Introduction
Mastermind or Master Mind is a simple code-breaking board game for two players, invented in 1970 by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert. The general Idea is that one player becomes the codemaker and the second becomes the codebreaker. The codemaker first decides on a code. The code is made up from four coloured pegs. There are six different colours and there can be multiple pages of the same colour.
The codebreaker then has a number of turns to work out what the code is. The number of turns can be varied in order to make it easier or harder to determine the correct code, but is normally around ten. Each turn the codebreaker has a guess at what the code may be. In response the codemaker will tell the codebreaker how many pegs are the correct colour in the correct places and how many pegs are the correct colour but in the wrong place.
To be Continued...
For now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_%28board_game%29
I had the ZX-80 (before the Sharp MZ-80k), which had just 1k, and that was shared with the screen. As your program got towards the 1k limit the number of lines on the screen began to reduce...
Fortunately (?) the keyboard was so poor that your rarely got that far :-)
Oh the keyboard...did the ZX-80 keyboard get very hot? Then, of course, there was loading and saving the programs on to audio tape, the sound of a demented modem still haunts me a cold winter nights! :0)
I went from the ZX81 to (what I consider to be my first real computer) an Atari 520 STFM, which was handy because when I finally went to university they use them to teach assembly programming, so I could get a lot more work done out of the lab! I still have it in the garage, one day I will have to see if it still works. The ZX81 was turned into a maze mouse.
No, there was no problem with the keyboard getting hot that I recall - just the fact that the pressure required to register a key tap on the 'pressure sensitive' keys appeared to be random from key to key!
I had an 520 STFM for games for a while, but then I moved to the PC with my mighty Amstrad 1640 - 16 colour VGA, 640k Ram, 32Mb Hard card, 5.25" and 3.5" floppies! Programmed it using Turbo pascal and UCSD P-System Pascal:-)
It was a BBC B for me and BBC basic. Did they get beyond the UK?
I remember a friend having a ZX81 and having the press the keys through the bottom of the casing just to get them to register a key press, then he got a spectrum.
I remember those damn cassette tapes and that modem type noise only too well.
My first computer was a Mac, with a black and white screen, I am only 18 now, and I was like 8 when we had it, but I loved that computer! I used to play golf on it! Then we got this new Mac when i was like 12 and we had that until my freshman year in highschool, and then we got our first Windows machine, The rest is history!
2. A terribly written climax, a la Star Trek ("We can't have children, so we captured yours"), supplemented with crappy special effects.
And Shatner. Lots and lots of Shatner.
Combine these with a futuristic setting with about 5 spinoff series and a Vulcan first mate.
There. Your suspense just got built up for nothing.