With This Sinclair ZX81 I Will Conquer the Galaxy

Writing that post about Gödel Escher Bach got me interested in, for lack of a better way of putting it, the archaeology of American nerdiness.

Archaeology is not an exact science — it does not deal in time tables! — but yesterday I was moving a box of books up to the spare room, because the shelves in “my study”* give out at the P’s and this box contained the Z’s. As such it was mostly full of Zelazny novels, with a soupçon of Zola left over from college.

But it also contained this artifact:

This is the programming manual for the first home computer my family ever owned. Which looked like this:

This is a beautiful piece of photography, as it shows off perfectly the crap grainy plastic of the case, the crap membrane keyboard of the ZX81, and the perfect period crap wood-grain coffee table that often supported ZX81’s, and is their natural habitat.

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