GC17E0A Nostalgia Trip: ZX81 (Unknown Cache) in North West England, United Kingdom created by muttoneer adopted by Ian Titanic

This cache has been archived.

Iantitanic: with a feeder cache gone .... . Time to put it to bed.

GC17E0A ▼

A cache by muttoneer adopted by Ian Titanic Message this owner

Hidden : 11/16/2007

Difficulty:

Terrain:

Size: Size: micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:

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Nostalgia Trip is a series of five caches not far from the A580, East Lancs Road. As well as a journey through South Lancashire it is also a journey into the past... more specifically the early 80's when I were a lad!

The five caches in the series are:
Nice Cup of Tea
Coal Not Dole
ZX81
The Adventure Game
When All This Were Just Fields
It is strongly advised to do them in this order. You will need coordinates from the first two caches to find the third and fourth, which in turn contain the coordinates for the final cache.

The co-ordinates on this page are for the suggested parking only, on Light Oaks Road. The cache location is a twenty minute walk to the northeast, just outside Windy Bank Wood, a Community Forest which is well worth exploring should you wish to extend your walk.

On your way to the cache you'll pass the lovely Light Oaks Hall with its latticed brickwork and old windows, and you'll get your first look at the Liverpool-Manchester Railway... of which more later!

When you find this cache, don't forget to note down the value of C, which you will need to find the final cache in this series.

The coordinates for the cache are:

N 53°28.X
W 2° 29.Y

where X=(A-81) (you will have found the value of A in Nostalgia Trip:Nice Cup of Tea)

and Y is a number that should be obvious from looking at the following symbols...

OK, so maybe not obvious, but if you are a fan of early home computers you may have seen them before.

My very first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, back in the days when Microsoft didn't rule the world and good old Sir Clive still made the best computers in Britain.

The ZX81 was a stylish little black number with a membrane keyboard that, though very futuristic, wasn't the easiest thing to use, especially for an excitable six year old. It offered a brutal 1K of RAM and, if you were lucky like me, you could get a chunky 16k additional RAM pack which had to be secured with blu-tack.

It was possible to write some fun little programs in BASIC, although all that PEEK and POKE stuff was a bit beyond my young brain. If you didn't want to write your own you could always buy such classics as ZX81 Chess, The Perilous Swamp and (of course) the very first Football Manager. My machine still works, and is brought from the attic for reverential cooing every now and again. Some even consider the humble ZX81 rather a collectors' item. Even though the PC you are looking at now is several million times more powerful, it was still less than 30 years ago that these things were at the cutting edge of home computing.

Anyway, back to the cache. To find Y, I would recommend getting your ZX81 down from the loft and taking a very close look at it. All should then become clear...