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25th Anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Alioth writes "Twenty five years ago today, Sinclair Research launched Britain's most popular home computer of the 1980s — the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Costing about one third of the price of its rivals such as the Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU and a better BASIC interpreter, the machine sold well in many guises throughout the 1980s and had more than a staggering 9,000 software titles. The machine may well have done well in the US too, had Timex — the company building the machine under license in the US — not already been in financial trouble and about to fold. The machine was also extremely successful in Russia, although not for Sinclair Research — because the Russians made dozens of different clones of the machine, and did so right into the mid 1990s. The machine still has a healthy retro scene, including the development of new commercial software by Cronosoft, and new hardware such as the DivIDE, which allows a standard PC hard disc or compact flash card to be connected to the machine."
The Speccy was better than the C64. Obviously.
Commodore 64 was by far a better machine.
Spectrum's ghost is still alive and kicking.
-- Rastignac was here.
All of us math students with Ti-89/92 partial with the ZX can emulate it right on the calculator. No more waiting to be at home to play our favorite ZX programs. (mind you the screen may be small, but it's still better than nothing!)
I learnt to program on my Spectrum - and a lot more besides. It wasn't just a gaming console, and it's significance for the industry was much wider also.
its not it's..
A friend who did ASM on these chips said that the Z80 processors and variations there of is still (or at least until recently) the most common microprocessor in the world.
Apparently they are common in dishwashers, washing machines and other programmable appliances. (Can your dishwasher run Linux?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z80
I started with a Sinclair ZX81, 1Kb of RAM expanded to 16Kb with a "RAM pack" that had an edge connector to the main PCB inside. It got hot (as did the power supply) and was often unstable. You could suddenly lose everything you were working on because the system just froze.
Along came the ZX Spectrum, 48Kb (and later 128Kb) with 8 colours (the ZX81 was black & white), sprites (the ZX81 was limited to the built in character set which included blocks & things until someone worked out how to hack that) and rubber keys (the ZX81 had touch sensitive membrane things).
It was a revolution, at my school we swapped tapes which didn't always load, had multiface cartridges to enter POKEs (changing a value at a particular memory address) for cheats and in order to create backups... and a big magazine scene.
I even ran an emulator on my PC to play one game in particular: the game that everyone tried to beat, and still fiendishly hard (and created by a mysterious genius who "disappeared", Matthew Smith) : Manic Miner (link to a Windows version).
Those were the days. The UK 8 bit scene was dominated by this machine.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I was 11 y.o. in 1984, got a Timex Sinclair 2068 for Christmas (they were being dumped into Argentina, where I live). I got that manual (basically the same as the ZX Spectrums) and in a couple of weeks was writing Basic programs. It was really my way into programming. I think the manual was as important as the machine. I DID stumble when I got into 4th dimension Matrices, though. The book said something like "If you can draw a 4th dimension Matrix, then you dont need to be reading this book" :P
You're joking, right?
Here's me and a million other Brits aged 25-35 saying 'thank you' for the Spectrum. If it wasn't for this little rubber wonder I doubt I'd be sat at this desk today, working in IT as a career. I'll be botting up the emulator" tonight to celebrate!
It's also worth noting Amstrad's healthy attitude to the retro scene (they bought Sinclair Research in 1986, and many of those million Brits will think of Spectra every time they watch The Apprentice...). Anyway, the Spectrum ROM was cracked & emulated before permission was sought. When someone decided to approach Amstrad to seek permission, one Cliff Wilson stepped forward with a simple reply: "Yes, do what you like with the Spectrum ROM, just don't charge money for it and don't remove our copyright message." Such an open attitude towards the scene in 1999 means that it's still thriving today.
Costing about one third of the price of its rivals such as the Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU and a better BASIC interpreter
Horray for reviving pointless 25 year old arguments! The oldtimers wake up and are trembling with rage! False teeth may be knocked out, please watch where you step carefully.
Hey Hey 16k
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It was the first computer in our household, and in many ways by far the most significant.
I remember learning BASIC and assembly (Z80), playing Elite all through one night, playing games and learning lots of stuff.
And that little silver-paper thermal printer!
I've still got the 1981 ZX-Spectrum 48K in a box somewhere, with tapes of many games and that printer (and some spare 'paper'). The keyboard membrane has pretty much had it, making the computer almost useless, but one day I'll get a replacement, just for the nostalgia.
It was earlier than the Spectrum. I learned to program on that thing, firdt BASIC then assembly. I still have some tapes with programs on it, wish I still had a machine to run them on. Are there any TS-1000 emulators out there that will read a tape plugged into your modern PS's sound card?
ZX Spectrum was meant to be an aid to the young programmer, not the gamer. But the "market" was made by gamers.
Sr Clive also gifted us with the Sinclair QL, another product the market largely ignored despite its potentials.
The Acorn Archimedes was meant to be a powerful innovative PC. But the "market" was aimed to IBM PCs and to Amigas
That was the history: the market can esily ignore techinical advances against fancy worse products!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I got my spec
trum 48k to c
onnect to the
internet and
work with sla
shdot.
REM disconnec
t
I'll admit I ordered games from Britain, copied them and sold them to my mates and people I hardly knew. I was only 13. Attic Attack was a big seller. Happily my life of crime finished there, and my life of programming took off.
Interview with him - http://www.redkeyreddoor.com/index.php?p=75
I got my parents to buy me a ZX Spectrum for Christmas 1983 to "help with my homework" but all I did was play games. But I work in IT now because of the wee bugger.
Jonathan
I've also made a 25th anniversary hardware project for the Sinclair Spectrum - an add-on board to be used for helping diagnose problems with sick Sinclair Spectrums:
http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Spectrum-Diag
It uses LEDs to display the test progress and status, so even if you can't get a picture out of the Spectrum, you can at least find out if the CPU and memory is working, and a good idea whether the ULA is servicable.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
And I blame it all on my using a ZX81's membrane keyboard when puberty hit. Instead of developing sleek, feminine fingertips I have hands that resemble welding gloves.
:P
Thanks a lot, you bastards.
My proudest Spectrum moment remains getting two solid colours in the border using a clever switching technique with no attribute clash. Took me weeks to figure out how to do it. Things were sooo much simpler back then. :)
The spectrum was only beaten by one machine in the 1980s, the BBC micro. Without that, it has no equal.
Some starting points for those of you who are new to the Spectrum's current enthusiastic and nostalgic retroscene (the buzzwords come free) available from http://www.sinclairfaq.com/cssfaq/essential.html
It's a fun scene, well worth exploring.
Is it possible to web browse on a ZX spectrum in any limited fashion? I'm not talking about an emulator, but actually connecting an old 48k spectrum to the net and browsing, even in text mode. any tcp/ip stacks or gateways?
"Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU"
It did not have a faster CPU. It had a CPU running at a higher external bus clock. You'd think that after all these years that people would realize that MHz != performance, but I guess not.
The 6502 ran on a bus multiplier, meaning it ran faster internally than it did externally. This is true of practically any modern CPU, but was not so common back in the day. In general terms the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 ran at the same internal speeds. That said, the 6502 was much more efficient and RISC-like. In practically any benchmark that scales for speed, the 6502 comes out ahead.
Arguably the fastest, in theory, 8-bit machine was the Atari series. They ran a 2 MHz 6502 (declocked to sync with video), which was twice as fast as any of the other 6502 machines and effectively the same as an 8MHz Z80. But again, these machines always finished at the bottom of the heap in BASIC benchmarks, which again demonstrates the point at the top.
Maury
I purchased a zx80 kit early on, a little bit of assembly (and a phone call to Sinclair to help me un-fuck-up what I did) and it was running with 1Kb and a zilog cpu. Learn't Z80, fiddled around with it a lot and it helped me understand the basic architecture because it such a low-level computer. There were a few quirks, plus it tended to get really hot. I don't know what happened to it in the end, I think it was passed onto a family member. Then I upgraded to a ZX Spectrum 48K. Colour, swimming in RAM (after 1Kb, 48Kb was a dream), improved BASIC support, more peripherals (scored a speech synthesis add-on from somewhere and a thermal printer, oh I still remember the smell!). Upgraded to a +2 when Amstrad released the integrated tape recorder onto a 128Kb version. Thank you for the education Sir Clive Sinclair!
But honestly, the C5? WTF were you thinking man, a 3 wheeled lay-back scooter made from a washing machine motor?
Task Mangler
You're going to make our little challenged friend feel bad... Let it have it's day in the sun.
Between all the Apple, Commodore, TRS 80, and Sinclair fans there is no winning.
On that basis, I seem to have written ZX Spectrum emulation for QEMU. Oops! :-)
BTW, there's a list of emulators in the comp.sys.sinclair FAQ.
Stuart Brady
some acquaintance of my father brought a zx spectrum, and i played with it just 50 cm away to where i am sitting now. i remember it like tomorrow. i was what, 7 or so then.
Read radical news here
Not really much to add, but I feel compelled to post in homage of the computer that changed the life of so many people, including my own.
My very first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48k. I still remember the beautiful banner: "(c) 1982 Sinclair Research, Ltd. Chuckie Egg II was my very first game, and BASIC the very first programming language I tried. The ZX Spectrum and the Timex had an almost monopoly here in Portugal in the '80's, to the extent that I never really saw a C64. The Timex plant in Portugal continued making them after the main branch closed its doors, and exported the machine to several countries (Poland was one of the main markets IIRC).
To Sir Clive: Hip! Hip! Hurrah!
I started with a ZX81 and its 1kb of RAM, little flush keys and built-in BASIC. Moved up (or should I say 'was moved' - I was five years old) - to a ZX Spectrum when that came out. Ahh, the white-knuckle action of Arcadia! The blistering platform mayhem of Horace and the Spiders (by Psion no less)! I spent many a late night (sometimes not retiring until 8pm) hammering away at the rubber keys, navigating some hideous pixellated sprite.
Damn I can still hear the staticky 'eeeeeee-ktsch' of the tape drive now.
Modern computing seems so flat, routine and devoid of character by comparison. What happened?
---- scrm
Tell me, can it run Linux?
I think that your problem with Spectrum programming is due to Sinclair's "keyword" system. This first appeared on the ZX80. A single touch of a ZX80 key gave you a whole BASIC keyword (e.g. PRINT, GOTO). This was fast and simple. Symbols were accessed with SHIFT, and you could still type single letters when it was required.
A similar system was used on the ZX81 , but because it was more powerful, there were more keywords to squeeze onto the keyboard. Thus, some keywords required the user to type SHIFT+NEWLINE *then* hit the key.
Sinclair retained the "keyword" system for the ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately, this was *much* more complicated, and there were lots of keywords to fit in. This made the system complicated. Even at its release, the Spectrum was criticised for this. From "Your Computer" magazine:- Sinclair invented the "one-touch key" system for the ZX-80, which ensured that the computer knew that the first key pressed after a line number, or after the word Then, would produce a keyword, such as Let, Print, Poke or Goto. This meant that programming was fast and positive. The ZX-81 demanded a sequence of key presses - such as Shift, then Function, then a key - to get the results you wanted. Sinclair is obviously wedded to the one-touch entry system, but it is really not suited to the Spectrum. The sequence of key presses required for Ink and Atn, for example, requires the same number of key presses as would be needed to type the word in directly. [..] The one-touch entry system, retained from the ZX-81, is not suitable for the Spectrum and leads to complicated multi-shift operations when keying some functions. It should have been discarded. I also found the Spectrum's keyword system too complicated. I remember having an argument in the school playground where a Spectrum owner said that he could type "RANDOMIZE" in less key presses than my machine.
Of course, at that time, I didn't realise that many BASIC keywords on my Atari 800XL could be abbreviated; for example "PRINT" could be "?", "LIST" could be "L.", and so on. Sinclair should have done that on the Spectrum instead.
Incidentally, when the enhanced 128K Spectrum was released, the new BASIC abandoned the keyword system.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I remember that machine well - a friend of mine actually had one. Without the memory expansion pack, it was pretty much useless. Still, if you you wanted a computer (And who didn't?) you couldn't get any cheaper than that. I remember towards the end, they were literally giving them away for free at our local service station with purchase of an oil change.
The 1 Mhz 6502 was significantly faster and had a more advanced instruction set than the 3.5Mhz Z-80.
The Z-80 was essentially an 8080 with twice as many registers but no significant changes to the instruction set. the Z-80's. (well DMA but it was hard to use). I/O was a separate operation than memory access. And most instructions took 4 clock cycles but some took more and a few took 3.
The 6502 had a much leaner but more powerful instruction set with some very sophisticated computed branch offset instructions. It had fewer registered but mapped all of the first 256 bytes to behave like registers. (At that time It did not pay a significant speed penalty for accessing main memory over register memory.) All I/O was memory mapped. This allowed a simpler bus structure.
it ran at 1Mhz but most instructions were 1 cycle so it was faster than the Z-80.
These design features allowed for the two greatest innovations in modern computing history. Dynamic memory and Graphical displays
1) Dynamic memory.
Prior to the pet and apple, nearly all computers used Static memory which was not dense and used lots of power. Many bankrupt companies had tries to use Dynamic memory with the 8080. They all failed because no one successfully mastered the problem of robustly refreshing the memory without severely compromising the machine. The problem was that irregulat 3,4,5,6 cycle instructions set length. one could not predict easily when and how much of the time the memory bus would be in use by the CPU. As a result the refresh controller had to just opportunstically try to refresh the memory. This resulted in complex logic that sometimes failed to get through the whole row-address space in the required time. As a result, the only viable approach was to insert wait states into the process to give the refresh a guarenteed access. This slowed the CPU and also had complex logic. It even messed up timing loops like those used in I/O for baud rates and such.
The 6502 had a regular heart beat. The second half of the cycle was gaurenteed not to access memory. So the refersh sould be poot on the back side of the cycle. no special logic was needed. No wait states.
Of course eventually refresh controllers got better and that did allow the intels to work with dynamic memory. But the 6502 got their first.
2) Graphics.
Most graphics on the 8080/z-80 used I/O ports. Think CGI graphics. There were of course exceptions. But the reason for the lack of memory mapping was How was the video card supposed to access the main memory. It would have had to use wait states. lots of them. and would have halved the CPU rate.
Memory mapped graphics were of course natural for 6502. Wozniak went one better. He used that backside clock cycle to access the memory for the video output. Now wait you say, how can he use the backside clock cycle to video access if it's already in use for the refresh? That's the genius part. He used the video access as the refresh. The video was just incrementing over the entire row-addrress space in a very regular cycle. Refresh was assured and no circuits was needed.
the Dynamic ram and overall lower chip counts, simpler bus logic, video, refresh all meant smaller power supplies too. the expansion cards required less logic to decode the complex bus signals so the expansion cards on the apple were literally 1/4 the size of the ones on the s-100 bus that was standard in the 8080 world.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Just to say I had a 48k, 128k, +2, +3 before moving onto the Amiga 500.
The Spectrum made me who I am today. All hail the bald git, Clive!
wow
Jet Set Willy! Yay! We were obsessed with it. The holy mantra "Poke 35899,0" was branded into our consciousness.
My web domain.
or "Poooyke" "poyke". it was an era allright. but we used it on c64
Read radical news here
Finally, I can post this without feeling like off-topic pimping... I've actually written and published a book (http://zxgoldenyears.com/) on the ZX Spectrum (full-colour, coffee table format) which I decided to do last year as a 'tribute' to the machine that defined my youth... The Spectrum was a fantastic machine for the time, even though it had weedy sound. It's a shame the Clive lost his way after the Spectrum+ and didn't add enough improvements to the 128k edition of the machine. I wonder if things would have been different if he'd just repackaged the American enhanced Timex TS2068 and brought it over. Still, even though I lot of my friends had Commodore 64s (http:c64goldenyears.com), I still preferred the speccy. Andrew
The ZX Spectrum Book 1982-199x
Oh, the memories ... I remember recording those weird sounds from a particular radio show to get the latest games ... I remember Alchemist was particulary good.
I have to represent the SAM Coupé. /. post. Thinking about it gets me embarrassingly emotional.
The logical evolution of the Spectrum, it could even emulate it perfectly (in 1989!).
Abject commercial failure, but it is the reason I am in this business at all
I have two, still fully working, and it has what is still my favourite keyboard of any machine ever.
I can't condense my feelings for this box of chips into a
Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon are hugely important figures in my childhood.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
I bought one for my girlfriend for Christmas. They were long since out of stock in the catalogs by then, but I found one for sale at a little gas station. The owner told me he had ordered one for himself, using his business address, and had promptly gotten a letter: "We have no dealers in your area, would you be interested...." It was the last one he had, he ordered 3 at a time and kept them under his counter.
I set the thing up (it was the week before Christmas, and I wrap fast) on my parents' kitchen counter using a 9 inch B&W TV they had. I made a display of 3 linked rotating rings (they each had a gap that made the "rotation" visible) that completely blew my father's mind -- the idea that something like that was possible. Compared to the punched cards and half day delays I was used to at college, it was a darned nice system.
because we had a the Timex Sinclair 1000 with the 16K RAM cartridge and had major issues with it prior to buying a replacement for it.
The C64's only flaw was that slow floppy drive. But it had a real keyboard, sprites, 3 channel music, and seemed to be a better quality than what Timex Sinclair offered. We later upgraded to the Commodore 128 which ran CP/M and had 128 mode with a better basic and faster 1571 drive.
I almost bought a Macintosh 512K, but bought an Amiga 1000 512K instead at half the price. After that it was PC clones. But I did buy some old Macs from eBay and later an iMac 350Mhz G3 Mac refubrished from the Internet. I still mostly use PC Clones now but I have the old Macs, an Amiga 500, and sold the C64 and C128 at a garage sale.
The thing I liked about the C64 was that games played smoother on it thanks to the custom chips the C64 used. We almost bought an Atari 400 but we got burned by the Atari 2600 promising us a keyboard to turn it into a computer and making better graphics for it as well.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Living in Eastern Europe, we didn't have access to most western hardware/software.
When I was 7, my father built a 48K Spectrum from scratch using smuggled components (the Z80 processor, the EEPROMs), parts from other computers (the case and keyboard); he made the PCB by himself as well as copying and programming the ROMs. I still remember the hardware debugging sessions.
Later we managed to make the Interface II (I think that was its name) addon board and get a floppy drive to work. It was an East-German Robotron 5.25" drive; we were using 360Kb Bulgarian floppies (sorry, can't remember the brand).
It was a wonderful machine and it's the way I got into computers and learn assembler (Zeus ruled). At 12 I was busy cracking the games' copy protection to be able to copy them from tape to disks. Oh, btw, games had to be smuggled in too - one network used airline pilots, some of the few kind of people who could travel outside the country with ease. Don't get me started with books, it was hard even to photocopy one, as access to photocopiers was restricted.
Time to move out of your parent's basement then.
I keed, I keed.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Here's another source of recent (and less recent) prods for the ZX Spectrum. This one is more specifically oriented towards demoscene and technical feats.
(The link mentionned in the article seems to be slashdotted, btw.)
The problem with Slashdot memes is that YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
My dad told me a story about a friend of his that purchased a Sinclair. He was so excited to have a computer. He hooked it up, turned it on, and thought he'd ask it a simple question. "Who was the first president of the United States?" "SYNTAX ERROR" What?! My dad explained to him that he had to write a program to tell the computer how to answer that question. "Well if I have to tell it what I already know, what's the point?"!
Yeah, he didn't get it. Actually, I imagine he's a lot more into computers these days. Finally got what he wanted, twenty years later.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Here's me and a million other Brits aged 25-35 saying 'thank you' for the horrible unreliability of the Spectrum loading system. If it wasn't so hard to actually get the games to load (I'm looking at you, Ultimate Hyperloader), I doubt I would have started writing my own games instead... and ended up with a good career in computing :-)
(Seriously, happy birthday to a wonderful, wonderful machine. BTW - say to Gandalf, "Carry Me"....)
Speccy made me what I am. Bigger and better computers followed, but she was the first.
8-to-16 bit signed extension (from A to HL):
LD L,A
ADD A,A
SBC A,A
LD H,A
LD A,L ; optional
I'll use the occasion to promote Bacteria, a full Spectrum emulator a friend has programmed, allegedly the smallest in the world (just 4 kB) http://www.speccy.org/bacteria/
To highlight just one point where ZX BASIC is clearly superior than C64 BASIC:
How hard was it to write a program which let you input an arbitrary function (which used only built-in BASIC commands), and plot its graph on the screen? Well, you'd have to write your own expression parser, despite the fact that a parser for BASIC expression was already built into the computer!
OTOH, with the ZX Spectrum, the parsing could be done with a simple VAL. That is, input your formula into some string variable (say, f$), and then evaluate it at any time with VAL f$. The only BASIC I've seen to have that capability was ZX BASIC. I don't understand why, after all those were all interpreters, and thus had to have the parsing code in memory anyway. All that was missing was a way to call it on your strings.
The same text again in German, in case you didn't understand the English above -- Derselbe Text nochmal auf Deutsch, für den Fall, daß Du das Englisch oben nicht verstanden hast.
Worüber Du Dich beschwert hast, hat überhaupt nichts mit der BASIC-Implementierung des Spectrum zu tun. Es ist die Eingabemethode, mit der Du Probleme hattest.
Um nur einen Punkt hervorzuheben, in dem das ZX-BASIC dem C64-Basic überlegen war:
Wie schwierig war es, auf dem C64 ein Programm zu schreiben, das es erlaubte, eine beliebige Funktion einzugeben und dann ihren Graphen auf dem Bildschirm zu zeichnen? Nun, Du hättest einen eigenen Parser für Ausdrücke schreiben müssen, obwohl ein Parser für BASIC-Ausdrücke bereits in den Computer "eingebaut" war!
Andererseits konnte mit dem ZX Spectrum das Parsen mit einem einfachen VAL erledigt werden. Also, gib Deine Formel in eine Stringvariable (z.B. f$) ein, und werte sie jederzeit mit VAL f$ aus. Das einzige BASIC mit dieser Möglichkeit, das mit untergekommen ist, ist ZX-BASIC. Ich verstehe nicht, warum, denn letztlich waren sie alle Interpreter, und mussten also den Paser-Code ohnehin im Speicher haben. Alles, was fehlte, war eine Möglichkeit, ihn auf eigenen Strings auszuführen.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
vehhhhhhhhhhh.
actually flats in turkey do not have basements.
however i now inherited this flat. im living in it now. the same saloon i played with zx, is the saloon i work now.
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Spectrum BASIC was nothing outstanding, but at least it didn't rely on countless POKEs and control characters for simple graphics and sound.
FWIW, I didn't own either machine, and if either were shite in any particular respect, I'd be quite happy to say so, so there
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Crash Magazine, Monotone games to avoid "Attribute Clash", tinny "speaker", rubber keys with 9 different functions on each key, game swapping, Head Over Heals, KnightLore, Batman, Fairlight, Quazatron, Commando, Yie Ar Kung Fu, the Way of the Exploding Fist, Uridium etc etc. Those were the days that computing was fun. :)
Have to disagree with the comment about it having the best BASIC. BBC BASIC was the best.
This site is about American machines, not some crummy 2-bit copy from a collapsed country.
We invented the computer, so hack off back to the pond you came out of.
The Timex Sinclair 1000 was my first computer. I spend many nights programming that thing. I would leave it on for weeks because I had no way to back up anything. So I would just write code, play with it, then erase it all and start something else.
The above is not worth reading.
...which is none other than:
Jet Set Willy!
this brings back fond memories of me as a ten year old kid way back in 1985 learning logo on a commodore vic20, later 64, with tape drives and hooking it up to the television and making the turtle go forward 50 and right 90 repeat 4 [fd 50 rt 90] the sinclair zx spectrum was reserved for my older cousin who used it to run VUcalc off of a cassete tape, i remember being amazed at the small silver keyboard with the little rubber keys, it looked like something from a sci-fi movie for my ten year old eyes he was also very proud of tornado notes, an early word processing pogram today with a pentium4 3.2Ghz and 1Gb RAM this seems like centuries ago, but good memories nevertheless...
Move along now, nothing to see here! Go on!
According to measuringworth [http://measuringworth.com] ...
In 2005, £125.00 from 1982 was worth:
£295.53 using the retail price index
£298.88 using the GDP deflator
£448.72 using average earnings
£516.34 using per capita GDP
£552.27 using the GDP
After just two months of playing with it, my passion to change/modify/tweak/expand all electronic gadgets that I own got a hold of me and I tried to add an A/D converter to the expansion bus, using a modified stock PCB connector. Unfortunately, I fried something while trying with the result that my Spectrum was now dead and I couldn't afford a replacement. That was a sad day indeed but I'll always remember the nice, compact housing and the "feelgood" rubber keys.
There were 3 big barriers (at the time) to stop British machines taking off in the US:
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
was only the first 16K. Accessed by the ULA for video output, causing timing glitches.
Stop it, no STOP IT, you're killing me! You should be a stand up comedian! ;-)
Thanks for the laughs!
!ERR: Signature not found.
Posted anon as I don't need the karma, but try Oolite if you liked Elite! http://oolite.aegidian.org/
The way to type on the ZX81 was to just wipe your finger gently over the key. Works great in FAST mode for feedback.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Sorry, can't blame the poor chaps, if zx spectrum did anything for my fingers, it was increase my wrist strength, trying to get the stupid athlete on the olympic games to raise the weights... still, nice, feminine fingers here :)
shana
... and started my casette player, but all I got was an
:(
"R Tape Load Error"
I remember those ads in Popular Science, Byte and several other magazines selling the Sinclair. I bought a ZX81 board kit which was only a PC board and schematic and I had to buy the parts. I took over several months to build since I had limited money, only high school kid, and needed look for parts in electronics surplus stores. But in the end I finally built it and it ran for several years. I had a friend that a bought a assembled ZX81 and compared to mine it looked much smaller and neater, except for the 1st generation membrane keyboard and that keyboard wasn't great.
Wouldn't it be more fair to compare the ZX to the VIC-20 rather than the C-64? The comparison to C-64 seems like a strawman since it was not the low-end of Commodore computures (although the VIC was discontinued long before the C-64 was).
Table-ized A.I.
A bit of pointless time wasting with Google has found a few of them - Oli Frey (and maybe some others), are now running Thalamus Publishing, which produces illustrated history books, Chris Anderson is the curator of the Technology Entertainment Design) Conference, Julian Rignall was reviewing for IGN as recently as last year, although Wikipedia claims he currently works for the Bank of America (no idea if he still has a mullet), and Gary Penn is now Creative Director at Denki.
If you have Nintendo DS and you're able to run homebrew, be sure to check SpeccyDS. Runs Exolon/Starquake/Knight Lore/Death Chase/whatever very smoothly, loads .Z80 and .SNA files, emulates Kempston joystick, can save memory snapshot to flash card at any time. But what is most important, NDS's screen has exactly the same resolution as ZX Spectrum (256x192), so games look very good since no ugly stretching/interpolation is needed...
I Loved my spectrum. I saved up for ages to afford it and it was everything I hoped for. Didnt like the heat of Australian Summers though !
It leads to me to an interesting question though. All those old machines had built in basic. Before I bought my spectrum I learnt to program on the TRS-80 at the local Tandy Store.
I think its a pity there isnt such a simple ubiquitous language out there for kids to learn on now. I know there are options like squeak but its got to be down loaded and then there are other options as well.....
Its all too hard for the younger kids...
Any nostalgic Speccy user absolutely needs to check out these videos:
http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/tvprog/index.htm
Call me soft, and old, but they brought tears to my eyes. =)
For any others with fond memories of Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge, a free multi-user tribute is available at http://www.midnightmu.com/
Yes, take up the War of the Solstice, playing against other real humans! Storm the Gap of Valethor! Lay siege to Ushgarak! Romp around the Icemark pretending to be a Giant...or an Icelord...
Day by day, the penguins steal my sanity
I am making a new system (it is much more than just a game console system...) which should be a good BASIC interpreter when it is done. Better than ZX Spectrum. If you disagree that it will be a good BASIC interpreter, please tell me. Opinion is a good things to know about. One time I made DS-BASIC (which isn't very good, it is retarded) but that was because of the limitation I had. Entirely new system cannot have such limitations.
My family's first computer was a ZX81. My father purchased it 'unassembled' and it actually sat on our kitchen table for six months before he gave in and paid someone to professionally put the computer together.
My father was always trying to turn it into something 'useful' and kept purchasing Spectrum magazines to for code. I remember when he actually tried writing up a report for work and printing it off on the "receipt" thermal printer that went with the computer.
I was always pouring over the THICK manual that came with the computer, and even brought it to school to 'explain' AND and OR conditions in 3rd grade.
My first "cheat code" was hacking a game called "Red Alert" so I would never run out of lives. I wanted to see if the 'map' actually had an end, like the story that came with the game implied. It seemed amazing to me, as previously all I had ever gotten to play with were cartridge games for an Atari 2600, that I was actually 'allowed' to mess with the game like that.
Eventually, my father lost interest in the computer and passed it on to me when he got an Atari ST (Dad didn't have the best of luck when it came to picking computers that would survive in the marketplace).
I can't remember how many days I wasted playing with that thing, making simple XP and gold accumulators/dividers for imaginary D&D sessions, using a basic DB program to create a record for all the lands in my campaign world, trying to type in those effing 100 page programs for games (only to have a typo around line 270 cause it to never run).
Then one day, it just died. I spent a whole month trying the mojo a 6th grader might try to convince the ZX81 to come back to life. I was "good' for a week, I left it unplugged for days, I even pulled apart its shell to see if something had come loose. But it was essentially a door stop.
By then, I had also gotten an Atari ST. Not my dad's this time. My own, it was cheap even since this was near the end of the ST life cycle (STe I think it was), but it wasn't the same. Basic in it was crappy. You could buy 'nice' versions like STOS, basically pimped up version of Basic designed to make small games, but even then it was so much more difficult to get the ST do to anything that amazed me half as much as the ZX did.
If I were a better person, I'd buy one of those kits they still sell to make a ZX81. But like my dad before me, I'm sure it'd just sit on a table for months before I realized that I wasn't going to do anything with it.
I never got to see the Speccy in person. As a kid I was slightly jealous of the computer itself (kid logic) since it had more than the ZX81, but I'm glad to wish it a happy Anniversary all the same. If it was half the machine its ancestor was, it deserves the remembrance.
LONG LIVE THE ZX SPECTRUM! LONG LIVE SPECCY!
Wow... For all these years I thought I am the only one who adored the VAL function of Spectrum BASIC.
That and the ability to "GO TO" a variable line number, some kind of primitive dynamic method invocation:
10 LET A = 10
20 GO TO A
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I just wanted to add my own nostalgic bit. I ownded a ZX Spectrum 48K+ (plastic keyboard instead of the membrane one). 8088 based IBM PCs were already in the scene but this one was my first home computer. Paid 3850 INR (Indian Rupees) to Computer Point in GN Chetty Road, Chennai and waited for about 4 months to get it in hand. Lots of great addictive games were Jetpack, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Matchpoint (Tennis), Full Throttle, Sabre Wulf and a lot more that I don't remember off hand.
:-).
Tape loading was a bit finicky; I bought a Philips variable speed player/recorder where I could slightly increase the speed for faster loading. Oh those were the days! I learnt my assembly programming on the spectrum; manually poking in hex opcodes before I managed to buy an assembler. This was in high school. 2 years later in my CS Engineering course, I had a course on 8080 assembly programming and remember thinking wow, they actually teach stuff what I did for fun.
I can't say the Spectrum was very popular in India. It was released quite late and was still out of reach of most people. While I didn't have access to user clubs or other ways to talk to other owners, what I did have was access to very cheap Spectrum related books from the UK available in book sales. I still have most of them somewhere in the attic
In 1994, Discworld author & Sinclair ZX81 owner, Terry Pratchett on being asked whether he was a sellotape or blutack man with regard to preventing wobble said "Real Men soldered their rampacks on."
R Tape loading error, 0:1
I can safely say that my parents buying me ZX Spectrum+ in '89 (some of my friends already had Amigas back then, but we couldn't afford it) was one of the best things that happened in my life.
That's when I got infatuated with computers, programming and, above all, games. That's where my fascination with insides, outsides and the logical part of electronic devices stems. That was the beginning for me.
Imagine how many possibilities this gave, how many doors to visionary worlds opened, how programming was tickling my mind - and we're talking about nine years old me in a gray reality of a freshly post-communist country.
I now meet programmers who can't tell me what processor their machine has, who don't understand the way their expensive graphic cards work, I meet engineers that barely know what's in that black box. If I still happen to like to know what's 'under the hood' (so to speak), it is because back then my childish curiosity was driving me to understand ZX Spectrum from inside out... and after that, every next generation of computers was easier to understand.
Right now, I have ZX Spectrum emulator on my PSP and I can revisit the dungeons of Knight Lore or caves of Heavy on the Magic on the bus - and it's like a trip back to childhood days, only without waiting for the game to load from the tape.
Clive Sinclair received his "Sir" title for ZX Spectrum 48 and rightly so. Happy birthsday, Speccy, and all the best to you Sir Clive.
Hurray for the Spectrum. It was my first 'real computer' after owning an Atari VCS for a few years, there was something about the atmosphere and the colour clashing graphics in those ZX games that really captured the young imaginations of us 80's kids. :)
;)
I'm another one who learned the basics of coding on a spectrum (then via another classic the Amiga and onto PC).
So much love for that old piece of hardware and the magazines (especially Crash) were a big part of the 'scene'. I still remember Driller first appearing on the Spectrum and thinking "the future had arrived"
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