[BITList] Times past

[John Feltham]

G'day Hugh,

On 11/10/2010, at 3:24 AM, HUGH wrote:

> And the Sinclair ZX-Spectrum at £125, 16k RAM - still got it also.  

I started an Sinclair club n the island of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea.

I also arranged with a London shop that if I phoned and placed an order with them, they agreed to post it off that day. I had told them that the money would be arriving by post, as I had the Bank cheque in my hand.

we ended up with around 30 members in the club.

Fees for the club? Nothing, but they had to purchase some software that wasn't on the List of what we already had!

A copy had to be provided to me which I would then copy, for those who wanted a copy.

I worked out what the keyboard matrix was and got my hands on a discarded Hewlett Packard keyboard of normal (note, not 'regular') size and soldered it all up.

I still have it, plus dual floppy disks and a printer (Also Sinclair).

I did buy an Epson printer, by Catalogue, from Hng Kong.

It was delivered by Air Mail. The postage cost more than the printer. Because I was working in a Technical College I got into PNG, duty free!.

It was an Epson FX-80. A dot matrix ribbon printer that did stirling work for many years. Still got it too!

Do you know how the Epson Company got its name?

The Seiko watch makers wanted to get into the computer and printer market. They started off trying to manufacture a printer. They gave their prototype the name of EP, for electronic printer.

When they went into production they needed a name so the new printer was called "Son of EP".  Epson.

True.

See ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiko_Epson



ooroo

 



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