ZX81 Webserver | Hacker News Reader

ZX81 Webserver

zx81-siggi.zx-team.org

125 pointsnickt54 comments

Well, the concept is glorious. It's not accessible at the moment though.

(Memories of me and my mom buying a weirdo european-phono/antenna-to-cable-shoe adapter from a local TV store to make the ZX81 work with the black and white TV from the 1960s we had in the summer cottage, so that I could continue my obsession with the ZX81 I had "inherited" from a richer relative in 1984. I was 7. I'm amazed my parents believed in me so much. And that they spent insame amounts of money, realtive to their income, later on...

I suspect lots of us here have some very odd memories! I used a ZX80/81/Speccy at school and at friend's houses and we eventually ended up with a C-64 at home. I still have it now and it has USB nowadays.

Very much so, I started programming on the 48k rubber-keyed Speccy, and I know I'm not alone:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

I spent days entering code on the Spectrum 48k from a magazine just to play space invaders.

We had a radio show on a local station being broadcast every friday evening at 22:00 where various open source programs for different platforms (C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, etc) would be aired. You could then record the show (which consisted mostly of "whiirrrzzzzzzbrbrrzzziii"), and load the programs on your computer of choice.

Those were the days where you'd spend hours browsing your local magazine shop for new and exiting computer magazines, and debugging included reading manuals, and not just pasting code from StackOverflow :)

I often think back to the world when i was a kid, and while the Internet has certainly made a lot of things easier, i'm not always convinced that it's actually helping. When answers to every question you have are readily available, what happens to curiosity ? At age 11 i could hook up just about any home computer, program in BASIC, could take apart electronics and fix them (which was a lot easier back then).

I learned by taking things apart (and rarely breaking them in the process), and for those more specialized things (electronics) there were evening classes for kids. We had a "programming class" when i was a kid that was basically just a lab. Show up at 18:30 and "here's a RC 700 Piccolo (https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=650) to use for whatever you like". There was no set program, and the instructor was the other kids in class. Those were the best classes i've ever taken.

I never knew that programs were broadcast, that makes total sense and it's completely awesome that you could just analog record a program from a radio program into the system like that!

The simplicity of the cassette tape recording (and playing) mechanism and how it works w/ a simple 5V amplitude modulated signal makes me happy thinking about it every time I see something related to it mentioned.

So the 2h edit window ran out just before I could fix two quite annoying typos.

What I meant to write was: And that they spent insane amounts of money, relative to their income, later on... [on an 8086 and then a 486 PC].

I suspect that quite a lot of us now sort-of-old-timers owe our careers to parents who did something similar to what my parents did to me.

I was bought a ZX81 after I pestered my parents for months, unfortunately they were not particularly well off, so they couldn't afford a tape recorder, which meant I had to write my own games (copied from magazines at first of course).

I now own a couple of software companies and have had the good fortune of making my once hobby my career.

Lucky us!

I'm definitely grateful to my parents for shelling out (after ~1 y of begging) for the first computer, an ZX clone; then for a 386 !

I think starting on a ZX was a blessing and a curse at the same time :) I shaped my career, but I continue to think of processor cycles and RAM as being very expensive in terms of time :(

Heh, there may be something to that "curse".

Since the linked website is under siege, here's something else related to look at. I believe it's probably powered by the SpectraNet card. You can read about that here: https://www.bytedelight.com/?page_id=3515

The manual for it: https://www.bytedelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Spect...

Edit: It's now apparently using a ZeddyNet adapter instead of the SpectraNet. Info on that: https://www.sinclairzxworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=1771

Here's a wayback machine cached copy of a different Sinclair ZX-81 web server: https://web.archive.org/web/20190402161928/http://zx81-siggi...

Archived snapshot of OP link: https://archive.vn/GxV04

>Since the linked website is under siege

I still dont quite understand how most web page dont have CDN / Cloudflare. Especially those static pages.

Most of the web doesn't get slashdotted.

It's called HN hug of death. But wow I haven't heard of the term Slahdotted for a very long time.

By 'ek. ZX81 were a luxury to us. We 'ad t' make do wi'a ZX80 wi' extra 'eatsink bolted t'it three terminal regulator that we warmed us 'ands on in winter. An when it were on't blink we 'ada fall back on't MK14.

Lookshury.

MK14? You were lucky!

I 'ad a single 7400 quad-input NAND gate. I'd take it aht and look at it. Named it Black Beauty and all.

Dint do much, but were still t'envy o t'village. Computer clubs'd come from Scarborough and Bridlington, even Durham, to look a' it.

But you tell your young people now what it were like then and they don't believe you.

Quad-input. Luxury. All we had was a BC108

A BC108 would have been a bloody luxury for us. We had to dig up sand, chop down trees, make a big fire, melt the sand into glass for making our own valves.

Yah, you t’ry an tell the young people of today t’at, and ey won't believe you.

Suddenly my childhood's spacious 5 bytes of swap feels like I was spoiled.

The thought of a ZX81-based server getting hammered by HN frontpage…

It appears to be using a WizNet ethernet to parallel device. So, at least the tcp is offloaded to something else. But it would have to read and respond to page requests in the Z80.

Hopefully it's in FAST mode.

If you are over 47 and from the UK then this joke is extremely funny. Laugh out loud funny. I don't believe anyone outside this niche truly gets it. Brilliant.

Meh, I'd say anyone who remembers Turbo mode on PCs would understand the spirit, at least.

FAST mode disabled the screen raster output to allow more cycles for user code. The TV monitor was free to improvise its output, which for me was alarming rolling garbage and an audible whine.

Turbo mode changed the clock speed, which was a less hectic experience.

Turbo mode actually lowered the clock speed.

Not just the UK -- the North American variant Timex Sinclair 1000 was fairly popular too (relatively speaking)

It may have sold in some numbers in North America, but remember that Commodore had a trade-in offer and some chains like Fast Eddie's offered the T/S 1000 at a bargain price solely to allow people to get the discount. Commodore reportedly used some of them as doorstops!

It sold well also outside the UK and I remember fast mode. But I might miss the joke. Was FAST something / somebody in the UK back in the 80s?

As robotresearcher says in a parallel comment chain, FAST mode was without the screen running. Normally the ZX81 only did anything during the vertical blanking, most of the time it was drawing the screen. If you enabled FAST mode then it could go ten times quicker or more.

Sure the ZX81 sold internationally but it was so much more successful in the home market than overseas.

Not just the UK. the ZX-81 sold well in most of Europe. I'm from Denmark and i got the joke :D

Australian owner checking in

It may as well be since the screen doesn’t matter.

This joke is not just applicable to the ZX81, in fact the general idea of a RAM shared as video RAM and CPU RAM lives on today, just much less noticeable. And as an older example, the Commodore Amiga performed much worse CPU-wise if you used highres, you had "chip mem" and "fast mem" as a consequence etc.

The ZX80 and ZX81 just took a somewhat, ahem, less subtle (but efficient!) approach to get those cycles to the CPU :)

I had that thought right after I hit submit. Nah, not enough old British geeks around for that to make the front page...

Sorry siggy, hope the zeddy is ok!

To put it in the context, ZX81 came with 1KB RAM. A screenful of a BASIC program could easily fill the whole available memory and the computer would hang. You had to plug a 16KB expansion RAM to make it usable.

You were lucky if the 16KB expansion pack stayed put. The connector was notoriously wobbly and unreliable, resulting in a crash and many more hours of copying game code from a magazine.

My RAM pack was liberally held in place with blutack - I saw something in the last month or so about a ribbon cable extender that fixed the wobble disconnects. That would have been great on day 3 of typing assembler into a REM statement - we only had one TV in the house. Probably where my penchant for working in the middle of the night comes from still :-)

Yeah, my father built me a RAM pack ("I'm not paying that much when I can make one myself!" - he did a lot of embedded work with Z80s back then) and used a ribbon cable for the connector to avoid the wobble.

And this included the VRAM, or rather the variable-size display file! Count 25 bytes + 1 byte per character [1] Hopefully, BASIC tokens were included in the character set.

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/7974

Here is a screen shot of the page. The only difference between this and what I looked at before it went down was there was a small screen capture of a trex in a maze from the game 3d Monster Maze.

http://archive.is/GxV04

Here's the link to Zeddynet (mentioned on the page), which is apparently somewhat similar to the card I mentioned in a different comment.

https://www.sinclairzxworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=1771

It’s quite colourful for something coming out of a Speccy ;-)

It's a ZX81 right, not even a Spectrum.

Sorry in my head they’re the same thing. I actually have a ZX81 it makes a fancy paperweight!

I think it's been slashdotted...

Remember not to press too hard on the keyboard as this will caus a hard reset. Not sure if this happened with all ZX81 models, but on a friend's model we had to be very careful when entering our elaborate programs not to cause a reset by typing too hard.

Sigh...

My first computer. Self soldered from a kit. And it worked at fist try!

Self-signed cert, and I have to login? Seems suspicious...

Interesting. It's not an https link. Did it redirect somewhere for you when it was working?

Edit: Ahh, I see. You do get a page if you change http to https in the link. It appears to be the login page for a Ubiquiti router, where "self signed+ login" would be pretty normal.

That's likely especially now that Firefox launched a mode that will redirect all HTTP links to HTTPS, only optionally failing back if it didn't work.

It would be good to put that server behind a service like Cloudflare - even the free tier. It would still be a ZX81 webserver but at least requests for files that could be cached would not hit the server... And everyone could visit this little experiment.

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