Alcoholics Anonymous

^^ zx81 Not all of them do. There is pseduo-hires and true-hires. Pseudo-hires does not require any modification but you also cannot have an arbitrary bitmap display since not all bit patterns were possible. True hires on the other hand does allow an arbitrary 256x192 display. However, with one of the methods, it's only possible if the expanded ram available from Timex or Sinclair is modified by the addition of a diode. In the zx81 (and zx80), the z80 is directly generating the display by 'executing' the bitmap and this is not possible in the stock rampacks without the modification. Pseudo-hires was around in the day and led to some hi-res games, 64-column word processors and was used in at least one CP/M port. I'm not sure why previous posts are discounting the basic as I found it to be preferable to eg, the dialect Commodore was supplying for its C64, minus the disk capability. It was slow, contributed by two factors -- written to be compact and more than half of the z80 time was spent executing the display -- but I thought it was a really good basis for learning. My 10-year-old self, in particular, was very driven to learn by the keywords printed on the keyboard itself. A lot of trial and error and finding out what those commands did drove the discovery. The keyboard itself was impossible to touch type on, so the keyword entry was a requirement, and I doubt had anything to do with saving a few bytes in a tokenizer. That allowed you to enter programs at a rapid pace, perhaps faster than an average person typing out full keywords on a professional keyboard. There was a great spirit around that machine and it's the reason it has such a following today. It suited the audience it was intended for really well, but as it came down in price it found a new set of buyers among regular people for whom such a machine was useless. But with those new buyers found, the price war began and so did the home computer revolution.