Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Fred Cisin]

>> I had to choose between buying not skimping on groceries V a Mini-Cooper-S
>> (needed a little work) V Honda 600 V TRS80.  Did I make the right choice?

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Liam Proven wrote:
> I'd go for a bike over a car any day. Well, when I was young, anyway. Now,
> I'm getting kinda stiff and creaky... Because of all the bike crashes and
> the scar tissue.

The Honda 600 was NOT a bike. Well, mostly not.  After demise of the mid 
1960s Honda S600/S800 ("poor-man's-Ferrari" design exercise that got out 
of hand and went into production), Honda engineers took a 360CC parallel 
twin, detuned it and upped it to 600cc, added a differential, and a 
reverse (tacked on to the outside of the case), and put it in a car body 
that resembled the Mini.  AN600 was the first Hondas officially imported 
into USA (1970).  A later Z600 had a "sportier" body, and one was cut in 
half in the down-under movie "Malcolm"


>> Later, I bought a used Yamaha MSX (from Mitchell Waite) for him.
> I never got into MSX. They ended up very impressive by the MSX2+ era.

He was into music, and wanted MIDI, etc.
And, of course, he never mastered conversion of the Ensoniq Mirage disks.
(each track had 1024 byte sectors numbered 0 through 4, and a 512 byte 
sector #5)

>> Then he bought a Mindset.
> Mindset?
Obscure 80186 MS-DOS machine with interesting graphics innovations and no 
market.  Designed by es-Atari engineers.