Re: Ubuntu in Space

I built ZX Spectrums in late 1980's, while in High School; however I have NOT designed 99% of it; in Russia we had these flea markets where people sold components stolen from work (which was acceptable since government was stealing from workers), blue collar folks mixed with highly educated upward to professors - all engaged in computer building.

"Building" was mor einvolving than today - in those years you soldered motherboards from ZERO (BLANK PCB BOARD) to a complete motherboard, and it had little to be complemented with - storage was a tape recorder thru OPamp-based comparator circuit, display was a TV thru RF modulated by RGB out of this motherboard, video was a joke built on that board, audio, etc; no modem.

I built those... from blank PCB to a complete machine, and even wrote QBASIC programs later to solve college Sum of Series problems and repetitive mundane calculations; but then I realized it's easier and faster with a programmable calculator. The entire purpose of ZX Spectrum faded away, I returned back to MK80 calculator which was a shameles copy of American Texas Instruments.
Everything technically advanced had to be American, German, British and Japanese we had difficulty in St. Petersburg with due to distance.

I couldn't help but to write this, ZX Spectrum is burned in my brain for LIFE. I can see it's motherboard in my head at this very moment, with photographic memory, from 16 to 128KB memory versionbs.
I built 32KB, and that was enough to run many games of that time, in full graphics; today OS's complain if they have less than 4 GIGAbyte.
programming changed from art to brute-force coding, less intelligence required since programmers get so much resoruces and memory, they don't alway suse brains, just fill as much memory as they can and then ask for more memory.

Check this out:
I wrote programs where one instruction could be both insutrction or a memory register because we realized the mnemonic code is the same if certain fragment of that insutrction is read into memory... too long to explain, it was art. Now it's a basic trade.

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