Sinclair And Clones Computer Show

Anonymous Coward writes "The Sinclair ZX Spectrum seems to be alive and well with 'Your Sinclair' magazine being relaunched at WH Smiths newsagents, and according to this, there is a Spectrum and clones computer show in Norwich, England, (the other Sinclair formats and clones include the QL, SAM Coupe, Timex/Sinclair, ZX81, Z88 etc). It looks like it could be fun. I must get my Spectrum out and play some games."

Comments

Video Playback off an HD... via a spectrum

[kilf]

Video of the hardware panel at NotCon '04, showing a demonstration of the current speccy DemoScene, and playback of a music video off an HD.

http://quernstone.com/notcon04/
http://quernsto ne.com/notcon04/NotCon-Hardware-hig h.mov

If you liked...

[jd]

...Bill Gates' 640K remark, you'll just love Sinclair's thoughts on 32-bit systems. Yes, Sir Clive Sinclair was convinced that nobody needed more than 8 bits. :) The QL used an 68008 processor, which was largely a 68010 that could only shuffle 8 bits into out out of the processor at any one time.

Sinclair was notorious for over-hyping his products, advertising them long before they ever came to market, and aimed much more for numbers than for quality. (If he hadn't built that stupid C5, Sinclair might well today have the kind of grip Microsoft has. Clive had been inventing and marketing products from radios to metal detectors for several decades before the ZX80, so he was very well established. In the early days of home computing, he very probably had more cash on hand than Bill Gates and Paul Allen. If the QL had been true 32-bit, and he'd not gone bust over building an electric car from washing machine motors, there is every reason to believe that the industry today would be bowing to him.)

Legend has it that one reason his computers were so cheap was that he'd buy defective parts. His argument, apparently, was that home users were never going to put industrial-sized loads onto their computers, so there was no point in buying chips up to that grade. Consumer electronics barely existed, back then, so the cheapest alternative was to buy stuff that had failed QC. The stuff would likely still work well enough for home use, you just didn't want to use those machines to control nuclear reactors.

(Maybe that explains what happened at Chernobyl...)

Re:Popularity?

[mikael]

Here are some adverts from that era

Applications for games and applications.

It's amazing they managed to get a flight simulator (if a bit blocky) running.

The $149 computer

The $99.95 computer