Sinclair ZX Spectrum 30th Anniversary

It's not just the TRS-80; new submitter sebt writes "ZX Spectrum, the microcomputer launched in 1982 by Sinclair Research (Cambridge, UK) turns 30 today. The launch of the machine is seen by many today as the inspiration for a generation of eager young programmers, software and game designers in the UK. The events surrounding its launch, notably Sinclair's well-known rivalry with Acorn, later helped to inspire the design of the ARM architecture and most recently the Raspberry PI (based on ARM), in an effort to reboot the idea of enthusiastic kid programmers first captured by the Spectrum and Acorn's BBC micro. Happy birthday Spec!"

Comments

My first computer

[mcrbids]

... was a Timex Sinclair 1000. It had 16k of RAM and loaded programs on audio cassettes! You had to be pretty consistent with the volume or you'd "lose" programs. I programmed Monopoly into it, complete with color-pixel graphics, all in BASIC!

Re:My first computer

[Immostlyharmless]

My 2nd computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. absolutely hated it compared to my first computer (a Vic-20) because you couldn't just *type* your program, every key was a shortcut for a basic command, drove me up the wall :)

Re:My first computer

[mprinkey]

I had the Timex Sinclair 1000 as well, but not 16KB module. Paid $60 for it at Hills--I was in 6th grade. It learned quickly to be careful with my precious 2k of RAM, but I coded a fairly accurate image of the Space Shuttle and figured out how to make it "fly" across the screen. Hard to believe I have been writing code for almost 30 years!

Re:My first computer

[lord_mike]

The TS1000 was my first computer, too. I certainly had a love/hate relationship with that machine. I hated that it was so incredibly limited, but loved that it was mine. I didn't have to sign up for programming time anymore at the school or library. The machine was all my own whenever I wanted it even if it sucked. It was cheap and it was mine! Mine, mine, mine!! It was at least a good learning machine. There were a surprising number of programming books available, and even a decent amount of off the shelf software. The TS1000/ZX81 was certainly a brilliant example of engineering efficiency. Although it wouldn't compare to Woz's work with the Apple II, the fact that the Sinclair was able to do everything with only 4 chips was an incredible achievement.

I always had a soft spot in my heart for Sinclair and his machines. I wish they had something like the Spectrum here in the states, but by then Commodore had initiated the price wars and it was pointless for Clive to invest in his newer machines here. I can see why they were so popular in England. They were inexpensive, easy to work with, and quite ubiquitous. While many Americans long for their Commodore 64's or Atari 800's, the Sinclair was a truly British machine made for Britons. It's understandable why that generation of users holds the Speccy near and dear to their hearts. Software is still being produced for the Spectrum, and it boasts the largest software library in the world (according to Wikipedia).

In many ways Clive Sinclair was both the Jack Tramiel and Steve Jobs of Europe. Like Jobs, he believed in simple elegance for all his products. He was also a ruthless leader. Unlike Jobs, though, and more like Tramiel, he also believed in making his products as inexpensively as possible... cutting corners wherever he could to bring prices down. He certainly should be considered one of the great computing pioneers and given the same due reverence of his American peers. After all, he was knighted for bringing computing power to the masses.

Nevertheless, I don't think I'd use my TS1000 to control a nuclear power plant, as Sinclair Research suggested in their advertisements. Unfortunately, my unit isn't going to be running power plants or anything else for that matter--it doesn't work at all anymore. The years of temperature changes in the attic on the cheap parts finally did that little wonder in. I still have it sitting prominently at my desk, though. It makes a great conversation piece.

Thank you, Sir Clive, for making my first computer!

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

The Timex Sinclair 1000 was monochrome..

Re:My first computer

[blind biker]

I programmed Monopoly into it, complete with color-pixel graphics, all in BASIC!

Well, that's funny, since the TS1000/ZX81 was B/W. It had no color to speak of.

That's what the ZX Spectrum fixed.

Re:My first computer

[ozmanjusri]

My 2nd computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.

Mine was the Australian equivalent, the MicroBee. They were another Z80 variant, very solidly built. The biggest draw for most of us was that the non-disk based versions had battery-backed CMOS RAM. They also had a Word Processor and other software on EPROM. I saw several Sinclair 1000s, in those days but never liked them, I think I would have gone crazy from frustration if I'd had to use one. Interestingly enough, they've started to make the MicroBees again... http://www.microbeetechnology.com.au/index.htm.

Re:My first computer

[DrXym]

Personally I think the keycodes was kind of elegant. It meant less syntax errors, simplified parsing and meant the program occupied less space in memory. The ZX Spectrum inherited the feature from the ZX81 and ZX80.

Later ZX Spectrums from the the Spectrum 128 onwards actually allowed you to type programs manually but only in 128K mode. If you booted into 48K mode the ROM still enforced the old style. The first Spectrum 128 printed all the keycodes onto the buttons but the +2 and +3 only printed a couplemaking it enormous fun trying to figure out which button meant what. Most Spectrum owners can probably still recall the sequences for calling LOAD "", POKE and cursor keys with little trouble.

Re:My first computer

[philip.paradis]

I had a Sinclair ZX80 as a kid. My father fixed the keyboard issue for me with a real keyboard connected to it. The way it was set up, I could type BASIC commands normally, which was much nicer than the typical method. The standard peripherals were still a black and white TV and cassette deck; I'll always remember the lovely sound of a program loading from tape.

Re:My first computer

[earthloop]

Most Spectrum owners can probably still recall the sequences for calling LOAD "", POKE and cursor keys with little trouble.

One of the emulators is called "jpp" for this very reason. ;o)

Re:My first computer

[hackertourist]

My first computer was a Spectrum. Not having been exposed to other machines before, the one-keystroke-per-command feature felt perfectly natural to me, and faster than having to type the commands by hand (in part because the rubber keyboard hindered fast typing).

It also made it easier to formulate correct programs: the system knew that certain keywords should only appear at the start of a line and made it impossible to put that keyword anywhere else in the line. An early form of syntax checking.

It made Spectrum Basic readable; it ensured that the commands and keywords were always written in full, rather than the shorthand that crept up everywhere else.

It had its drawbacks: hunting down infrequently-used commands could take more time than typing them, and the system was unique to Sinclair so the skill didn't transfer.

Ah, the Speccy. I still have mine, plus a box full of tapes. I wonder if they're still readable though.

Re:My first computer

[hairyfeet]

But you have to admit its nice to see the little guys that meant so much to so many actually get recognized. I remember how in the late 90s-early 00s all you would ever hear about on computing history was MSFT and Apple, maybe a little IBM. But many of us didn't have IBM or Mac money when we were kids so its nice to see Sinclair, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, BBC Micro, all the little guys that started so many of us down the road to a lifetime of computing.

So while i never got to own a Sinclair (Like you I had a VIC) I'm sure that those that had the Sinclair enjoyed much time with it and love computers to this day thanks to it. So happy BDay Sinclair, here's to you and all the little guys that started us on the road of computing.

As I said with the TRS while I'd love to be a teen again frankly i wouldn't trade our childhood for the teens of today with all these locked down cell phones and tablets, the teens of today I doubt will get a love of tinkering and tweaking that we got from our little guys.

Re:My first computer

[SigmundFloyd]

the program occupied less space in memory

Unlikely. Back then, every BASIC interpreter (certainly all of those for 8-bit home computers) used to "tokenize" commands to save costly RAM (and CPU cycles on interpretation, too). Tokenization usually meant translating every command to a 1-byte index to a lookup table. That's what is called "bytecode" nowadays.

Re:My first computer

[Savage-Rabbit]

I had a Sinclair ZX80 as a kid. My father fixed the keyboard issue for me with a real keyboard connected to it. The way it was set up, I could type BASIC commands normally, which was much nicer than the typical method. The standard peripherals were still a black and white TV and cassette deck; I'll always remember the lovely sound of a program loading from tape.

I still have my Sinclair Spectrum ZX 48K, complete with joystick and other peripreals. My most enduring memory is not the sound of a program loading from tape it's the "Crrrcccswwwhhzzzzz" sound my cheapass cassette players occasionally made when they ate up my tapes and with them my precious programs. With time I became an expert in cassette player repair. Thankfully those days are over.

Re:My first computer

[dintech]

My first computer was a spectrum too. I recently I downloaded the excellent open source FUSE emulator which when combined with .TAP format games from World of Spectrum and the right settings, you can watch the tape loading screens.

For the "R Tape loading error" gambler in you, some emulators even let you connect a cassette player to your audio interface's line in for that authentic experience.

Re:My first computer

[BasilBrush]

Programming with tape machines was the real exercise in patience. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it with source files saved in a moment, automatically before each compile. It took us 5 minutes to save to tape. And we had to keep track of what version of what program we stored where on what tape.

If we didn't save before running we risked a crash and losing everything we'd added since the last save. Knowing when to take the risk and when it was time to save was the only way of making progress.

And yet, somehow, programming then was still more fun than today.

Re:My first computer

[msobkow]

Actually if you look into the BASIC interpreters of the time, I can't think of a single one that actually stored entire keywords in memory. They used codes for keywords and variables, such that most keywords were encoded as a single byte.

The Sinclair just made it possible to TYPE those codes explicitly instead of having to spell out the words and let the interpreter do the primitive compression.

In particular, I'm thinking of Commodore's implementation and the TRS-80.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people I know that started with a Spectrum are gamers today, as they were then. Others that begun with a commodore or Sony MSX (like myself) are developers.

Re:My first computer

[robthebloke]

Unlikely.

So in a nutshell:

* 8Bit computers stored a tokenising program (a few hundred bytes maybe?).
* The spectrum didn't need a tokeniser (a single keycode maps directly to the BASIC instructions).

That tokeniser is not free - it uses up memory.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this had several benefits:
- you could not enter lines with syntax errors
- all the keywords were there which was an advantage when learning to program
- all keywords had their own numeric code so basic code had a smaller memory footprint

Re:My first computer

[slartibartfastatp]

Personally I think the keycodes was kind of elegant. It meant less syntax errors, simplified parsing and meant the program occupied less space in memory.

What I really liked about it is that all BASIC programming commands are available on the machine itself; so I just kept wondering what PUT# and GET# commands would do, as the manual for the Brazilian TK-90X won't give details and we never got the microdrive here.

And I think it was kind of cool to have that keyboard with so many stuff written in it, for me as a kid.

Re:My first computer

[gstrickler]

So, in a nutshell, wrong. The tokenizer was in ROM, along with the rest of the BASIC interpreter. The amount of RAM used was unchanged.

Re:My first computer

[Jerry Atrick]

The tokeniser uses some ROM space, RAM use is temporary and not at runtime - so irrelevant. The ROM space is why the original ZX80 BASIC used direct token input, it had a tiny ROM. It remained in there on the ZX81 then the Spectrum because Sinclair never allowed enough time to rewrite the interpreter rather than any need to save space. Which sadly meant BASIC on it was pitifully slow and didn't improve till the 128.

Given the poor quality of the Spectrum keyboards (and the ZX ones before it) it was probably an advantage anyway. Just drove me crazy and one of the reasons I refused to program any Sinclair machines.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to adjust the volume of your very own memory cassettes, as they are failing you right now. There was absolutely no way to make color pixel graphics in a Timex Sinclair 1000. I still have my still working TK-85 (the shamelessly ripped brazilian clone of Sinclair ZX81/Timex 1000) and my also still working TK-90X (the shamelessly ripped brazilian clone of the Spectrum).

Re:My first computer

[kinarduk]

You'd be surprised at the things hackers made the '81 do. I remember sound generation by playing with the screen refresh code, no don't ask me how, but I remember trying it out. Also there was code where people managed to get some colour out the the '81, again I think by playing with the refresh code, but I can't remember exactly, it was a LONG time ago. Lastly there were hardware 'fixes' for the lack of colour, here's a post I found on the 'nets: http://forum.tlienhard.com/TS1000/www.ts1000.us/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl-board=HARDWARE;action=print;num=1125268877.htm

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh cool!

Had to think about this one for a second but then I remembered that pressing 'J' invoked the LOAD command and P invoked inverted commas (typed in the correct sequence of course), so pressing j,p,p equated to LOAD ""

In retrospect I believe that my father purchasing a 48k ZX Spectrum was one of the best things he ever did for me.

Re:My first computer

[Crookdotter]

That was the beauty. I used to write a lot in BASIC on a speccy, and the lines flowed out rather quickly. Until you had to renumber them of course.

Re:My first computer

[Savage-Rabbit]

Programming with tape machines was the real exercise in patience. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it with source files saved in a moment, automatically before each compile. It took us 5 minutes to save to tape. And we had to keep track of what version of what program we stored where on what tape.

Yes, that and discovering that you had run out of batteries. Most cassette players back then did not come with an external power supply. Eventually I saved up for a powersupply with a user selectable voltage output.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it's possible to tokenise the keywords for storage anyway - the BBC Micro did that. So memory saving is not contingent on single key entry of commands..

Re:My first computer

[jeremyp]

I don't think I'd use my TS1000 to control a nuclear power plant, as Sinclair Research suggested in their advertisements.

When I was at school we went on a tour of what is now called Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. We had a tour around one of their fission reactors and there in the control room was a Commodore PET. This would have been in about 1983 or 84.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Spectrum's 16K of ROM were pretty stuffed, IIRC, and 128's ROM was used mostly for editor and new commands and called upon 48's ROM for actual interpreter. ROM usage was a concern - strings terminated by bit 7 set, anyone? Or a stack-based language bytecode interpreter for FP arithmetics (used throughout the ROM)?

If you wanted speed from BASIC on Speccy, you got a compiler, there was honking fast integer arithmetic only, and there were somewhat faster than interpreting floating point one.

Re:My first computer

[BasilBrush]

A tokenizer wouldn't need a few hundred bytes. In those days we coded algorithms like that very efficiently. A few tens of bytes perhaps.

The biggest part of it would be the look up table for the keywords. But that would be needed for output of the listing regardless.

As a point of comparison, the Acorn Atom had a BASIC with a tokenizer, and it's ROM was 8KB versus the Spectrum's 16KB ROM. To be fair though the spectrum was probably just doing it that way for consistency with ZX80 & ZX81. The ZX80 only having 4KB ROM.

Re:My first computer

[BasilBrush]

In fact most BASICs of that period were Microsoft BASIC, including Commodore and TRS-80.

And yes, that and every other BASIC interpreter I've ever heard of stored the program as tokens.

Re:My first computer

[DrXym]

It probably was possible to tokenise but then you need to add more code to do the tokenizing and handling of syntax errors. I assume Sinclair just stuck with what they had from the ZX81 because it worked well. Generally speaking once you got used to it it was an easy system to work with. On the flip side if you use a ZX Spectrum emulator these days it's almost impossible without a keyboard overlay to tell you what buttons do what.

Re:My first computer

[BasilBrush]

It made Spectrum Basic readable; it ensured that the commands and keywords were always written in full, rather than the shorthand that crept up everywhere else.

The shorthand that other computers had was only for input. Because it was tokenized, listings would always spell keywords in full regardless of how you'd input them.

For example on the BBC Micro you could input:
10 P."Hello World!"
and the output would be
10 PRINT "Hello World!"

On the few occasions I used a speccy I found the keyboard to be horribly confusing, with it's multiple functions printed on and around each key.

Re:My first computer

[hlavac]

What? What does Microsoft have to do with BASIC? Do you think Microsoft invented it or something? You are probably thinking Visual Basic. That has no relation to Commodore's implementation. You fall victim to Microsoft's marketing practice of calling their products generic names.

Re:My first computer

[mooterSkooter]

Wow. You learn something everyday. I have always thought the whole reason was to save memory but yes, obviously that could be done when saving (and displaying on screen and editing).

Very interesting.

Yes, it was a joy to get the 128 (I skipped the 128 and went straight to the +2) and actually type the commands.

mmmm, RANDOMIZE USR 1234

Re:My first computer

[sa666_666]

What are you talking about with Vistual Basic?? The GP is correct. Most BASIC implementations from that timeframe were developed and licensed from Microsoft. Boot up a Commodore 128 and it even shows the MS copyright. In fact, there's a humourous story about Commodore/Jack Tramiel getting Microsoft Basic without any per-computer licensing fees, and as such being the only person who ever outmaneuvered Bill Gates in a business deal.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Most 8-bit basics tokenised the BASIC keywords, so there was no memory saving by having keys enter full keywords instead of single characters. I'm sure the BASIC editor still processed each entered line of code character by character too, and retokenised.

Given the quality of the Spectrum keyboard however, the single-key BASIC was probably a good idea!

Re:My first computer

[BasilBrush]

LOL! You're obviously too young to remember. Most 8-bit computer's BASIC was Microsoft BASIC. Commodore BASIC was licensed from Microsoft BASIC.

Nothing to do with Visual Basic, That came more than 10 years later.

Take a look here for confirmation that I'm right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Basic

Back in those days Microsoft was actually respected.

Re:My first computer

[wildstoo]

...the teens of today I doubt will get a love of tinkering and tweaking that we got from our little guys.

I'm pretty sure teens will always have a love of tinkering and tweaking their "little guys".

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course. As we all know, Bill Gates' first product was Windows 3.1.

Re:My first computer

[gatkinso]

Bill Gates was the man when it came to BASIC.

Re:My first computer

[cpu6502]

What? What does Microsoft have to do with BASIC? Do you think Microsoft invented it or something? You are probably thinking Visual Basic. That has no relation to Commodore's implementation. You fall victim to Microsoft's marketing practice of calling their products generic names.

What a dumb fuck. When you use a Commodore, Apple, or most any other 8/16 bit computer of the 70s/80s, you see "BASIC" splashed across the screen. Sometimes with "copyright Microsoft" as well.

Atari is probably the only company that didn't use MS Basic, because they couldn't squeeze it into their limited ROM space.

Re:My first computer

[cpu6502]

This is why I decided it was worth the extra $100 to get a disk drive. I had seen my friend's pain with the cassette save. Plus disk drives were just "cooler" to own with their shiny plastic, ker-clunk when you closed the door, and whoosh as they quickly-and-efficiently loaded games off the floppies.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember my Sinclair 1000, with the 16k add-on module. It worked great...until my dad dropped a shelf full of books on it and broke the connector. Then, we got the fun process of re-soldering all of the connectors. It worked after that, but it was never the same...

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

... was a Timex Sinclair 1000. It had 16k of RAM and loaded programs on audio cassettes! You had to be pretty consistent with the volume or you'd "lose" programs. I programmed Monopoly into it, complete with color-pixel graphics, all in BASIC!

How did you manage the color graphics on a TS1000?

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the amount of ROM used does have an impact on the maximum possible amount of RAM. The Z80 only had a 64KB address space into which the ROM needed to be mapped along side RAM. Presumably the ROM on the speccy was around 16KB, hence 48KB of RAM.

Re:My first computer

[slartibartfastatp]

and my also still working TK-90X (the shamelessly ripped brazilian clone of the Spectrum).

I wouldn't use the word shamelessly; AFAIK both the TK90x board and its ROM was different from the Spectrum. The board relied heavily on a custom chip that comprised the ULA and other functions as well; the ROM contained BASIC messages in portuguese (and in some models, spanish) and three different character sets (or Used Defined Graphics UDG): the standard (UDG-0), the "latin" (with á, ã, ç among other letters) (UDG-1) and the "really" user defined set, UDG-2. A new basic command, called UDG, provided a tool for editing this characters!

And many other differences which required that most games from the original speccy needed some tinkering to get to work on the TK90x.

I remember just coding the whole evening and using the cassete recorder to play some music while not loading/saving anything. Oh, how many of my stepfather tapes I ruined by saving programs in it by mistake!

Re:My first computer

[John Bokma]

No, in a nutshell, still correct. There is a limit on address space (64K), so memory saved is memory saved, no matter how many bytes. I don't recall that there was much (if at all) "free" space in the 16K ROM of the ZX Spectrum.

Re:My first computer

[gstrickler]

No, the ROM space is fixed and not usable for user programs, 64k address space - ROM space - I/O space - video memory - working memory = available address space for programs. Including a Parser/tokenizer in ROM does not take away any space from the user program. So, in a nutshell, you're still wrong.

Re:My first computer

[Anonymous Coward]

False. Timex Sinclair did not have 16K of RAM without the add-on ram pack, had no colour, and had no pixel graphics.

Re:My first computer

[John Bokma]

I am not. Let me explain it in a clearer way: The 16K ROM of the ZX Spectrum is as far as I know completely used (I think there were a bunch of filler bytes, but can't recall how many). So no tokenizer means that the ROM had space for other routines. I am not talking about a user being able to "poke data in ROM" (you silly, you), I am talking about useful code in ROM. And since ROM was not cheap in those days, bytes saved was money saved.

Re:My first computer

[gstrickler]

And given that the table to convert the keycodes to tokens, and the tokens to readable text for program listings, was already there, all that was required is a small loop to scan the already existing table. Probably no more than an extra 20-30 bytes of Z80 code. I can almost guarantee you there was space to squeeze that into the ROM, even without looking at it. You say there were some filler bytes....

Do I need to explain it more clearly? Or write the code to prove it?

Re:My first computer

[An ominous Cow art]

Indeed, Atari's BASIC was a non-Microsoft implementation.

This is a nice bit about the tokenizer, that hopefully will clear up some of the arguing here.

Re:My first computer

[ncc74656]

No, in a nutshell, still correct. There is a limit on address space (64K), so memory saved is memory saved, no matter how many bytes.

It couldn't have added much...as others have already said, maybe a few dozen bytes.

The Apple IIe also had 16K of ROM, and that turned out to be enough for a floating-point BASIC interpreter with a tokenizer, a monitor, a mini-assembler, and 80-column display firmware. Pretty much every other computer of the era's BASIC interpreter had a tokenizer; the only one I ever ran across that didn't was a ZX81, and I suspect that one-button BASIC keywords might have been as much a workaround for the wretched keyboard (even worse than the one on the Atari 400) as a way to shave a handful of bytes out of the ROM image.

Re:My first computer

[Alioth]

It wasn't just Atari...

Sinclair didn't use Microsoft BASIC (theirs was written by a company called Nine Tiles, which still is in business)
Acorn didn't use Microsoft BASIC, they implemented their own and it was probably the best 8 bit BASIC (variables even had scoping rules, unlike most BASICs at the time where every variable was global)
The Jupiter ACE had FORTH (!!!)
Amstrad used Locomotive BASIC for their CPC range.

One attribute of all the BASIC interpreters here were they were much better than Microsoft's, but in fairness to Microsoft, they were developed later. I remember the BASIC on the C64 being particularly awful.

Re:My first computer

[John Bokma]

I am quite sure the filler bytes were less than 30, maybe even less than 20. I hope you now understand it.

Re:My first computer

[John Bokma]

The 16K ROM of the ZX Spectrum had only a handful of filler bytes if my memory serves me correctly. There was no space for "a few dozen bytes". If I recall correctly in some places the ROM already used quite some smart ways to reuse code.

Re:My first computer

[ncc74656]

Atari is probably the only company that didn't use MS Basic, because they couldn't squeeze it into their limited ROM space.

There was a Microsoft BASIC cartridge for the 8-bit Ataris. It probably wasn't as common as the usual Atari BASIC, but it was out there.

Another prominent non-Microsoft BASIC implementation was Integer BASIC on the Apple II. The II+ and later machines switched to a Microsoft BASIC in order to add floating-point math, though you can load Integer BASIC into RAM if you have at least 64K.

Re:My first computer

[gstrickler]

I'm quite sure I could make it fit. I've written firmware for numerous machines, hand coded lots of such routine, patched in code where I could find or make space. And, for compatibility reasons, couldn't just change entry point addresses, so I had to use whatever space I could find, or make (by writing other routines to be more compact).

I hope you understand now.

Re:My first computer

[hlavac]

Nah, I just didn't have C128, I had C64 so i never saw the Microsoft copyright... I was programming the C64 in assembler all the time, even had a demo group... :-) Good old days...

Re:My first computer

[micropitt]

I still was living in Germany at that time and the ZX81 was my first encounter with computer technology. If I remember correct, people also were able to order the ZX81 as a "kit". I can remember that we went to the Bookstore to buy the american and english computer magazines and then we sat for hours on the ZX81 at home typing up the program listings from the magazines.

Re:My first computer

[TuringTest]

Direct editing of tokens used less memory in the edit buffer, making the reserved RAM space smaller and thus allowing BASIC programs to be bigger. For really big programs that sqeezed the system resources, this made a difference.

Re:My first computer

[dlsa]

My first computer was a zx81. 16K of RAM wasn't enough for me, so I traded it at the store for a Timex 2048, which was a ZX spectrum 48K clone. Had tons of fun gaming on it.

Re:My first computer

[ralph.corderoy]

I suspect what's being recalled is that, thanks to the keyboard entry model, the new line being entered, or the existing line being edited, was never in a de-tokenised state. The programmer did the work of the tokeniser by entering the bytecode in a context-sensitive fashion. The cursor was an inverted K when in keyword state, pressing P then entered the bytecode for PRINT. Given it came from the 1KiB ZX80 and ZX81, not needing the memory for the detokenised form of the current line was a big saving.

Inspiration to younger users - thing of the past?

[acidradio]

I wonder if the "old" generation of microcomputers - the TRS80, the Sinclair, Commodore 64, Apple II - were more inspirational to young programmers and coders than what we have today. The old computers were all command line. You *had* to know what you were doing to make the thing do anything! You couldn't break it because you had to know how the thing worked to make it do anything! And there was a joy or satisfaction of "Hey, I made this machine do 'this', exactly how I wanted it to do it!" Today's PCs/Macs/pads? Anyone can pick one up, use it, maybe even cause a lot of damage with it but never understand the inner workings of it because all you had to do to make it go is click on some icon somewhere. There is no command line to use (at least that most users would choose to work with). You can become a proficient user of it but without some real digging you will have a hard time writing any kind of usable software for yourself, even as rudimentary as a "Hello, world".

I liken it to giving a car to a starting driver. The Sinclair and other older microcomputers were like giving a kid a 20-yr old Honda Civic with a manual transmission. Slow, dependable, bland, hard to get in trouble with it, you have to know how to drive it to make it go, you can really get a feel for how the thing wants to drive. The newer, much more powerful computers of today could be like giving that same kid a Porsche - powerful, fast, stylish, easy to get in trouble with, easy to wreck at high speeds, you may never understand its inner-workings because they are too much to learn.

Re:Real programmers.....

[gstrickler]

Yes, we did. Although I also owned a Vic 20, Commodore 64, and a ZX81.

Yep, my first computer..

[jamax]

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K....

I was good at school, so my dad bought me 48K version, instead of 16K one - oh, happy memories...

Re:Real programmers.....

[maroberts]

in the UK probably used the Spectrums rival, the BBC Micro, as it had expansion ports, extension ROMs etc, it was used as the standard computing workhorse for both hobbyists and electronics labs around the country.

Apple ][ was for people who wanted to become accountants.... :-)

For the love of God...

[Amiralul]

Please STOP IT!.

Re:For the love of God...

[Copperis]

Agreed on the bad analogies thing, especially the one GP wrote with a Honda. While it's a nice petition, I'm not signing anything that has a false dilemma in its description text!

Re:For the love of God...

[mug funky]

yeah, stop having fun, guys! i don't like something you all enjoy!

Re:For the love of God...

[mwvdlee]

What is that link supposed to be?
Is it like one of those flyers they put behind the windscreen wipers of your car?

Re:For the love of God...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the need for this petition, I've never seen a computer or a car making an analogy on Slashdot.

On a (slightly) more serious note:
 

A computer is an infinitely programmable software platform, while a car is just a vehicle designed to take you (and your loot) from point A to point B. The two share no similarities whatsoever and as such the analogy makes no sense.

It sounds like the petitioner hates analogies in general. In SOME cases (although the above example was a particularly bad one) a computer and a car may "share similarities" depending on the comparison being made. In any case, if a car and a computer were virtually identical in function then comparing them wouldn't be an analogy any more, it would be a direct comparison.

Re:For the love of God...

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer and cars have only one thing in common - you're sitting while using it.

Re:For the love of God...

[Anonymous Coward]

So if this petition was a car, it would be a 2005 Ford Fiesta... Diesel ?

Re:For the love of God...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the need for this petition, I've never seen a computer or a car making an analogy on Slashdot.

On a (slightly) more serious note:

A computer is an infinitely programmable software platform, while a car is just a vehicle designed to take you (and your loot) from point A to point B. The two share no similarities whatsoever and as such the analogy makes no sense.

It sounds like the petitioner hates analogies in general. In SOME cases (although the above example was a particularly bad one) a computer and a car may "share similarities" depending on the comparison being made. In any case, if a car and a computer were virtually identical in function then comparing them wouldn't be an analogy any more, it would be a direct comparison.

Analogies usually do suck, in general. There might be educational use of good neutral analogies, but in discussion forums on the net in particular, they are most often used to prove your point by using an "obvious" analogy that shows how any thinking person can't possibly come to any other conclusion than the one you have arrived at. And brings no value to the discussion that way.

Still got mine!

[Billlagr]

Boxed, with the leads, manuals, tapes. Also still have my Vic-20, boxed, and C64 & 1541 - also all boxed, but they aren't particularly uncommon.

Re:Still got mine!

[Anaerin]

One of my two is in my parent's loft. Working Commodore +4, and Commodore 64. And a 1541 and MPS-801 to go with them. There's also a boxed up (tower-modded) Amiga 1200 with '040 expansion card there too. Unfortunately that loft is in the UK and I'm in Canada.

Re:Still got mine!

[Spacejock]

I have my first ZX81 still, and I picked up another Spectrum a few years ago out of nostalgia. ZX Printer, microdrives, interface one ... a whole list of bits and pieces. I have a ton of nostalgia for my teen years in the 80s', and I can't help but smile when I crack open my copies of Crash magazine.

Re:Still got mine!

[Billlagr]

Oh yeah...I actually dug my C64 out weekend just gone and gave my son a hiding in International Karate + :). Mind you, I bought that 64 when I was about his age...

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[wmac1]

The good thing about those computers was that

- they left something for the owners to do, today you can get ready made software for almost every need
- when you turned those computers you were in the programming interface, so that was in the focus and people would give a try to use it
- Personal computers were the magic new things of that decade, people were still appreciating it. Nowadays a PC with 16G of RAM and a quad core CPU is "just another" computer and more of a commodity than magic
- We loved to build things (like small electronic circuits, small programs) ourselves. Nowadays consumerism has taken everywhere. We just need to pay and buy.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[gstrickler]

Different time, different limitations.

I still say, give me a room full of Apple II's (preferable //e or IIgs) and eager students, and I'll give you room full of great developers. There is value in understanding how software interacts with hardware, something which has been missing in most programmers for a long time. That's not a new complaint, it existed in the mainframe and mini computer world before the microcomputer revolution. The pioneers of the micro revolution, the early adopters, etc broke that mold. But as operating systems and development environments have become more "friendly", much of that has fallen away.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Osgeld]

The bad thing about those computers was that

- they left something for the owners to do, today you can get ready made software for almost every need, where as then if you needed a simple fucking 4 function calculator you needed to learn programming

- when you turned those computers you were in the programming interface, and with no software you had no other choice

- Personal computers were the magic new things of that decade, people were still cursing it. Nowadays a PC with 16G of RAM and a quad core CPU is "just another" computer and more of a commodity than some bullshit you needed a PHD to operate

- Only a certain segment of nerds loved to build things (like small electronic circuits, small programs) ourselves. Nowadays consumerism has taken everywhere. We just need to pay and buy for them to encroach on our elitism

Listen, I grew up with this batch of 30 year old computers, I love them, and I was inspired by them, but they were not magical boxes of imignation, they were devel boxes of fustration that took damn near 30 years for average people to be fully functional with. And frankly all the knowledge I gained as a child gave me fuck all nothing with modern computers, so what I can pull the zeropage address of a Apple II out of the top of my head, doesn't do me any good past 1990, neither does the programming techniques or basic operations, these computers may have inspired a generation of hard core nerds, but outside of that they had little or nothing in common with modern machines. ASM wont do a kid much good if they cant even make a spreadsheet now.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know... rubbish. And I mean that in the nicest and most conversational way. I was there in 78 with a PET. It was engaging for a visibly large slice of pimply geeks simply because we had so little else to engage with. Broadcast TV and a Public Library. (Thank god for the Whole Earth Catalog to at least show me better books to ILL.) It was fabulously different, and anyone playing with it stood out because of that.

Kids got the Web now. The only reason you're not noticing them doing so much programming*, is because the smarter ones have so many more things to play with.

*I'll also suggest there are more kids doing more programming today than there was in 82. Definitely than in 78, when there was 2 in my 1000 student high school. Seriously, consider final years of most high schools then and now, and especially first years of college and uni.

Maybe what's tripping you up is you're connecting computer-use with computer-programming. In 82 the four or five computer-using kids were programming kids. In 2012 they're 100% computer users, but it's still a small fraction who are interested in things that need code.

Nostalgic!

[putaro]

Sinclair Computing - corporate motto: A computer in every closet!

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[lord_mike]

I disagree. Fundamentals are ALWAYS important even if they aren't practical. While 6502 assembly isn't practical anymore, the experience you gained programming with it provided you a foundation for future skills that many of your peers might not have. That not only gives you a competitive advantage, it makes you into a better, smarter professional. You can play the piano without learning music theory, but you will be a much better pianist if you do take the time to learn the fundamentals of music. It's the same for computer science or information technology.

I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

...what is up with the ZX Spectrum's color capabilities? I often see the ZX Spectrum compared to the C64, but the screenshots I've seen aren't comparable at all. I doubt it had the sound capabilities of the C64 as well.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean they're not muddy?

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Joce640k]

It's a different style of graphics.

C64 hardware was good at character-map based, scrolling graphics but if you needed more than eight sprites on horizontal line you had problems.

The Spectrum was bitmapped graphics, it was bad at scrolling but you could have more sprites and do more 3D stuff, eg. there were quite a few fully-interactive isometric-view games and even some filled-3D-polygon games (Starstrike) which the C64 was really bad at.

Sound was pretty bad, yes, but it was a lot cheaper than a C64.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Sound was produced by the Z80 CPU on the Spectrum. That meant that you could not have a soundtrack in games because the processor would have to dedicate 100% of a given cycle to playing a sound. You could have a beep or two as soundeffects, but no soundtrack to speak of, unless the game was either very basic, or the programmer was very, very talented. For the life of me, I cannot think of another soundtrack except Manic Miner. Also, I had a ZX. Games on the C64 were much, much better looking than on the Spectrum. there was no comparison. The Spectrum had a near-fatal flow: you could not have a 8x8 square with more than two colours. So that meant that most games were two-coloured affairs - one colour for the background, another for the sprite, and even then you could have the colour clashing that made Spectrum gaming unique. Whatever the Spectrum's faults, this in my opinion was the biggest by far and since it was a hardware limitation, it meant that games simply could never be as nice looking as the competition.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Joce640k]

it meant that games simply could never be as nice looking as the competition.

That doesn't mean they were 'worse'.

Spectrum owners were jealous of C64 music, C64 owners were jealous of the isometric adventure games on the Spectrum.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Mushdot]

I always thought a lot of C64 games, though colourful had really blocky looking graphics. The Spectrum seemed to have better detail, but with the drawback it was mostly in monochrome.

In the Spectrum's later years programmers came up with a few clever tricks to get the appearance of full colour graphics. If I recall, Uridium's title screen had a full colour title? JetSet Willy and Gilligans Gold are two games with a soundtrack - can't think of anymore though!

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

While first point was true until ZX Spectrum 128 added AY-8912 sound chip, second is not. Color clash is a problem, but many games just featured plain backgrounds with colourful characters - like this or this, and some went overboard like this (Check those crates, there are FOUR colors on them! Can your C64 do that? Hell, no!) or this. "Two colored affairs" in commercial games were mostly isometric engines, something, AFAIK, not very common on C64

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Truedat]

I know what you're saying but I loved that two color limitation as it inspired a certain graphical creativity that was unique to the spectrum. The analogy would be that yes it's possible to produce a photo realistic animated movie but there's more charm in choosing not to and going with something a little more stylised. Yes I know I'm being overly nostalgic ;) Besides, games could have more than two colors but you'd have to be a little more sneaky about it by dividing the screen up into different color zones.

I cant agree that c64 games were always better looking, for example vector graphics based games such as elite and isometric games such as knight lore to my eyes looked superior on the spectrum. They struck me as kind of chunky for want of a better word than on the c64. And c64 sprites also looked squashed and dumpy for some reason. Ymmv.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

The C64 had two (or more) graphic modes - the 'blocky' mode, and one exactly the same as the Spectrum's - two colours per hires character square.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[msobkow]

The limitations on the hardware sprites were why many C-64 games used software sprites for "characters", reserving the hardware sprites for "bullets" in most cases, and relying entirely on software to do the collision detection.

So although the C-64 had more "advanced" sprite hardware, in practice it wasn't used by anything but the simplest and most basic of arcade shooter games.

Hell, you couldn't even program Space Invaders using the hardware sprites, and that's about as basic as a game could get!

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

The c64 also had the same hi-res color-clash mode as zx. Head over Heels and Fairlight were two isometric titles in the style of the spectrum that I remember.
But most c64-games used sprites.
Delta, which was more advanced than invaders, used only sprites for ships and structures, and character graphics for bullets and background stars.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

C64 resolution (without sprites in borders trick): 320*200.
Spectrum resolution: 256*192.

It was perfectly capable of less blocky graphics, especially in games that laid multiple sprites over each other to build up colours.
Also it had its own "extra colour" modes done by flickering the graphics every field to give the illusion of more than 16 colours,
but that was not used much until games that post-dated the Amiga (someone had to draw the graphics after all!)

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Alioth]

There's been some development on full colour graphics with the Spectrum recently:

- ZXodus engine - a tile engine for full colour graphics http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0026639
- Buzzsaw - A really fun game http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0027057

There's been some other projects on the Spectrum colour pallette, for instance the ULA Plus enhancement, which replaces the flash and bright attributes and uses a colour lookup table. It's very easy to modify existing software to make use of the ULA Plus, and the ULA Plus would have been something achievable at a low cost back when the 128K Spectrum was being developed so is within the spirit of the original machine. The ULA+ has been implemented in hardware, too.

- ULA Plus is here: https://sites.google.com/site/ulaplus/

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[BasilBrush]

BBC Micro owners weren't jealous of anyone. They had it all. Pixel addressable colour graphics, good at scrolling, better than the speccy at isometric (because of lack of attribute clashes). Programmable sound chip.

It was only outdone when the 16-bit era arrived.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet there weren't that many outstanding games for the BBC Micro (which I owned and loved). Elite, Exile and maybe Repton. My list for the Speccy would be a lot longer - although the BBC version of Elite was probably my most played game as a kid.

The BBC was a dream to program for, though. Give me a few hours with a Beeb and I can program something complicated and cool that works. I still believe a modern update of BBC BASIC would be an excellent tool for schoolchildren to learn the fundamentals of programming. Better than lessons on how to use Word and powerpoint, anyway ...

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still believe a modern update of BBC BASIC would be an excellent tool for schoolchildren to learn the fundamentals of programming.

You mean like this?

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[jhalme]

The trick for more sprites on C64 was to generate rasterline interrupts which change the sprite location while the electron gun of the display was still drawing it. This way you could re-use a sprite further down the screen in an area which had not yet been drawn. However, the new location had to be at least 21 (IIRC) rasterlines below the rastercount at which the interrupt occurred for the new sprite to be displayed. Also, you couldn't change the sprite data pointer until the old sprite was fully drawn because weird things would happen.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he means "shitty". I don't know how to translate that into the Queen's English for you.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, isometric games like 'knight lore' were mostly monochrome on the BBC, because it was too slow to shuffle enough memory around for colour. It was still noticably slower than the spectrum even in mono.

The one that had it all was the Amstrad CPC.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The c64 also had the same hi-res color-clash mode as zx.

Similar, anyway, in terms of attribute clash in 8x8 cells. The zx still had a much more garish palette, nothing you could do about that - it was easier to do plant, metallic and skin tones with the admittedly somewhat wierd and seemingly arbitrary c64 palette.

Many, but not all, c64 games used the "multicolor" mode instead, which halved the horizontal resolution, but allowed four colors per now-4x8 cell. It needed careful blending to look good, and tends to look worse under emulation than it did back in the day, unless you use CPU-intensive PAL-blurring emulation to fake the smoothing an old TV set used to do that artists deliberately made use of.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spectrum owners were probably also at least a little bit jealous of having more than 2 colors on screen at once.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amstrad CPC had good-looking graphics as long as you didn't have to scroll the screen. The high-colour graphics took 16 kB which was too much for a 4 MHz Z80 to move around in software in a single frame, and the hardware only supported scrolling 8 pixels at a time, which was incredibly jerky.

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Joce640k]

Actually, isometric games like 'knight lore' were mostly monochrome on the BBC, because it was too slow to shuffle enough memory around for colour.

That ... and having full color graphics chewed up 20K of RAM for the display and four times as much RAM for the all the sprite data. It simply didn't fit.

The BBC would have been 1000% more awesome if the video RAM was shadowed so it left 32K for normal use. They could have switched out the BASIC ROM to access the screen RAM or something (yeah, that's only 16K, I know...but you get the idea).

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Joce640k]

No...the CPC had full hardware scrolling (the same graphics chip as the BBC) but it was hardly ever used because most Amstrad games were direct ports from the Spectrum.

The other problem was that most games needed a split screen with part scrolling and part static (eg. status panel). The CPC couldn't do that, although there was a trick you could use:

The Amstrad CPC monitors wouldn't do a vertical flyback unless they saw the flyback signal near the bottom of the screen. If you did it higher up they just kept on going downwards. You could tell the video chip to start a new video frame before this point, effectively having two different video frames shown on screen. Each one could have its own scroll offset so you got split screen scroll. "Future Knight" by Gremlin Graphics (where I worked) did this...

The downside was that sometimes the monitor would sync with the panels reversed (status panel at the top instead of at the bottom). .

Re:I Think I Speak For All North Americans...

[Joce640k]

You can have more than two colors on screen, just not more than two in any 8x8 pixel character.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen ! I was there @ 1980 ... and still coding strong ...

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[garry_g]

+1
I started out on a Spektrum, going to the department store almost every day, programming on the one they had on display for advertisement (they also had the ZX81, but with it being monochrome, awful keyboard and only 1K of RAM, who wanted that?). My friend would even bring his cassette player so we could save programs we wrote ... (cassette player as in "bulky, heavy, need a bag to carry it around").
After a while, my parents got fed up with my hanging around in the store constantly, so they decided to buy me one - while we were waiting for the clerk to get one from storage, we talked to some boy who convinced us to get a C64, as it had more RAM, more power, better keyboard, ... so we got that instead ...
Of course I was disappointed with the missing gfx commands on the 64, but quickly got around that (in part because of "Simon's Basic" IIRC), and ended up with the good ol' 6502/6510 Assembler programming ... heck, once you get around with 3 not-so-all-purpose registers and the limited ASM commands, you ought to be able to program in just about any language with a couple pages of syntax/command reference ... seeing how "well" kids nowadays are tought in business school as far as programming goes, I always wonder if we should put an emulator (or maybe even the "real thing"?) on their desk and let them learn coding in assembler for a while ... sure programming is easy with all the fancy tools and libraries, but if you never really learned the basics, how should they know that requiring a bigger, faster computer isn't the way you fix limitations and performance problems?

The good old times...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have both my Spectrum 48K and my Sinclair +2 Working, aswell as my +D disc interface.
I recently bought a Sinclair +3 to complete the set... And I plan to have my children discover them (well, my oldest, 3yr old, first contact with a computer was with Hunt the Wumpus on TI99/4A

These were nice pieces of hardware and developpers used to use every last bit of memory to make great programs. My favorite from that time is the Amstrad CPC (464/664/6128)... fast interrupt for sound control (and other), vector table for most system functions, support for up to 256 ROMs with autorun on some of them, ... Very elegant design... probably superior to the other from that generation (Commodore, Spectrum, Thompson, MSX, ...)

Re:The good old times...

[Tastecicles]

I've still got two Spectrum +2's, a +3, a Spectrum+ 48K (well, two of those, actually - one with the rubber keys and one with a custom clicky board), a BBC Model A, Commodore 16K+, portable 8080 (a pre-x86 x86 with a SIX WEEK BATTERY LIFE!! Modern netbooks top off at ten hours, what's up with that!?), and a Casio FX 82S that I bought in 1990 for my high school exams. They all still work as well. One of these days I''m gonna hook 'em up and open a live museum in my garage.

Re:The good old times...

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's up with that?" - I think you'll find that modern netbooks can do stuff in a few minutes that your little 8080 couldn't complete before the heat-death of the universe arrived :-)

Hey Hey 16k

[safetyinnumbers]

This song sums up the nostalgia so well

The Spectrum was a big part of my youth and early career (I was writing for it into the early 90s).

Re:Hey Hey 16k

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Hey 16K
What does that get you today?
You need more than that for a letter
Old skool rampacs are much better

What strikes me as funny

[SmallFurryCreature]

What always strikes me as funny is how "local" computing was in those days. There are entire countries were people never heard of computer brand X or model Y because they used brand W and model V. Commodore, Amiga, Sinclair, Apple and god knows what else. The Sinclair I seem to reclass was available in Holland but it was the commodore that got used. The BBC even had their own computer! Imagine that, that would be MS-NBC getting into the OS market, you just would not think that was at all likely would you?

It is just amusing to see such local snobbery when a few years later, computing would be "the internet" which is the ultimate global product.

I have to laugh at this because the other side of the story is that once, I thought of this kinda of hardware as an upgrade... god I am old. When you still think of Unix as the new kid on the block, you know the grim reaper can't be far behind.

RE: Five million copies sold...

[Joce640k]

How do you sell five million "copies" of a computer?

Not only in the UK

[21mhz]

As the Warsaw Pact was crumbling and the people of the Soviet Union were exposed to Western influences, there was a surge of interest in DIY home computing. I think the availability of a local Z80 clone, as well as use of off-the-shelf consumer technology such as cassette tape and analog TV output, was what made Spectrum a popular choice for clone designs. One of those was my first home computer.

Re:Not only in the UK

[fatphil]

Wasn't the old soviet union an MSX stronghold?

Re:Not only in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Here, note how most of those are Russian and East European.

There were MSX and Apple clones for education, but Spectrum (and clones) was THE home computer in 1990s Russia. They were sold factory made, they were sold as kits (and some bought kits wholesale to assemble and sell), there were PCB layouts and ROM hex dumps printed in magazines - lots of extensions too, like extended video modes, IDE adapters and better ROMs. There were floppynets, demoparties and bootleg localized soft, and ...

Ah, screw that, I'm gonna dig out my old Quorum and play me some Rebelstar.

My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT...

[ttsiod]

My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT (I ended up becoming a software engineer, and part-owner of a startup). Will always feel grateful to the designers of the 8-bit micros that started all this...

Oh, and I still remember my first hack - dissassembling JetPac and finding the POKE that gave me infinite lives. Now *that* was fun :-)

Re:My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT...

[tibit]

Ohh, I was lazier than that :) Montezuma Revenge on PC was coded in such a way, that when you searched for the byte with default number of lives (IIRC 3), it was before the 5th match that you'd hit the right byte to patch in the executable. No disassembly was involved. I'd patch the copy, run it, it'd crash or have a glitch, copy again, patch next location, and in IIRC 10 minutes I had 127 lives; IIRC the most significant bit couldn't be set. The key was not to get greedy: I initially tried incrementing the count only by one. Had I tried going directly to 255, I'd have never succeeded. I still remember it, even though it was 25+ years ago...

Re:My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT...

[fatphil]

Increased number of lives requires tweaking that initial value, yes, but for infinite lives, you'd want to find the bit of code that loaded that value's address, and then loaded that initial value, and then stored it somewhere else. Then you'd want the bit of code that loaded that stored value's address, then loaded the stored value, then decremented it, and jumped if it had reached zero.
Then NOP the decrement, the test or the jump.

Re:My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT...

[Ginger Unicorn]

The most significant bit was probably the sign bit - if you set all 8 bits high you would have had minus 1 lives :)

Re:My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT...

[tibit]

If you need more than 127 lives to get through that game, you're screwed anyway :) -- it was a simple solution to a simple problem. Agreed otherwise. I was maybe in 3rd or 4th grade at the time.

Re:My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT...

[tibit]

Now for the intimate question: is that a bug or a feature that the lives counter condition check was signed :) The code was probably a decrement followed by jump on negative sign - you could play with 0 lives left, after all. A "proper" check would add two instructions - before it was, I guess, DEC lives; JS dead; after it would be MOV al, lives; OR al,al; JZ dead; DEC lives. No, I don't remember if MOV updates flags.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Hognoxious]

The BBC was better, but it cost, IIRC, twice as much. It was out of my budget, I remember that.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Joce640k]

Nearly three times as much...

But there was really no comparison. The BBC had a proper keyboard and tons of connectors on the back/underneath. Not just connections for printers, serial ports and floppy disks either, it was the Arduino of its day.

The only real problem was the graphics eating up two thirds of the RAM.

16K

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah - the good ol day - when programmers has to think and code in 16K

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Joce640k]

I liken it to giving a car to a starting driver. The Sinclair and other older microcomputers were like giving a kid a 20-yr old Honda Civic with a manual transmission. Slow, dependable, bland, hard to get in trouble with it, you have to know how to drive it to make it go, you can really get a feel for how the thing wants to drive. The newer, much more powerful computers of today could be like giving that same kid a Porsche - powerful, fast, stylish, easy to get in trouble with, easy to wreck at high speeds, you may never understand its inner-workings because they are too much to learn.

Most "wide of the mark" analogy ever...?

Owning a civic doesn't require lifting the hood and tinkering with the engine.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Joce640k]

The good thing about those computers was that

- they left something for the owners to do, today you can get ready made software for almost every need

Most Spectrum owners never programmed them, they just put cassette tapes in the player and typed LOAD"".

FYI; Google even devotes a doodle to this.

[Qwrk]

On the google.co.uk domain today there's a special doodle devoted to the ZX and St. George's Day; all in one ;-)

Re:FYI; Google even devotes a doodle to this.

[CrazyBusError]

Yeah, that's about right. Loading screen looked *awesome*, then you got to the game (assuming you could avoid the dreaded 'R Tape Loading Error' )and you realised exactly where all the £1.99 that the tape had cost you went...

And yet, we never learned. The very next week, it was back to WHSmiths with your pocket money for *another* £1.99 game from Mastertronic, hoping against hope to avoid the inevitable disappointment...

Re:FYI; Google even devotes a doodle to this.

[Threni]

Let's not forget the quality of older games:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/fury-as-'retro-80s-arcade'-app-discovered-to-be-just-very-poor-new-games-201111094519/

Re:FYI; Google even devotes a doodle to this.

[Alioth]

Here's the Google doodle loading on a real Sinclair Spectrum...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF2bi_R2v9A

Clive declined to take part in the conversation:

[s-whs]

Sir Clive declined to take part in the conversation.

Actually, I heard he wanted to do participate via online conferencing, but his computer suffered from RAMpack wobble...

Re:Real programmers.....

[DrXym]

The BBC model B cost a lot of money, far more than the C64 or ZX Spectrum. If people used the BBC it was most likely in schools where it enjoyed far more popularity than it did in the home. When Acorn finally released an affordable home computer called the Electron it was so gimped that it didn't really hold much attraction for anybody.

Re:Real programmers.....

[sgunhouse]

Sorry to predate all of you, but I started with an RCA VIP - no BASIC, 2K of RAM, hex keypad and 64x32 (pixel, not character) video. Later I did get a T/S 2068 (the US version of the Spectrum, with some additional sound hardware).

Re:Real programmers.....

[Young Master Ploppy]

The BBC micro was the 'standard' educational model, not least because of the BBC brand and the association with the Beeb's educational TV programs. The home market was dominated by Spectrums and C64s.

After spending the summer playing with my friends' ZX81, I got a Spectrum for christmas at the age of 8, and every week I would pester my dad to buy me "Your Spectrum" and "Your Sinclair" magazines, with their pages upon pages of type-em-in program listings. I'd then piss off my sister by monopolising the TV for 3hrs while I typed in the latest greatest amazing game .... and spend 5 minutes playing the inevitable top-down scrolling dodge-em-up before thinking "surely I could do better than that!". So I set out to try.

30 years later, I'm making a good living as a senior programmer, and I put it all down to those early days of truly accessible computing. The Spectrum was the ideal balance between entertainment machine and experimentation platform, amazing a geeky 8yr old with its possibilities while its limitations positively encouraged anyone with the right mindset to try and work around them. Hacking infinite lives with PEEK and POKE... designing game graphics pixel by pixel and then converting them to integer data... figuring out how to give the illusion of full-colour graphics when you only had one foreground and one background colour per 8x8 character square... i learned so much about computing from those days. Thanks Sinclair, you were awesome.

We still have fun with the Speccy!

[Alioth]

A few of us make hardware for the humble Speccy still, you can now go on the Internet with the Spectranet http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc - at the VCF in 2010, much fun was had sending tweets from a Sinclair Spectrum, you can connect hard drives/CF cards with the DivIDE http://baze.au.com/divide/, there's a USB interface (although the developer seems to have disappeared, hmm...) and various other fun bits of hardware to play with. Retro enthusasts are still writing some really nice games for the Spectrum and there's a strong demoscene, too.

The ULA (the custom logic IC) has also been reverse engineered by actually de-encapsulating the chip and photographing it with a microscope http://www.zxdesign.info/ - you can buy the book there, by the way... There were some interesting anecdotes from that. Today we have FPGAs and CPLDs and you can essentially make custom logic at home, but back in the early 1980s, companies like Ferranti made generic dies, and stored them, and you made your actual custom logic by specifying the interconnection layer. Richard Altwasser had only 6 weeks to design the circuit for the Spectrum's ULA (which handles video and all other I/O for the basic machine). When Ferranti completed the first wafer of Spectrum ULAs, they ran tests and found that they didn't work. It turns out that a Ferranti engineer had made a mistake when making the phototools to make the metallization layer, and basically half the chip lacked its clock signal. However, one single die on the whole wafer DID work. It turns out that despite all this being done in a clean room, a spec of dust had landed in precisely the right place on the phototools to connect the clock circuit, so they had one working ULA die on the wafer, and Sinclair could test and validate their ULA.

Incidentally if you're in London on the 5th/6th May, there's a 30th anniversary of the Spectrum celebration at the British Film Institute. It's free to enter. Details are here:
http://www.imperica.com/horizons

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[luther349]

that era of pcs was the best but it will never come back.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[luther349]

80s computing will be missed by anyone who was lucky enough to be in it. back when users had control of there pcs. not what apple and microsoft and media company's think you should be allowed to do.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[TheMathemagician]

Yes I think they were inspirational. I remember wanting to write a screen scrolling type Defender game on my Spectrum and learning Z80 machine code in order to do it. I couldn't afford an assembler though so I had to write out the programs in pseudo-code and manually look up their codes. It didn't seem a big deal at the time but it was immensely satisfying to actually produce a working program from a series of 8-bit numbers. I'm hoping the Raspberry Pi will do a similar job of stimulating young programming talent today.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[AmiMoJo]

There is a big shortage of people who know what a zeropage is now. I happen to work in Embedded software development and that sort of knowledge is vital (not the exact address, but the concept). It is hard to recruit people like me because we are few and far between.

Re:Real programmers.....

[91degrees]

Didn't know a lot of kids with BBC Micros. The 48K Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64 were the popular ones.

Although you might be right about the real programmers using the BBC. It had a better basic, with inline assembler.

Enthusiastic kid programmers ?

[Anonymousslashdot]

Not me... Hated the keyboard with rubber keys and the crude T9 typing. Managed to retype one or two half-page listings of funny text animations from computer magazines and was totally fed up and non-enthusiastic about this programming thing. I became enthusiastic much later, when windows 95 and Borland Delphi came around.

But I admit I enjoyed playing games on it and I've broken a few joysticks on decathlon-type games.

Re:Enthusiastic kid programmers ?

[ledow]

Meanwhile, in those intervening 13 years between you tinkering with a machine and actually becoming enthusiastic with programming, the rest of us loved it and used it and learned to program on it and it lead us onto other platforms.

For instance, if you totally missed the Spectrum+ with it's hard keyboard, or the +2/+3 with a "real" keyboard, then you missed out on a great machine.

And the point of the "T9-typing", as you put it, was to reduce the amount of time you had to spend actually typing on that keyboard.

Re:Enthusiastic kid programmers ?

[Anonymousslashdot]

I get your point. There are those who like it with rubber, and there are those who don't. As for me, rubber is rubbish :-)

Nice article on The Register

[Alioth]

Nice article on The Register:

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/23/retro_week_sinclair_zx_spectrum_at_30/

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

You had to _look them up_? You're weak!

I had all the opcodes memorized! Did wonders to my grasp of hex and bin, just memorizing opcode families like "00rr0001 - LD rr, imm16". Used it both ways (uphill, in the snow, etc.), for writing code and disassembling code with a hex editor to find the magic POKEs.

Timex Sinclair 1000

[Timtimes]

You haven't really lived until you have experienced flight simulator on the Timex Sinclair. I had the full meal deal. Extra ram kit as well as the thermal printer. I was in hog heaven when I upgraded to the Timex Sinclair 2000 (color and sound!!). Enjoy.

Hip Hip Hooooray!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Happy BB Speccy! Greetings from Knighs of Lore, BoulderDash, Tetris, R-Type, Raibow Islands, Underwulde, All Winter Olympics, Spy vs. Spy, Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, Cybernoid, Nebulus, Dizzy, Tennis, Ping-Pong, Arkanoid, Breakout, PaperBoy, RoboCop & Elite! :-)

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[robthebloke]

Most Spectrum owners never programmed them, they just put cassette tapes in the player and typed LOAD"".

That's 7 characters (including the space) more code than kids type these days.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Inda]

Wow. Jog my memory, why don't you.

What was that game called? It was a up/down _and_ left/right scrolling shooter. Weapon power ups. Loads of sprites.

I'm talking about the first game on the ZX to dither the 8x8 character square in order to show 4 (four!) colours.

Still got my 128k upstairs somewhere.

Re: Five million copies sold...

[robthebloke]

1. Sell your company to sir Alan Sugar.
2. Re-house the spectrum internals inside a new box.
3. Make the new box look identical to the CPC-464.
4....
5. Go bankrupt?

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still one of the cheapest CPUs out there.
I think you can buy a 6502 with some RAM and 32Kbytes of ROM for cheaper than the ROM by itself (because it has fewer pins).
For a 16 bit or 32 bit part you are going to go into double digit cents per unit, by a fair way!

A piece of code (ah, the memories)

[Anonymous Coward]

Only those intimately familiar with the Speccy would understand and appreciate:

INC H
LD A,7
AND A,H
RET NZ
LD A, 32
ADD A,L
LD L,A
RET C
LD A,-8
ADD A,H
LD H,A
RET

Re:A piece of code (ah, the memories)

[julesh]

Only those intimately familiar with the Speccy would understand and appreciate:

INC H
LD A,7
AND A,H
RET NZ
LD A, 32
ADD A,L
LD L,A
RET C
LD A,-8
ADD A,H
LD H,A
RET

Takes a pointer to screen memory in HL and adjusts it to point one pixel further down? I know the *start* is right for that, but it's been long enough that I'm not sure about the rest...

I disagree

[SuperKendall]

I agree the computers were very inspirational - my first computer was a ZX-81.

But kids today are NOT suffering because the computers we have now are "too powerful"!!!?

Instead it is an AMAZING time to be growing up. I know a few ten year olds selling apps on the App Store!!! How is that not even more awesome and impressive than my writing a crossword puzzle generator at the same age?

The car analogy really falls down because there is no danger for younger kids with greater computing power and reach, just a much greater opportunity to share with others more complex development more early than has ever been possible before.

The only problem I can see is that despite this awesome opportunity you have a great deal of distractions through video games, movies and so on. Yet those with a real interest in programming will still I think find their way through the hedge of entertainment to the real world underneath it all.

Re:I disagree

[BasilBrush]

I know a few ten year olds selling apps on the App Store!!! How is that not even more awesome and impressive than my writing a crossword puzzle generator at the same age?

But there were children selling apps back then too. Only they were doing the full business, accepting mail-order cheques, duplicating to cassette tapes, making the labels and instructions, and mailing them out.

I'd say that a far greater proportion of the developers were school children then than now.

Re:I disagree

[SuperKendall]

But there were children selling apps back then too. Only they were doing the full business, accepting mail-order cheques, duplicating to cassette tapes, making the labels and instructions, and mailing them out.

Not as many though. And they were doing the parts of the thing that were NOT programming, that while educational took time away from deep learning of programming.

I'd say that a far greater proportion of the developers were school children then than now.

I'd say totally the opposite. There are way more younger developers now than there were back in the day; if for no other reason than because LOTS more households have computers now.

Re:I disagree

[BasilBrush]

Not as many though. And they were doing the parts of the thing that were NOT programming, that while educational took time away from deep learning of programming.

They programmed them first, then distributed them.

"I'd say that a far greater proportion of the developers were school children then than now."
I'd say totally the opposite. There are way more younger developers now than there were back in the day; if for no other reason than because LOTS more households have computers now.

Note the word "proportion" in what I said. That means it doesn't matter that more households have computers now.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[BotnetZombie]

Nope. Everyone I know that had one, at least bought papers where you could input cheat POKEs for infinite lives, times etc. Anecdote, I know - but still, where did you get your statistics of 'Most Spectrum owners' from?

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats just ungrateful bastardism talking. If you loved them, you was inspired by them, and they are still with you nowadays.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Joce640k]

where did you get your statistics of 'Most Spectrum owners' from?

Out of my backside of course.

OTOH I was a salaried Spectrum games programmer back in the 1980s working for one of the major companies.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Crookdotter]

Uridium?

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

On the Spectrum it was just 3 characters. J shiftP shiftP

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[BotnetZombie]

OTOH I was a salaried Spectrum games programmer back in the 1980s working for one of the major companies.

Interesting - did you work on some titles one might have played back in the day?

Good Times!

[ruhri]

Ah, I remember. Atic Atac. Moon Buggy. The Hobbit. All great games. But of course the coolest thing was to program that sucker. I always liked the Basic dialect better than Commodore's (which was far more popular in my school), and even liked the weird tokenized entry method. But the real game changer for me was when I bought (yes, bought!) a Pascal and a Forth compiler. Man, Forth rocked. It still is one of my favorite programming languages.

Funny enough, my father was really opposed to me getting one, so an (older) friend of mine had to buy one for me and "lend" it to me until my father finally gave up and let me outright own it. A Ph.D. in EE later I'd say it was a good investment...

Too bad at some point my brother ended up with it and rather than giving it back for proper conservation he discarded it. I miss it dearly.

Re:Real programmers.....

[DrXym]

Uridium was mono in the play area because attribute clash was especially visible in a sideways scroller. Most games which had scrolling were mono. It tended to be games with static top down or isometric layouts which would put more colour in and ensure that sprites were multiples of characters to minimize clash. e.g. Sabre Wulf, Jet Set Willy etc.

I don't recall any game explicitly mixing colours to make more than two though perhaps some did use dithering a bit. IMO the game that managed to exploit the Spectrum's graphics the best was called Trap Door. It used massive graphics that managed to minimize attr clash while still making for a colourful game.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Turrican?

Re:Real programmers.....

[Anonymous Coward]

There was more in the same style, all from this guy, he also was so kind to allow redistribution so you can play them from links there (if you've got Java). He also wrote my favourite "country management simulator" genre game.

Now go waste some time playing.

Happy Birthday Song...

[Anonymous Coward]

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you.
Your keyboard was squishy,
And you colour clashed too...

Congrats, England!

[Anonymous Coward]

At at time, I had a boss who used to say England as a country was not viable.

Sir Clive was one of those Englishmen who showed the world things were not so.

I'm not English (nor a native speaker, as it may show), but were I one, I'd very proud of him as a fellow citizen. The man seems to have a serious case o sequential itches and I'd say he is an authentic hacker in the purest sense of the word.

Thank you, Sir Clive, for making the life of the poorer richer, my dreams more colorful and making the world a better place in the ways you could do it.

Well done, Sir!

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[BasilBrush]

Of course there was early attempts at DRM back then too.

The BBC Micro for example introduced a file lock in ROM v1.2 (I think) that meant you could only execute a program from tape, not load it for copying.

And commercial games had things like the LENSLOK protection.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Joce640k]

I'm credited on a lot of Gremlin Graphics games... ;-)

Re: Five million copies sold...

[Joce640k]

That only accounts for a couple of hundred of them

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[TheMathemagician]

Well of course I had all the common ones memorised after a few hours of hand assembly but had to check those JR NC or LDDR from time to time.

Happy birthday Speccy!

[Spit]

You were always a unique take on the home computer.

Re:Real programmers.....

[BasilBrush]

Using up 2/3rds of the RAM for graphics was worth it considering it got proper per pixel colours. Speccy games always looked shit because of their per character colour system.

But don't forget there was also the option of Teletext graphics for the BBC Micro which gave coloured text and very blocky graphics in just 1KB.

Re:Real programmers.....

[BasilBrush]

Better graphics modes too. Colour addressable per pixel in various resolutions, plus a teletext mode that only used 1KB. And commands in the BASIC interpreter to draw on that screen too.

And sound. BBC Micro had 3 channels of tones, plus a white noise channel, all ADSR programmable. Speccy had a single bit attached to a speaker.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but this story is about the 30th anniversary of the Sinclair Spectrum, not the 80th anniversary of the RCA VIP.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[BotnetZombie]

I remember some of those games... Here's a quickly googled list if anyone's interested. Nice to have some nitpicking take you down memory lane, cheers :o)

Re:Real programmers.....

[dkf]

Better graphics modes too. Colour addressable per pixel in various resolutions, plus a teletext mode that only used 1KB. And commands in the BASIC interpreter to draw on that screen too.

Unfortunately, the awesome graphics modes used so much memory that you had no space left for your program. Picking the graphics mode was a matter of trading off between having memory for code and memory for output. I remember all this from when I wrote (what I now know to be) my first IDE. For the BBC. The trick was I loaded pieces of the program off floppy disk when needed. (I still hate those DFS floppies; only having a maximum of 31 files per disk was very limiting. Didn't have the ADFS available.)

And sound. BBC Micro had 3 channels of tones, plus a white noise channel, all ADSR programmable. Speccy had a single bit attached to a speaker.

But the Z80 was (with a bit of careful coding) fast enough to use PCM to drive that speaker. If your assembly chops were up to it, you could do truly impressive things. The BBC had some very interesting hardware, but really wasn't all that fast and the (lovely for the time) BASIC implementation greatly restricted what you could do in mixed BASIC/ASM code (unless you didn't mind being stuck in ASM).

Re:Real programmers.....

[dkf]

Nearly three times as much...

But there was really no comparison.

Provided you had the budget in the first place. A lot of people had to save hard just to be able to afford a Spectrum (and Sinclair's genius was in recognizing that this was actually a substantial market that the other players weren't really focusing on). There is truly no comparison between having a Spectrum and not having a BBC because you've got to save 2.5 times as much to be able to afford one...

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

if you needed a simple fucking 4 function calculator you needed to learn programming

Actually, you kinda needed to have a pocket calculator handy before you started programming.

Re:Real programmers.....

[BasilBrush]

Planetoid and Elite proved that you could do plenty. Planetoid used the full colour 20kB mode and hardware scrolling. Elite used a mixed medium res monochrome mode and low res 4 colour mode. Presumably using 10kB.

For an IDE where you had floppy available, presumably you used teletext graphics (1kB) for the coding, and saved the source code to disk before running so the object code could use any graphics mode it needed.

This was the power of the BBC Micro graphics. A choice of low memory teletext mode and several different pixel-addressable graphics modes.

Sure there were possibilities for trickery with the Spectrum speaker, but any time spent on IRQs serving speaker sound was lost from time spent doing the graphics. In practice it was an either/or. You didn't have games doing anything impressive with sound during gameplay on the Speccy. But on the BBC, it was no problem.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[wildstoo]

Surely, once you'd figured out that the C64 had vastly superior sound and graphics capabilities (that, admittedly, weren't exposed through Commodore's shitty, ancient on-board BASIC) you were less disappointed?

I mean, consider the Spectrum's shitty single channel "beeper" vs. the magnificence of the SID chip.... or the Spectrum's solution to squeezing full colour screens into as small a memory area as possible, leading to the Spectrum's famous (and much-derided) attribute clash. Don't even get me started on the Spectrum's so-called keyboard.

The boy in the store steered you in the right direction. The C64 was a bit more expensive, but the hardware inside was well worth the extra money.

All of which isn't to say that the Spectrum sucked; it didn't. Considering the year, the price and the target market, it was a decent machine.. but the C64 was better, in almost every measurable way.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[mooterSkooter]

Peter Harrap?

Remember the promotional leaflet?

[Aguazul2]

It had a full-size picture of the keyboard to stare at and practice on. I had a ZX-81 before the Spectrum, so I had an idea of what most of the keywords printed on it would do, but still there were mysterious ones like INK, PAPER and BEEP that I could only guess at. What fantastic excitement computing was in those days!

Actually I am also a fan of the one-key keyword entry. I have my Linux console remapped so that with various modifier-keys I can type all the keywords of C and Java with one keypress each. "public static final int" is four keypresses plus two modifiers == 6. Definitely speeds things up.

Yes, I remember all those early games, the incredibly slow fill-routine used by the Hobbit ("time pashshesh"), the Ultimate classics like Atic Atac. There were only a few games then (relative to now) but that made them much more special somehow. I learnt so much on the Spectrum -- learning machine code, experimenting with hyperloaders and even writing a working Forth compiler (never released). I just hope kids these days can get the same lessons some other way.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Savage?

Spectrum for business?

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved my ZX81 and my Spectrum 48K - and they both gave me a love of computing that exists to this day. I remember in the late 80's going to hotels and finding the Spectrum font and graphics driving the in-house television system! What a cheap but effective way of solving that problem.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[John Bokma]

I got a ZX Spectrum back in 1983 and I was for quite some time the only person I knew who had one. No idea where you got the "most ... never programmed" from, but I doubt it's even close to the truth. Oh, sure, a lot of them just typed programs in they saw in magazines, but just LOAD""? Forget it. It took a few years before I found other people who did have plenty of access to tapes.

FWIW, same when I bought the Acorn Archimedes. I had to write my own editor in order to code PASCAL (had money to by the latter, not the former)

.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[0123456]

And commercial games had things like the LENSLOK protection.

Ah, LENSLOK, the Starforce of its day.

Though arguably the 'match the right colored squares' system could be worse when playing on a monochrome TV.

My first computer in Nigeria

[Anonymous Coward]

First, lets get it out of the way: No 419 scam comments please.... :)
Okay, I was 10 years old when we first got the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Strange thing is, I then got a ZX81 later on...
A year before we got it, my cousin got one and sat my brothers and I down and taught us how to program basic, not in front of the computer mind you... we did this in notepads! He was maybe 13...
Fast-forward to today and because of my early exposure to programming I've been a flash app developer (circa 2000) and written my own internal programs for business automation, even though I never formally studied programming and ended up with a degree in architecture.
Thanks Sir Sinclair. I only wish you'd had better fortunes with your other endeavors :P

ZX Spectrum

[jbonomi]

Interestingly, a ZX Spectrum emulator was recently discovered buried in the ROM of Goldeneye 64. http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/911/ Supposedly a programmer at Rare wanted to see if their old "Ultimate Play the Game" games could be emulated on the N64 while they were working on Goldeneye.

Re:ZX Spectrum

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope the Raspberry PI brings the same magic.

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[Anonymous Coward]

like giving a kid a 20-yr old Honda Civic with a manual transmission. Slow, dependable, bland, hard to get in trouble with it

The Honda Civic is among the most, if not the most desirable car among 20 year olds, so I'm not sure how relevant your analogy is.

Re:Real programmers.....

[Crookdotter]

Uridium was famous for the front logo having more colours though. A real feat given the limitations of the platform. I still play it at times (along with others - jetpac is the best of the lot IMO)

Re:Inspiration to younger users - thing of the pas

[julesh]

No, but it's easier to do so with a civic than a more advanced car, which I think was the point.

ZX Spectrum

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about 11 years old and living in Argentina, my mom was taking programming classes and she couldn't figure out most of the basic stuff, why? because we didn't have a computer!!, soon my brother and I started bugging my parents, telling them that we needed to get one so my mom wouldn't look like a fool!! so we convinced them to get one, some of our friends owned C16, C64 so we wanted a C64, the price for those were outrageous so my parents endedup buying a ZX Spectrum 48, and later on we endedup doing my moms homework :).
The magic of a computer at that time was completely incomparable to any other thing out there, we were soon programming small apps for school, I remember making a little guy and a girl using PLOT and DRAW, then I inserted sequence of PEEK commands to make them dance from music on the Dataset, I now work as a senior network engineer for a fortune 500 company in USA, Thank you, Sir Clive Sinclair.