ZX81 Connects to the Network
[Victor Trucco] makes us wish we spoke Portuguese. He’s done a lot of retrocomputing projects including connecting a ZX81 to the Internet to load programs. The project uses –what else–an ESP8266 to get the WiFi communications. You can see a video below if you want to exercise your high school Portuguese.
It is somewhat ironic that the ZX81’s CPU–kept busy driving the video, reading the keyboard, and doing every other task that would save external ICs–is an 8-bit part running about just over 3 MHz (and that does not translate into 3 MIPS on that processor). Meanwhile, the “servant” …read more
