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For Sinclair Fans, The ZX81 Lives On
An anonymous reader writes "The ZX81 Museum was set-up to preserve and showcase a private collection of original Sinclair branded ZX81 hardware, software and literature. The museum has since expanded to include ZX81 software from other publishers of the time and a variety of other ZX81 peripherals and reference books. The collection dates from 1981 to 1983 and features the complete Sinclair-branded software series. The activities of the museum are regularly reported via Twitter, along with updates from the ever growing ZX81 fanbase. There is even a YouTube channel for the diehard 8-bit fans out there, of which there seems to be many!" This was one of the first computers I ever used; I suspect it's still buried in some deep stratum in my dad's basement. As is often the case, the old advertisements are great.
My first computer was the ZX-81 kit where you had to soldier it together.
Although in a lot of ways I know this is simply not practical for most people to do, I have to say it was a really awesome way to be introduced to a computer. It's probably just nostalgia but I feel a little sorry that almost no-one going forward will be introduced to computing in that way...
It's nice to see someone keeping the history of this very unique system alive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Finally you can afford to satisfy your lust for power." Well, it's about time!
Wow! Four of those and I could run the Java Update Scheduler!
Given how careful you had to be with just one 16k expansion, I can imagine typing with four attached without causing a crash would take some very steady hands indeed!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was 12 years old. I worked for a summer and made enough money to buy the unassembled version. It was essentially a bag of parts that you soldered together yourself. Add an old black and white TV, a cassette tape recorder and you were on your way. That way back when "built your own computer" meant that either you assembled it or actually designed the darn thing. Today it means you connected the major components together and hoped everybody followed spec.
The best part of the ZX81 was the fantastic instruction manual it came with that essentially taught you how to program (in BASIC). Very well written. I eventually left basic behind and started programming in Forth.
I don't have mine anymore, but I wish I did. The membrane keyboard was truly horrible to use, the RAM (1K) insufficient (I eventually purchased the 16K add-on), and the entire thing painfully slow. But it was an affordable, functional computer back when that was a rarity. I owe it and it's designers a great debt.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I had one of these, and you couldn't pay me to to use one again. Well you could, but it would have to be a hell of a lot. I can understand why people would be nostalgic about a C64, or even a TI994/A. I had both of those too. But I don't really remember much to like about the ZX81. Even the keyboard/tiny plastic membrane was awful. It was sold by Timex in the US and the "keys" were about the size of calculator buttons. I shelled out the $200 (IIRC) for the 16K RAM pack too. I'm probably suppressing the memory, but I seem to remember there being some issue with it, but I don't remember what it was specifically. It was a big (in relation to the system) clunky thing that plugged into the back. It probably didn't seat correctly or something. Some things should just be allowed to die and be forgotten.
If you haven't seen the movie Micro Men about Clive Sinclair, it is very entertaining. Now playing at your nearest torrent.
My VIC-20 beat up your ZX81 and stole its lunch money.
There is even a YouTube channel for the diehard 8-bit fans out there
8-bit? 2-bit. Good grief, that thing was painfully limited except relative to its immediate competitors. Prior to my parents buying my a ZX81 for Christmas, my home computer was an Atari 2600 with a BASIC Programming cartridge. It had 62 bytes of code memory.
Let me repeat that in case you thought I misspoke: it had 62, sixty-two, 2^6-2 bytes of memory.
The ZX81 came with a whopping 16KB, which seemed mansionlike to my very inexperienced mind. But that's like having a better civil rights record than North Korea. It wasn't the worst of the worst but it wasn't far from it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Was the ZX-81 the same as the TS-1000, or was it the same as the one that came after?
I also had the TS-1000. The ZX-81 came before, I ordered mine from England. The Timex-Sinclair was the U.S. version, already assembled for you.
Yes, there was not a lot of software, though there was some you could buy on cassette as you say, or type in from magazines. It was however a great way to get into programming. I won my first programming contest with it, writing a crossword generator that won me a Timex-Sinclair 2048...
There are definitely emulators for both the ZX-81 and TS-1000, though I've not enough nostalgia I know where any are. I'm sure Google can find them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I learned on a ZX81, and I still have one.
I learned Z80 machine code by reading other peoples listings and comparing to the mnemonics at the back of the ZX81 manual.
I programmed a cool morse-code decoder, and a music program that played sound out of the TV speaker (along with a load of junk).
I also beat someone elses implementation of read, data & restore.
Then I went on to a CPC6128, then BBC Micro with econet and advanced programmers guide. Then hacking MSDOS with debug and edlin. Then Windows 3.1 and Delphi; win95, then moving to winXP and Linux and sticking with Linux - for the freedom you know.
For a while I had a ZX81 emulator on my android phone, but like the other guy said, you couldn't pay me to go back to it.
It was awful. At the time it was great and helped make me, but I won't go back. You can't make me!
blog.sam.liddicott.com
The Atari 800 came out in 1978 and was 10 times the computer! When I think of the Sinclair, I think of an oversized calculator, my Magnavox Odyssey could do more. I'm sorry, but the Sinclair was a POS back then and still is today!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
The ZX81 was one of the main reasons the UK had a great generation of programmers (and especially games programmers). The computers were cheap, easy to tinker with and allowed endless modifications. I know that a lot of people are very sniffy about Basic, but the BBC Basic taught in schools at the time was the gateway to self taught computer programming. This is why I think the Raspberry Pi will herald a revolution in computer programming - $25 (?£) compared to the £50 in some of the advertisements for the ZX81. With a keyboard and mouse the raspberry pi will be equivalently priced.
As an aside I never had the ZX81, only the later Spectrum +3. But those were the glory days of British computing...
The cool thing about the ZX-81 in particular (kit version) was how when you built something from scratch you really felt not a care at all about modification to it.
You didn't like the chiclet keyboard? Neither did I. That's why I replaced with with a spare TI-994A keyboard (real keys). After all, when you were the one that personally attached the keyboard connector you feel no trepidation in taking it out.
Or the wobbly 16k ram pack. The problem was the thing was as you say rather bulky, and would with some vibration work its way off the connector just enough to crash the system.
Again when you were the one assembling the case you have no issues attaching struts to the case to make the 16K expansion far more stable.
That's why there is still as much nostalgia for the ZX-81 as other more popular computers like the Atari or Commodore models that were easier to set up and use, because it was generally a more personal attachment and level of effort involved for those that really got into it.
Being mass market things I didn't keep any of the other early computers - but I did keep the ZX-81, because a lot of personal effort had gone into it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That the French version still had a QWERTY keyboard layout. I guess internationalization wasn't its strong point. I learned a lot with mine though, like how to type in endless amounts of machine language in comments.
Nullius in verba
How many k? One. One k. Not two k, one k. And here it is.
Cheers,
Ian
It's not the most popular 8 bit computer made, and you couldn't do a whole lot with it. I'm sure there are fan sites for many different 8 bit systems, why make a big deal about the Sinclair? The Commodore 64 is the most popular 8 bit computer ever made, and I'm sure has about 100 times more fans.
Yes the C64 was better and has more fans, but for a lot of people the ZX81 was the first affordable and usable home computer. I spent a lot of time typing in code from magazines and hoping the tape recorder would actual save it properly.
Progressed to a VIC-20 - cartridge slot for RAM pack or even GORF, followed by C64 although my brothers got a Speccy for games.
All that typing of code and debugging the typos in the magazine must have suited me as I went on to be a developer. Feel sorry for the kids these days - buy a game, plug it in - what are you gonna learn like that?
1. ZX81 was available in March 1981; C-64 was almost a year later.
2. The ZX81 was several hundred dollars cheaper. People who couldn't afford a Commodore 64 could afford a ZX81. It helped to bring computing to the masses.
3. A bit of a fuss was made that it only had four ICs inside it. I think the ZX80 had 21.
Oh well. At that point I realized that I had already been screwed by this thing called a computer and I didn't even know what the heck it was yet. Not to be beaten and then kicked when down, I forced the University to 'creatively' come up with another way for me to graduate (a semester late, but graduated none the less), and then went out and I bought this Sinclair kit and built my own computer in my dorm room.
I had to buy all the solder, wire, and stuff, to be able to build and assemble it, and then I went down the dorm hallway knocking on doors until I found someone that actually had taken that computer science class and dragged him down to my room and had them explain what they did. With a three line program printing out my name in a loop I allowed him to go back to his party, and it was history from there. The local electronics swap shop had numerous visits as I bought a second hand teletype keyboard, power supplies, and odds and ends, and rewired them all to interface with this little computer. It morphed over time to have more memory than it was ever designed to have and lots of relays and controls for all sorts of things. The creation kept growing in both size and complexity. Every peripheral that was ever designed for the Sinclair, and later the Timex version of it, was in there somewhere, and then many many creations of my own.
After graduating I began taking courses in microprocessors and digital electronics and was part of the manufacturing engine that built the next generation of computers. Eventually I became a Computer Scientist, now with fond memories if those simple days, when it was fairly easy to see how something worked and to find ways to improve upon it. Its nice to see that others have fond memories as well. The Sinclair was one of a kind.
price is not the only factor
for one the time had a lot to do with it, now YOU could have a computer without breaking the bank, much more impressive in 81 vs 012, next all you had to do is plug it in and your computing, PI well your going to have to choose and install a linux distro on the thing before it does more than sit there, which sad to say is still a challenge for most people today.
I cut my teeth on the ZX81 when I was 8 years old, and I've still got it... I had a 1k ZX81 which later got upgraded to 16k with a "proper" keyboard. My dad mounted it on a wooden base and fixed the RAM pack to eliminate wobble.
By the time I was 9 I was a confident BASIC programmer, writing my own (very slow) games, and was learning Z80 machine code (note all you commodore people: the 6502 sucked in comparison).
When I was 10 I got a multi-tasking FORTH ROM. It was a replacement for the built-in Sinclair BASIC ROM and was 8k. It contained a Real Time multi-tasking threaded-compiled (as opposed to interpreted) FORTH system.
You can get a ZX81 emulator for *nix and the ROM image is out there somewhere. I downloaded a copy a year or two back. Google for "zx81 husband forth rom".
Some Sinclair staff who had worked on the ZX81 left to form their own company to make a computer called the Jupiter Ace, which was somewhere between a ZX81 and a Spectrum in terms of hardware (no colour, but high-res graphics and more RAM than the ZX81). The FORTH in that was more conventional.
Those were the days!
Stick Men
... and in the UK, it was more like a couple of years, and factor of 6 price difference (£400 compared to £70 - or £50 if you bought the DIY version).
And - also in the UK - if you had that kind of cash, you were buying a BBC Micro, not some foreign nonsense! :-) The BBC was just an amazing machine - it had "good engineering" carved all over it. Properly separated OS vs Language ROMs etc. I built a video format converter in 1990, and I was able to test the input timing conformance using a BBC, because there was one of those *VIDEO commands for directly screwing with the video timings. Amazing.
I never owned a Beeb - I went ZX81 and Spectrum instead, and never regretted it (I wrote this game). But the Commodore 64 was nowhere on the scene. YMMV, of course :-)
Sheridan. Never figured out why Michael O'Hare left Babylon 5 though.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Well, the Atari 800 was 10 times the price of a TS-1000 ($999.95 vs $99.95)
Just wanted to make that clear for younger folks reading along. Kit assemblers our age were not of the same ilk as the hobbyists who designed their own.
True, but the brilliance was that it could get you interested in going further. Even though I did no design originally in putting it together I did have to look at pinouts to hook up a real keyboard... kits are a great way to get comfortable with putting things together at all, then you start questioning what the components do and what changes you can make.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Atari 800 came out in 1978 and was 10 times the computer! When I think of the Sinclair, I think of an oversized calculator, my Magnavox Odyssey could do more. I'm sorry, but the Sinclair was a POS back then and still is today!
Well, the Atari 800 was 10 times the price of a TS-1000 ($999.95 vs $99.95)
You said exactly what I would have! The Atari 800 was an absolutely fantastic machine for the time it came out- I owned a later version called the 800XL, so I've no axe to grind- but it was also damn expensive when first released (late 1979, not 1978).
Everything I've seen indicates that even at the time people knew damn well that the ZX81 was a pretty basic machine in most respects. Yet it fulfilled the essentials of computing for the hobbyist market, for people who couldn't have afforded a computer before, and for that and the fact they figured out how to build a simple but nevertheless "proper" home computer at such a low price deserves respect.
Actually, I'm guessing that this is why the ZX81 (and its US version the TS-1000) generally doesn't get as much respect in the US. It wasn't the difference between "having a computer and not having a computer" over there.
Partly (still guessing) because the TS-1000 didn't come out in the US until over a year after the ZX81 was first launched in the UK, which is a *long* time when the market is evolving as fast as it did in the early 80s. (The ZX Spectrum was already out in the UK by that time). Partly because Americans generally had more disposable income. And also (I assume) because the Vic 20 was cheaper in its home market over there(?). Also, I understand there was a shortage of the RAM packs needed to make the most of the TS-1000, and they weren't that cheap.
Still, in the UK, it was a milestone machine despite its limitations, and for good reason.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
They are using ZX81s to run their webserver
I recall magazines selling the ZX-81 in kit form, but at that time, I had no interest in spending a whole $100 (after shipping and/or sales tax, anyway) for a bag of unassembled parts. I really wanted my own home computer though, so the assembled Timex-Sinclair 1000 version was just the thing for me.
I even owned a very rare plastic carrying case for it, that I had to order direct from Timex with a special coupon to get. As I recall, it held 4 cassette tapes in their plastic cases, the computer and AC adapter, TV converter box, and maybe a spot for that 16K RAM expansion pack (it had 2K internally).
Good times!
Be that as it may, it was many peoples' introduction to computers, including me. You never forget your first... ;)
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Be nostalgic if you want to - but that keyboard really was horrible. We're not talking Samsung proximity touch screens - this was as painful as the weird old lady who works at Burger King punching a special order into the funky membrane keyboard point-of-sale system.
It was a blessing that you only had 1K - it meant your Basic program probably wouldn't be very long.
Use Archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110724142332/http://www.zx81museum.net/adverts.html
Dan
Use the Archive.org link:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110724142332/http://www.zx81museum.net/adverts.html
I tried the Coral Cache link:
http://www.zx81museum.net.nyud.net/adverts.html
But it returns "500 Internal Server Error".
Dan
It lost massively against all of the systems you mention, in almost every aspect. It won on three counts: it was early; it was small; it was incredibly cheap. It didn't have the words "don't panic" written on the case, but it might as well have. Here are a few highlights: monochrome RF-modulated video output only; no sound at all*; terrible membrane keyboard; 1K RAM (total, not all available to user); character-based display (no pixel-based graphics)**; edge-connector only expansion; very ropey cassette interface; "fast" and "slow" modes in BASIC - fast mode blanked the screen (ugly flickering grey) whilst executing the program, slow mode was- well, slow.
* actually, you could get sound output by slightly detuning the TV and using a machine code loop to mess with the RF modulator output
** I think there were also processor-intensive machine code hacks to get a graphic display but you couldn't do much else at the same time
The Atari 400 was half the price of an Atari 800
And that would still have been many times the cost of the ZX81.
or you could buy a Tandy Color Computer for around $400 new
Oh, so only four times the US price, then.
Either way, almost any other computer was far superior to the Sinclair.
And significantly more expensive.
My first computer was the Atari 800XL
As I said, that computer came out two years after the ZX81 had been released in the UK, so you clearly weren't making the same choice as that of people when it first came out. By then the market had moved on quite a lot and prices of more capable machines had fallen (like... the Atari 800XL!)
but it was a birthday gift plus I had saved up some money from my job as a PaperBoy.
Okay, so you didn't pay for it all yourself, then.
Also bear in mind that you're (apparently) arguing from a US perspective. The TS1000 wasn't launched properly in the US until well over a year later, by which time things had already moved on significantly (we already had its successor, the ZX Spectrum). Hence it was never as important over there, at which point it was just a cheap machine rather than the difference between being able to afford a computer and not afford one. (I discussed this in greater depth here).
The context in which it's most important was the context in which it was launched, i.e. the UK market of early 1981. But feel free to point out that the plebs should have saved up their pennies for a much nicer BMW instead of the mundane family car they bought themselves...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
FYI, the TI/99 was selling for $99 when the Sinclair came out.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
FYI, the TI/99 was selling for $99 when the Sinclair came out.
I'd already heard about TI slashing their prices to below cost in response to Jack Tramiel of Commodore's merciless price war, but I was sure that was later on. Having checked, this article says:-
"In February 1983, TI lowered the price to $150 and was selling the computers at a loss. And in June 1983, TI released a redesigned beige cost-reduced version that it sold, also at a loss, for $99."
That was the better part of a year after even the TS-1000's long-delayed US release anyway. At that point of course the TI/99-4A was better value (even though such obviously unsustainable price-cutting pushed TI out of the market shortly afterwards and left the machine orphaned and unsupported).
All this is true, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. That two long years after its original UK release, in a foreign market competing against slashed-below-cost domestic computers it wasn't such an obviously great buy? Well, yes. But its significance was in the UK market of early 1981, not the US market of early 1983, and there was nothing in the same ballpark pricewise back then. In 1981, most people probably didn't even know they wanted a computer(!)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).