For me, the second half of the 80's was about playing games with my neighbor on his Atari 130XE and learning BASIC on a PMD 85 after school. Little I knew about sir Clive's Z88 which amaze me today. Playing games, writing documents, programming, calculating. Everything is possible. And hey, there is also a serial port and a terminal software, that mean no excuses to stay offline!

Fast forward from 1987 to 1999 when Palm has released it's Palm IIIx PDA. Small, with a touch screen. Using graffity, it is possible to write the same way as into a small paper notebook. Much more powerful hardware then the Z88, but also a bit similar device - no multitasking, but programs sleep in the background. No distraction, just pick it up, do the thing and turn it off again. Fast system responses make both devices a pleasure to use (especially today).

The technology of today is incredible compared to just a few years ago and I am happy for that. But I am also happy I can still appreciate how sophisticated some of the old tech stuff really is because it is still fun to use some of the old hardware. Not really for a daily tasks, but with built-in serial ports it is still a safe place for any kind of data as back-ups are so easy to do.

#z88 #palm #retrocomputing #pda #computing

I had another round of an ancient computer books reading. I started with The Hacker's Handbook which is pretty interesting in a huge amount of knowledge that hackers needed to have in the old times, when no common protocols were used and every service had it's own way of dealing with the data and connections. Technically, the book is obsolete, but I like the mindset of it's author. Go and learn as much as you can, you never know when the knowledge comes in handy!

Second book is a good summary of Cambridge Computer's Z88. That small piece of computing wonder fascinate me so much that I bought one (actually 3 of them, 1 working, second one fixed and third one to be fixed yet) during the read and I am playing with it now. The book is a great one for beginners, the manual is a bit too brief sometimes.

#hacking #z88 #retrocomputing #books