Sad to hear this. I got a ZX in the mid-eighties. It was the 16k-model but my father upgraded it to 48k, I think it even involved some soldering.
One of my best friends also had one and we tinkered a lot, all by ourselves. To get stuff to load from copied cassettes on whatever tape deck or boom-box you had available was sometimes a very frustrating experience. We cleaned the tape heads with q-tips and alcohol, set the five-band eq to some previous good setting (marked with a pencil), then loaded, adjusted and retried. Typing in long listings from computer magazines, often failing and having to double check and re-type parts was quite common too.
We also learned the value of RTFM. The first game my friend had on a cassette had a fold in leaflet. We spent one evening not being able to load it using the instructions. The next evening a brilliant move was made, remove the leaflet from the cassette and read the remaining part on the hidden side :) Success!
These experiences definitely help remove any fear of tinkering with respect to computers and other digital equipment that I later on have noticed in others.
One of my best friends also had one and we tinkered a lot, all by ourselves. To get stuff to load from copied cassettes on whatever tape deck or boom-box you had available was sometimes a very frustrating experience. We cleaned the tape heads with q-tips and alcohol, set the five-band eq to some previous good setting (marked with a pencil), then loaded, adjusted and retried. Typing in long listings from computer magazines, often failing and having to double check and re-type parts was quite common too.
We also learned the value of RTFM. The first game my friend had on a cassette had a fold in leaflet. We spent one evening not being able to load it using the instructions. The next evening a brilliant move was made, remove the leaflet from the cassette and read the remaining part on the hidden side :) Success!
These experiences definitely help remove any fear of tinkering with respect to computers and other digital equipment that I later on have noticed in others.