I found my Sinclair ZX81‘s User Manual (actually, the Timex/Sinclair 1000′s, which I also owned). Reading it brings a smile and sweet nostalgia. Many things have changed since those times, when the “personal computer” era was beginning. People were able to buy computers at reasonably affordable prices. I was just a kid, unaware of the revolution unfolding around me.

Right from the first pages you get a glimpse of how different things were back then:

Welcome to the world of computing. Before you plug in your new Timex/Sinclair 1000, please take a moment to think about this exciting new adventure. We want to assure you that:

1. You will enjoy computing.

2. You will find it easy as well as enjoyable.

3. You shouldn’t be afraid of the computer. You are smarter than it is. So is your parakeet, for that matter.

4. You will make mistakes as you learn. The computer will not laugh at you.

5. Your mistakes will not do any harm to the computer. You can’t break it by pushing the “wrong” button.

6. You are about to take a giant step into the future. Everyone will soon be using computers in every part of their daily lives, and you will have a head start.

This is a translation and adaptation of an old blog post in Spanish.

I don’t remember the exact specifications, but my cousin Oscar’s PC had a VGA card (256 colors), while Oliver had a CGA (4 colors). My cousin had a 386, Oliver a 286. Oscar had a hard disk (40 Mb?), Oliver, just diskettes. Oscar had a Soundblaster, Oliver just the beeps of his built-in PC speaker.

And with all those things against him, Oliver always beat us.

We loved games, and we loved to code. It was the early days of DOS, with no computers in every home. We didn’t have Internet access. We had no books. Our knowledge was limited and our blind steps to find out how things worked were rarely fruitful. Oliver once found out on the QuickBASIC’s help manual how to redefine the VGA’s color palette. We finally understood why we always got shades of red (hint: we were moving only the first byte of the RGB value).
But other things we desired were far away, and impossible to find out by blind steps, like coding the mouse, or the Soundblaster.

So we coded little things with the little knowledge we had, with the dream of making games. There was a fundamental difference between the team of my cousin and me versus Oliver. He had constraints and limitations. He could play a few selection of games, since newer ones didn’t run on CGA cards anymore. So, in a sense, he was forced to code. My cousin and I, in contrast, had the distractions of games, and certainly we played more than we wrote code.
We had the resources to do amazing things, but the most amazing things were done by Oliver. And they were amazing because of their constraints.

Oliver was always the fastest typer. The PCs at school were some old 386s (with monochromatic CGA monitors!). At free time, Oliver ran QBASIC and wrote from scratch a game he memorized: a textmode shoot-em-up, with powerups and all. That was a game I played, like playing Sonic Wings or Xenon 2. I enjoyed it like any other game.
I remember my surprise when he did a fighting game, like Street Fighter. Actually, the fighters were two circles with arms and legs. You did SF2′s hadouken keystrokes and it worked! I begged him to explain how that was done, as I found that so complicated to do.

We use our limitations as excuses for not doing something big with the small we have. Our minds find a rational justification to our fear or lazyness: “If I had a computer,” “If I had more time,” “If I had more money,” and so on. Some of us were given more, some of us less, but the key is what we do with what we have.

Many barriers are in our heads and only in our heads. Don’t let your constraints stop you. Embrace them. You don’t need to be a genius, or own lots of money, or be networked with key people, or be skillful, funny, or good-looking to meet your goals. The ones who were remarkable in life were those who understood their limitations and bent them to their advantage.