As I approach the end of my first school year of driving my big yellow school bus I have some thoughts on the matter. I'm thinking of sending this into our local newspaper, so I'll write this in the style of a letter to the editor.

Dear local drivers,

As the driver of a big yellow school bus, I'd like to take a moment and thank all of the good, attentive and courteous drivers that I encounter on the roads around Dodgeville and Iowa county.

Image from Wikipedia page for ZX Spectrum By Bill Bertram - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=170050

I wrote about my first computer last month and it seemed time that I wrote about computer number two. This computer was made by the same company as the first, Sinclair Research. The computer was introduced with a cost of £175 for the 48K memory version, which was much more than was available in the family budget at that time. I had a hard time convincing my parents to get me this computer. In my favor was the fact that I had diligently studied programming (not just playing computer games) on the ZX81 and found a friend who was willing to buy my ZX81 from me.

So, lovely daughter number one is studying to be a graphic artist and has spoken on a number of occasions about her desire to illustrate books. Being the helpful kind of dad that I am, I suggested that she start out by illustrating my blog with some of her classic cat pictures.

Today I am delighted to report that she has delivered the first of the promised cat pictures and so this blog post is just a thinly veiled excuse to publish one of them.

I've already described the first personal computer that I owned, the Sinclair ZX81, but I had some more memories to go with that post.

The amount of memory (RAM) that the computer had was 1K, that's 1,024 bytes of memory. Take out just over 100 bytes for system usage and you ended up with around 900 bytes of memory for your program and its data. My current desktop computer is about a million times more powerful than the ZX81 with its 24 Gb of memory but back then the few home computers available came with only a small amount of memory.

An additional memory pack was available for the ZX81. It was known as the Ram Pack and it brought the memory capacity up to 16K of RAM. Unfortunately, its connector was not very well designed and it literally just plugged straight into the edge of the circuit board inside the ZX81. The result was that it would wobble if you bumped the computer and would cause the computer to crash. Owners of Ram Packs tried many different ways to keep their computers from crashing. I had the most success with resting my computer on a small book to keep the Ram Pack in the air and prevent it flexing on the surface of my desk.

I love old hymns, but I dislike covers of them done in country-style, so this means that there are very few hymns I can listen to on YouTube. One of my favorite hymns is I'll Fly Away. I've previously shared the awesome Christian Celtic Punk version by Flatfoot 56 and still love it, but then after some more searching I discovered that Go Fish have a great version together with a fun video. It's a much lighter version than that by Flatfoot 56 and includes a very nice guitar solo that I honestly don't remember being in the brown hymnal that we sing from at church.