"The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to."
- Zhuangzi

The dubious pleasures of a ZX81 captured brilliantly today in this article

I'm reminded of it as I've just bought a Kindle and there's something about the screen refresh that makes me think of ZX80's and ZX81's which were my first computers. Of course it's all rose tinted now, but I remember being breathless with excitement when I plugged it into the telly and switched mine on for the first time. It was a present from my Grandfather (who thought it was a calculator and might make me better at maths than I actually turned out to be). But I remember his confident prediction that one day I would earn a living from it. The description here of the printer and the shiny toilet roll of paper is priceless - I'd forgotten both the paper and the unique chemical burning smell when you used it. I haven't forgotten my sense of unbounded possibility when I'd scraped together enough money for a 4k RAM pack. This was a world where if you wanted your computer to actually do anything remotely quickly you were forced to learn machine code which is probably as close to learning an alien language as most of us non-programmers could ever cope with. I guess I feel privileged to have had a tool like this in my life, to have joined the home computer revolution at a stage when people still largely wrote software and were fundamentally interested in how the device actually worked. It was a special time as anyone who spent evenings copying blocks of hexadecimal cose out of magazines will tell you.
I miss the feeling of complexity and the triumphal sense of mastery when you got it to do..well, nearly anything other than crash, or produce error codes.

Here's a note about PEEK and POKE if you're interested.