Day 1566

Hot thundery night, slept badly, woke up in a mood at eight. Felt better once I was on my way to campus, worked 10.15-4.15 on VTPCM. There were two impressive thunderstorms - the lab has a great view West across the valley and I could see them approach. K left, saying she was scared of thunderstorms.

Saw my supervisor: he did not ask to see VTPCM. But writing it was good practice. I must now start on VT2 - the actual displayer. He's off on holiday for 3 weeks and thinks it should be substantially complete by the time he gets back.

He paid me a big compliment - he said when looking for a job I should not set my sights too low and bear in mind that I was top M.Sc. student and had grasped the background for his work quicker than anyone else he'd worked with. 'Don't end up hacking some company's database about,' he said. Gosh. I always suspected I might have a talent for computing, but this is impressive.

Back at home, started VT2. Thanks to a shrewd bit of downloading on campus, got hold of a Dragon 32 ROM image for the emulator I got yesterday. I can now emulate the ZX81 and Spectrum on my 8086, and the Dragon-32, Oric, and CPC-464 on the 486, thus giving me the functionality of 5 mid-80s 8-bit machines that'd've cost something like £900 in 1982, for about 30p spent downloading the ZX emulators on Sunday.

Pretty hard-working day really. Done 164 hours so far. Not bad.