The Apple II+

My job with Mr. Alessi started out with a software project he called Forecaster-Buy. The idea was to create a trend following inventory management system for distributors and manufacturers so that overstocking was a thing of the past. The computer we did all our initial development was:

An Apple II+ with 48K RAM and Applesoft BASIC in ROM
Two 143K Apple Disk II floppy drives
An Epson MX-100 dot matrix printer
Later we added a Microsoft Z-80 Softcard but didn't do much with it

I learned so much about programming with Mr. Alessi. We worked in the basement. There was a small room at the bottom of the basement stairs where the computer was kept, and in the larger basement space there was a TV and some chairs. We would talk about the software (and politics) and I would go into room and write software. Mr. Alessi would come in and ask me how I was doing. He'd make suggestions to which I would sometimes respond "That's impossible!" Of course it wasn't impossible, but if I didn't know how to do it, that is what I sometimes said. Then we'd talk and I'd think it over and come up with some sort of code to do the previously impossible.

Working with Mr. Alessi was a great experience. He was smart enough to know what sort of software to create. He'd bring me endless coffee and cookies. On Saturdays he would make me breakfast. He made very nice scrambled eggs. His two sons Tom and Michael were a little older than me and they'd always be around. I remember I used to play with them (and with all the other kids around the block) up at the park at the end of my street; kickball, pickle, keepaway, capture the flag, and hide and seek with the whole neighborhood as our hiding place. :-)

Yeah, working with Mr. Alessi was a great opportunity. It didn't pay much, but I learned a ton!

The Peacock Feather and Sinclair

I met the owner of the Peacock Feather (a gift shop in Needham, Mass that still exists today) at his store, but I don't recall his name. He was from India, and I remember getting into a discussion with him about computers. He said he had one of the new Sinclair ZX-80 http://oldcomputers.net/zx80.html computers based on the Zilog Z80.

He seemed interested that I was about his son's age and that I knew something about programming. He told me that his son played soccer, and I guess he thought that I could befriend his son and teach him about BASIC.

So we agreed that I would come to his house to see this ZX-80. I remember that his home was absolutely filled with the smell of curry (in fact he smelled like curry even when he wasn't at home). I also remember that his son wasn't there when I visited. So much for me and his son developing a friendship.

I didn't have much time to play with his computer. It was much smaller than it looked in the ads. The keyboard was completely flat, and you just touched each "key" lightly to activate it. Each key had a letter, a graphic character, and a BASIC keyword on it. Since you couldn't touch type, the way that you would type a whole keyword in with a single keystroke help speed things up. The computer was plugged into the television set (as so many home computers did), and its plain black and white output would blank briefly between some keypresses. If your program did any computation in loops it would also blank then since the display was driven completely in software by the single Z80 processor.

It was a fun little machine to play with, but I wasn't interested in owning one after I saw it. Later on Sinclair would produce the ZX-81, a much more expandable machine. I actually recently bought a kit version of this machine unassembled which I hope to assemble at some point.