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

So...

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Am I the only one who thought that T'zer was no hottie? That magazine was years ahead of its time, by the way...

obligatory question

[Anonymous Coward]

does it run Linux?

Re:obligatory question

[Gordonjcp]

I *did* write a task-scheduler for the Spectrum once, which could sequence eight different tasks. I incorporated something derived from it into some embedded controller code (running on a Z80) for a company that did, well, embedded stuff. I heard a bit later on, that the company had been bought by a large electronics manufacturer, and the simple scheduler I'd written while off my tits on magic mushrooms one night while I was in 6th year at high school, has since been incorporated into the braking system controllers of a very high-end automobile...

What fun!

[reality-bytes]

I must have a dozen Spectrums of various iterations kicking about here - including 2 of the early blue-key types complete with microdrives and microprinters.

I even have a couple of 'docking bases' which allowed (IIRC) you to network up to 16 Speccys together in series.

It just really suprises me that there is enough interest still going in the spectrum to actually warrant a magazine relaunch.

'Back in the day' I used to own my spectrum primarily for gaming. The magazine to have was 'Crash' (complete with cover-mounted cassette). Now there was a real magazine; it wasn't even glossy ;)

What I find interesting

[Pan T. Hose]

is why doesn't anyone massively manufacture faster CPUs basing their underlying design on the ZX Spectrum architecture which while being notably simple algorithmically (low count of transistor gates and intergate connections) would be significantly more effective considering the heat and power they would produce as compared to the legacy 386 architecture we use now. That might be something we all wait for: battery powered, silent PCs with no moving parts. Could that be the ironic future of computing: simplicity?

Popularity?

[MBCook]

This brings up a question that I've been wondering. Sinclair machines were very popular over in Europe, right? Could anyone tell me why they took off over there and not over here?

Either way, neat show. Wish I could go.

Re:Popularity?

[pesc]

Sinclair machines were very popular over in Europe, right? Could anyone tell me why they took off over there and not over here?

The first machine I bought was a Sinclair ZX-80. I bought it because it was very inexpensive. It was the first complete system to sell for under 100 pounds, which was revolutionary cheap for the time.

The circuitry was amazing. It had 1 KByte of memory which also serverd as video memory! I remember that someone crammed in a chess program into that. The original BASIC interpreter was 4K. (Why are all program so damned big nowadays?)

To make the system very cheap, it had no dedicated video circuitry! You stored characters in RAM and ended each line with 0x76. (The less text you had on display, the less memory it used.) To display the text on the screen, you set a special bit in hardware and jumped to the RAM character buffer. The CPU would start to fetch instructions from the text buffer, but the hardware would clear all bits fed to the CPU (00=NOP). Instead the RAM output was fed to the BASIC ROM which now served as a character generator. When the end of line was reached, the 0x76 code was fed to the CPU which interprets that code as a HLT (halt) instruction. So no more bits were fed to the display until horizontal sync, which gave the CPU another interrupt. So with a minimum of 74xx logic gates video text could be generated at low cost and extremely low memory requirements. Of course, the screen went blank when executing BASIC code.

It was an amazing machine and I have many fond memories playing with it. The schematics was included so you could do some hardware hacking as well.

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

Re:ooh does anyone remember this

[Anonymous Coward]

does anyone remember this When you're LISTing a program on the Speccy and it asks you to scroll go into extended mode and press a key... the screen scrolls up lots of garbage. Bug or easter egg?

I remember it every time I read Slashdot and constantly scroll lots of garbage on my screen.

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

Re:ooh does anyone remember this

[forgotten_my_nick]

or the all time favorite..

poke 23659, 0

or

poke 23613, 0

Scary that I can still remember them.

TK85

[stm2]

In Argentina there were some authorized clones made by a local motor company (Czwerny). Here are some pictures: czwerny (these are not mine).
Also in Brazil, I got this model imported from Brazil:
TK85.
I also have some CZ1000 and CZ1500 (were called TS in US).

Great learning machine

[jon514]

I got a Spectrum when they first appeared (aged about 13). I found it was a great machine to learn about computing - you had a Sinclair Basic interpreter as the main interface & Z80 assembler underneath. I spent many happy hours coding & hacking games on it. It & its predecessor, the ZX81, were what got me hooked on IT & software development. One of the great things was full manual it came with & fairly straightforward books you could buy detailing the full ROM disassembly!

I wonder whether those at that age now find it as easy to learn as much about the basics of computing? How hard is it to understand the fundamentals of how the machine really works, when most teenagers probably have a PC & Windows OS to play with?

Norwich?

[ollie_ob]

Norwich?

Arrrharrrrr!!!

</Partridge>

Silent PC

[nurb432]

Well, you can get that today with an ARM based unit..

Extreme low power, and they run really cool... Just check out your PDA if you doubt that...

And my old teacher said I was wasting my life....

[TAZ6416]

In my last year at School I got caught reading Crash magazine and Sinclair User in English class a few times and my teacher said I was throwing my life away by not paying attention to O'Level English. But now, I have a job supporting over 800 Windows XP Desktops, all because of that little rubber keyed bugger. Oh hang on.. supporting XP is hell, bollocks he was right, I'm wasting my life ;) Jonathan

Why no 'simple' computers like this today?

[payndz]

Forget even the Z80 and 6502/10 computers of the Eighties - 68x00 chips must be going for pennies by now. (Hell, the 6502 is still being made!)

Why isn't there a 'starter' computer system around any more? I went from self-taught Sinclair and C64 BASIC to minor levels of assembler on both systems before life shifted me away from computers for a while, until I came back to C++ on a Mac more than a decade later - and I think learning assembler properly would have made C++ a snap!

But the way systems are now, there doesn't seem to be anything to get people into programming easily. Anyone could piss about in BASIC for a couple of hours and get things moving about the screen that actually respond to their inputs, but in C++ on a GUI-based machine?

For that matter, why isn't there a BASIC interpreter built into modern machines? I mean, jeez, how fast would *that* run? 64-bits at 4Gh compared to 8-bits at 1Mh? For a program I could write myself in an afternoon for a particular job, I'd quite happily sacrifice GUI elements and go back to 'Enter value here_' options.

Kind of makes me wonder if you could take the gameplay refinements we take for granted today and apply them to an old machine. I'd love to see a (top-down, obviously) C64 version of Crazy Taxi! Or going the other way, how about a totally real-time version of The Sentinel powered by a G5 or 4Ghz Pentium?

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...)

I was in love once..

[deadgoon42]

..a Sinclair ZX-81. People said, "No, Holly, she's not for you." She's cheap, she's stupid, and she wouldn't load - well, not for me, anyway.