@nthony

There have been many square ones. There will be many more, I hope. I recently found this on my shelf - well I say found - I knew it was there... but I took it out, looked, read, remembered.

The Sinclair ZX81 for me was the start of what I do now. Early eighties computing involved a membrane keyboard, just about enough memory to write something functional before spilling into screen RAM - with games you could stop while loading and look through, and possibly even re write yourself (seriously - 1K RAM, 8K ROM, think about that). It was a world of old humming black and white TV sets for me, with fizzing resolution, and a long pause when you pressed New Line. It was a beginning. My beginning with this fascination that still plagues me.

Looking back now with the wisdom of a few years under my belt, this was the right book to come with the small black hot cheese wedge. Unlike the Sinclair Spectrum Manual (in a less fetching Orange, but in a similar graphical theme) it tackled important things, and didn't go with the easy win of games. Here you had tackled issues such as how DIMensions (flat arrays) are actually stored, the limitations of strong typing and how things are stored - sign and mantissa, nuts and bolts, and practical maths like how to plot points around a circle using Cosign... and a rather heavily thumbed page with pencil scribblings of a small boy charting the screen as its extensive 63x43 pixel points or 41x21 rows and columns.

The instruction manual is one of a military or utilitarian feel... it instructs - and thus I learnt, slowly, quietly to the buzz of the ancient giant, smelly, glowing back television set after a day at the brain factory... Primary School.

Here is a short extract from Chapter 21 to give you an idea of how it read:

To make sure this happens, the string that is being assigned to is cut off on the right if it is too long, or filled out with spaces and cut if it is too short - this is called Procrustean assignment after the inn-keeper Procrustes who used to make sure that his guests fitted the bed by either stretching them out on a rack or cutting their feet off.

If you now try:

LET A$()="COR BLIMEY"
&
PRINT A$;"."

... so very fine, so very very me.

If you fancy a little peruse with the proviso you are at primary school, and computers, well Pong Consoles where pretty much incredible things of wonder... you can check it out online 'Sinclair ZX81 BASIC programming'.

Here is to Square Ones.