My first home computer has arrived - a brand new Sinclair zx spectrum, the cheaper version with just 16K of RAM, out of which the system used some 7K for the screen, system variables, UDF characters etc.
It arrived through unknown channels, and cost about 280 DEM, which probably isn't much more than the 125 GBP it cost at the source. Allegedly some our guy got it in a murky area of London, where only the Irish dare go, and it was then smuggled via a turbo folk singer, who got married to a Bulgarian, and then claimed she is returning home, so she could import whatever she wanted without paying any customs. SFRY loved to see their gastarbajter return. It was smuggled inside a big concert speaker box. The alternate smuggling line allegedly went through the ambassador of Poland, which I doubt - perhaps some lower staff or his wife.
It came during a recess, when the colleague who was my connection was coming to work, so he brought it. The 9V adapter was missing the mains plug, but we just pushed the wires into an outlet downstairs at the school's electronics repair shop, plugged the video cable into the nearest fixed TV, and there it was - the boot sequence (about one second), the black square with the white border, and the "0 - OK" message on the bottom.
I don't know what I did for the rest of the day, probably nothing much, as the school year was near the end. Maybe I had a few F kids trying their last straw before seeing me in about ten days on the popravni exam („the ace in maths can never be your third - it's always first!“). Then I took it home, made a proper plug, hooked it up with our little TV (bought specifically for it) and... started coding my solitaire game. Well, sort of, didn't have a cassette player yet, and actually went a couple of years without one. Used my reel-to-reel tape recorder instead, until, much later, I got fed up with rewinding. But on that day I didn't have a proper cable , so whatever I tried was lost when I unplugged it, until I had someone (probably the school's shop) make one for me. Actually it was a pair of cables - I needed to bridge two 3mm bananas to a DIN 5 jack, same as would soon become popular as the keyboard jack, and stay popular until the PS/2 plug. The latter to this day of 2021 exists on motherboards, although I don't remember when I last saw a keyboard using it.
Look, a photo. Dad and mom with rosemaries to their lapels, and the newlyweds, not quite their whole faces, behind them. Date is 18th. Đuđa got her daughter married to that guy.
30-IX-2012 - 14-VII-2026