the autumn of 1981, a year after moving to a small town in the hinterlands beyond London. The ZX81 still sits on my bookshelf at home. It has the foot- print of a 7-inch record sleeve and is about as deep as your index and middle fingers. Compared to the other electronic items in early-1980s living rooms – the vacuum-tubed television or large cassette deck – the ZX81 was compact and light. Pick-up-with-your-thumb-and-forefinger light. The built-in keyboard, unforgiving and taut when pressed, wasn’t something you could type on. It only responded to stiff, punctuated jabs of the kind you might use to admonish a friend.

I posted a picture of the device on Twitter.