Comment Re:They're probably correct (Score 1) 273
You had to build the feature set yourself. Quite a difference from a smartphone, designed for easy consumption of pre-packaged goods.
I remember building my own reset-button on the back of the harddisk, or looking at the joystick cabling from a failed joystick and trying to build something where you could press buttons to move things on the screen. And creating my own games because we didn't have downloads yet.
If you wanted to load tapes on the zx spectrum, you had to be ready with a screwdriver to adjust the tapeheads for every tape. Some of my highschool friends learnt soldering specifically to expand their spectrums.
Connecting to a BBS for a download later on, wasn't easy either. I had a teacher at university who wanted to demonstrate this new thing called "usenet". He spent half the lecture trying to get a connection, fiddling with the hundreds of options for each protocol that had to be set exactly right.
Yeah, a smartphone is so much harder... lol.