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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!"
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.
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.
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.
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).
What is that link supposed to be?
Is it like one of those flyers they put behind the windscreen wipers of your car?
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On the google.co.uk domain today there's a special doodle devoted to the ZX and St. George's Day; all in one ;-)
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.
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.
No sig today...
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.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.