Weird though that they would build something for home users with ZERO sound at all though since the VCS could even do bleeps and bloops in 77.
Not really, they were probably pushing things quite far to get it at that price- even the TV signal was mostly generated in software with just some basic interfacing hardware. And AFAIK the VCS was quite a bit more expensive. Also, the VCS would actually have been entirely unsuited to use as a "real" computer (at least without any add-ons). Why?
The VCS spec was tailored specifically towards playing pre-programmed games, whereas the ZX81 was a "real" computer. All the following is to the best of my knowledge, so don't take it as gospel. However, consider...
The unexpanded ZX81 has 1KB, i.e. 1024 bytes of RAM, and even that was considered tiny. The VCS?... the VCS had 128 *bytes* of RAM! (i.e. one-eigth of a kilobyte).
Of course, this is missing the point; I assume the original intention was always that programs were supplied on ROM cart (up to 4KB) and that the tiny RAM was meant for data storage only. Home programmers, of course, couldn't do things that way. My point here is that the VCS got away with having a lower spec because it didn't need to cater to that need. The ZX81 did.
Similarly, the VCS had no proper screen memory- AFAIK only one line's worth of sprite position and background could be stored at any one time, and these had to be updated on the fly to generate the output for successive lines (and hence a complete picture).
Also, (again AFAIK) the VCS had no native character generation support, all number/letter graphic generation etc had to be done "manually" via software.
It also had no input or output for backing store or anything other than joysticks/paddles and TV. AFAICT it had no operating system as such. The most visible difference- that it had no integrated keyboard- is actually far less important than what I described above, since there were actually a number of crude keyboard-like attachments anyway.
My point is that although the VCS was much better at playing games than the ZX81, one might argue that the ZX81 was actually more powerful in terms of being a "real" computer! The VCS, not pretending to be as flexible, could afford to "cut corners" without this being obvious, presumably letting them concentrate more on graphics and sound.
True- but I'm sure that you'd also have to spend almost as much as a BMW to make a much cheaper family car run as well as a BMW. That's not really the point.:-)
The bottom line is that the base Spectrum was affordable for the man in the street, whereas the base BBC was much less so. Yes, one could argue that it was worth the extra money, but most people couldn't- or wouldn't- have spent that much, and wouldn't have planned on upgrading it to BBC spec anyway.
And that would still have been many times the cost of the ZX81.
or you could buy a Tandy Color Computer for around $400 new
Oh, so only four times the US price, then.
Either way, almost any other computer was far superior to the Sinclair.
And significantly more expensive.
My first computer was the Atari 800XL
As I said, that computer came out two years after the ZX81 had been released in the UK, so you clearly weren't making the same choice as that of people when it first came out. By then the market had moved on quite a lot and prices of more capable machines had fallen (like... the Atari 800XL!)
but it was a birthday gift plus I had saved up some money from my job as a PaperBoy.
Okay, so you didn't pay for it all yourself, then.
Also bear in mind that you're (apparently) arguing from a US perspective. The TS1000 wasn't launched properly in the US until well over a year later, by which time things had already moved on significantly (we already had its successor, the ZX Spectrum). Hence it was never as important over there, at which point it was just a cheap machine rather than the difference between being able to afford a computer and not afford one. (I discussed this in greater depth here).
The context in which it's most important was the context in which it was launched, i.e. the UK market of early 1981. But feel free to point out that the plebs should have saved up their pennies for a much nicer BMW instead of the mundane family car they bought themselves...
The Atari 800XL (essentially an Atari 800 in a sleeker case with some other improvements) came out in 1983, two years after the ZX81, and was nowhere near as expensive as the original 800. By the mid-80s, the later models were being sold by UK chain Dixons for circa £80 for a system with cassette deck or £120 for one with a disk drive, which was fantastic value even then.
If, as a kid, you'd saved up enough money for an Atari 800 at its original 1979 release price, you were either *exceptionally* hardworking or you had rich parents giving you lots of pocket money!
I believe that some of the ads for the ZX81 (or for its even more basic predecessor, the ZX80, not sure which) made the bold and somewhat ludicrous claim that you could run a nuclear power station using one(!!!)
Actually, this is probably technically correct, I just wouldn't want the Rampack wobbling too much if I was using it for that;-)
No point turning your volume up for that one: no sound, natch.
You *could* do ersatz sound by (e.g.) repeatedly switching between FAST and SLOW mode quickly or running COPY without a printer attached, etc.
The effect this had on the sound output of the TV (which you were normally meant to keep turned down) gave a sort of buzzing that could be "tuned".
I remember creating a slightly strange tune with bizarre vocals I made by recording this onto a cassetter recorder. It would probably be considered early minimalist electro music by today's standards, and I'm only half joking about that;-)
As I said, it wasn't a criticism really, as I appreciate that it was really focusing on that particular relationship and battle, not the market as a whole. It was just a simple caveat that those not already familiar with the UK 80s market *might* get the wrong impression that Sinclair and Acorn were the only players (or even that the latter was dominant in mass market terms).
Certainly, Sinclair and Acorn were rivals on a "personal" level, in that both wanted the BBC contract and Sinclair wasn't happy that he didn't get it, but ultimately they operated in different segments of the computer market. (Though the later QL, had it been successful, might have competed with the Acorn's own BBC Micro, and some suggested that this was in part the motivation behind its early release).
My point was that the BBC Micro *was* a great machine in many respects- I would have loved one at the time. However, it was still too expensive for most people, which was an issue with a machine meant to promote computer literacy to the man in the street. Whereas the Spectrum- regardless of its shortcomings- was affordable, and popular for that reason.
Two built-in ZX [85 KB] Microdrive tape-loop cartridge drives provided mass storage [for the QL], in place of the more expensive floppy disk drives found on similar systems of the era.
Yes, but this is what I mean about hobbyists vs. business. Hobbyists would have been willing to tolerate the non-standard nature and (arguably) lower reliability of the microdrives, but I suspect that this wasn't so much the case for businesses.
(IIRC I read somewhere that the QL Microdrives were more reliable than the Spectrum version, but still).
Also, there were things like the QL being released what some people considered way too early, with early versions having bugs and requiring "dongles" where they couldn't fit all the OS chips inside the case (or whatever the deal was), and there were still the notorious Sinclair shipment delays. Bottom line, it may have been a good value machine in some respects, but my gut reaction is that business users would have been put off by the Sinclair way of doing things, which would have been more at home and tolerated in the hobbyist field.
You forgot that the Spectrum was originally launched in a 16k & 48k format
Actually, if I'd thought about it I'd have mentioned that, as well as the variants- but that aside it was meant to be a brief, clear and concise overview of the machines, not a complete history. That's what Wikipedia's for, after all;-)
The QL was based on a Motorola 68008, which was a 68000 but with only an 8-bit data bus (instead of 16-bits). (*)
Anyway, AFAIK, the QL partly flopped because Sinclair aimed at the business market instead of hobbyists.
Even then (apparently), IBM PC compatibility was quickly becoming more important to such people. Also, I'm assuming that the quirkiness and flakiness of Sinclair products would have been less tolerable to business users in the quickly-maturing mid 80s market than it would have been to grateful first-time hobbyists a few years later.
In some senses, the real successors to the Speccy were consoles and the PC, depending on how much money you had and whether you were just playing games or were determined to write software as well.
Not quite, or at least, not directly. The late-80s and early-90s successors to the Spectrum were really the Atari ST and Amiga, the latter of which may have flopped in the US, but was massively popular in Europe around the turn of the decade. It wasn't until circa '92-93 that the ever-falling price of PC clones and the Mega Drive (AKA Genesis) and later SNES took over and *really* started to dominate the home market.
(Remember that the original NES was never as big a deal here as it was in the US at the time- it was even outsold by the Sega Master System in the UK).
(*) Sinclair sold the QL on the basis that it was a 32-bit machine, which the 68008 *was*... internally. But then, the Amiga and ST's 68000 was generally considered a 16-bit processor (not 32-bit) due to the size of its data bus, so following the same system the QL would only be an 8-bit machine. It depends what slant you want to put on it!
Prior to my parents buying my a ZX81 for Christmas, my home computer was an Atari 2600 with a BASIC Programming [wikipedia.org] cartridge. It had 62 bytes of code memory.
I read a bit about that "BASIC" cartridge a while back. It's obviously a ludicrous idea.
But then, I'm not attacking the VCS / 2600 in itself for that- it's clearly *not* what the machine was ever intended for. The machine has 128 bytes of RAM but supports up to 4KB ROM cartridges- obviously designed such that the program was stored on ROM, with the precious few bytes of RAM being used for data storage. (And *that* was using assembly language, and it was still apparently damn hard to develop "regular" 2600 software).
I imagine the BASIC cartridge is concept is actually impressive in a "singing pig" way- the amazing bit is that you can get the pig to sing at all, not that it sings remotely well. But you still wouldn't want to listen to it for long(!)
Similarly, it's somewhat astounding that they could write a system that left enough RAM to hold *any* program at all once the overheads have been taken into account, but 62 bytes is still.... wow.
Ironically, I'm guessing that they probably sold this to complete newbies expecting to be able to do *something* with it. Ironically, such people would have been least aware of the potential limitations, least able to get round them, and the most likely to have been put off their first programming experience by something so limiting and unsuitable.
The ZX81 came with a whopping 16KB, which seemed mansionlike to my very inexperienced mind. But that's like having a better civil rights record than North Korea. It wasn't the worst of the worst but it wasn't far from it.
As others have mentioned, it only came with 1KB- the 16KB was with the RAM pack. But 16KB was actually quite a decent amount for that time- the Vic 20 only had 3K by default with another 16K using an expansion, so that was in the same ballpark.
If you haven't seen the movie Micro Men about Clive Sinclair, it is very entertaining. Now playing at your nearest torrent.
I've a couple of points to make about the programme. It was okay in some respects- nitpicking aside, I knew most of the details already and it seemed to get them broadly right.
However, I did have a problem with how "Clive Sinclair" was played. Whatever one thinks of the guy- and I've heard some things said in the past that don't cast him in the greatest light- I think he deserved a fair portrayal. Whereas all the other parts (including Acorn's Chris Curry) were acted pretty much straight, Alexander Armstrong's portrayal of Sinclair was- IMHO- not merely tongue in cheek, but an outright comedy-sketch type figure of fun, portrayed in a manner that would have been more at home in one of Armstrong and Miller's own shows. He was basically a foaming-at-the-mouth borderline nutcase with an unconvincing ginger hairpiece, and I doubt that the real Sinclair was ever anything like as ludicrous as portrayed here. It was the contrast between the "comedy" Sinclair and the "straight" everyone else that made this all the more jarring.
Secondly, not really a criticism, but bear in mind that while the programme might have given the impression that the UK market was just about Sinclair (and the ZX Spectrum) vs. Acorn's "official" BBC Microcomputer, it wasn't. While it's true that there was rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn to get the BBC contract- which the programme focuses on- Acorn's machine (which became the official BBC Micro) ultimately wasn't the Spectrum's rival, as it was far more expensive and ended up selling primarily to the educational market.
For example, the Commodore 64- although it's not mentioned at all IIRC- was still a major player on the UK market and far closer a rival to the Spectrum, albeit with both machines having niches at slightly different price points.
Acorn's BBC Micro meanwhile was a great machine, but also too expensive for most people. For all its shortcomings, one wonders if the mass-market, affordable Spectrum wouldn't have been a more suitable candidate for the BBC's aim of computer literacy. Ah well, everyone ended up buying the Spectrum anyway(!)
The Atari 800 came out in 1978 and was 10 times the computer! When I think of the Sinclair, I think of an oversized calculator, my Magnavox Odyssey could do more. I'm sorry, but the Sinclair was a POS back then and still is today!
Well, the Atari 800 was 10 times the price of a TS-1000 ($999.95 vs $99.95)
You said exactly what I would have! The Atari 800 was an absolutely fantastic machine for the time it came out- I owned a later version called the 800XL, so I've no axe to grind- but it was also damn expensive when first released (late 1979, not 1978).
Everything I've seen indicates that even at the time people knew damn well that the ZX81 was a pretty basic machine in most respects. Yet it fulfilled the essentials of computing for the hobbyist market, for people who couldn't have afforded a computer before, and for that and the fact they figured out how to build a simple but nevertheless "proper" home computer at such a low price deserves respect.
Actually, I'm guessing that this is why the ZX81 (and its US version the TS-1000) generally doesn't get as much respect in the US. It wasn't the difference between "having a computer and not having a computer" over there.
Partly (still guessing) because the TS-1000 didn't come out in the US until over a year after the ZX81 was first launched in the UK, which is a *long* time when the market is evolving as fast as it did in the early 80s. (The ZX Spectrum was already out in the UK by that time). Partly because Americans generally had more disposable income. And also (I assume) because the Vic 20 was cheaper in its home market over there(?). Also, I understand there was a shortage of the RAM packs needed to make the most of the TS-1000, and they weren't that cheap.
Still, in the UK, it was a milestone machine despite its limitations, and for good reason.
Most of the shortcomings of the ZX81 that some people like to get snotty about were forgiveable because they were what made the computer affordable.
For example, a real keyboard would have been nice, but it would also have massively increased the price.
However, the notorious "RAM pack wobble" (and yes, this was very common- there was even a joke on Red Dwarf about it!) was just crap design. One explanation I heard was that they reused the RAMpack case from the ZX80 for the ZX81 (whose own case was a different shape and wouldn't have fitted as snugly). Don't know if that's true, but it might be:-
Was the ZX-81 the same as the TS-1000, or was it the same as the one that came after?
The ZX-81 came before, I ordered mine from England. The Timex-Sinclair was the U.S. version, already assembled for you.
There were three distinct "original" ZX machines sold on the UK market:-
* ZX80 came first in 1980. Black and white, text-based display, 1KB RAM, 4KB OS ROM with integer-only BASIC. Yes, it was very basic, but it was also very cheap- first computer under £100 back when even the Apple II cost many, many times that. Apparently it was also sold in the US in both kit and assembled form. (I don't know if the pre-assembled version was ever sold in its native UK?)
* ZX81 came next and was even more popular. Essentially an improved and cost-reduced refinement of the ZX80 design. Still black and white with 1KB RAM (expandable to 16KB) and a new improved 8KB OS and BASIC ROM. The Timex Sinclair 1000 mentioned above was an NTSC version with 2KB and other minor differences for the US market, but to all intents and purposes the same machine.
* ZX Spectrum followed on in 1982. Colour, high-res graphics, sound (albeit crude single channel). There was a US machine based on the Spectrum design (the failed Timex Sinclair 2068) but unlike the TS1000, it made significant changes and improvements to the original design. .
There were very many clones and variants- both authorised and unauthorised- of the above machines in various countries. In part because their architecture was based around clever design using cheap off-the-shelf parts (e.g. the ZX80's inability to compute and display at the same time was because the display was primarily generated in software). This made them easier to rip off than (e.g.) the Commodore 64.
The ZX81 replaced the ZX80 as it was essentially a refined and improved version of the latter (better OS and moving graphics possible- the ZX80's display flickered and went blank whenever it was busy) and at a lower price (18 chips in the ZX80 replaced with a single functionally equivalent chip). In fact, the ZX80 could be almost upgraded to a ZX81- minus the steady graphics- simply by replacing the ROM OS.
The Spectrum was a slightly more expensive machine with colour and high-resolution graphics and (very crude) single-channel sound. It was sold alongside the cheaper ZX81 for some time. (I think they stopped making the ZX81 in 1984?) In the long term the Spectrum was the most successful as it was usable for games- its success quickly spawned rivals, but its early lead had already established a network effect (i.e. users led to support and software which led to more users, which led to more support...) and it survived until the early 90s.
You could use a balloon to cover much of the altitude, but you'd need some other means of propulsion to get it to leave the atmosphere entirely.
Hmmm... What if you attached the whole thing to another helium balloon?
One more balloon might not be enough. You might need to add more. To those who would argue that this isn't going to work and ask "what's supporting the final balloon?", I'd have to say "You're very clever, young man, very clever... but it's balloons all the way up!"
I forgot to add- if you have existing material that pans from (IIRC) right to left in the appropriate manner, you may already be able to get a 3D effect simply by viewing it through a pair of dirt-cheap Pulfrich glasses!
Let's say you have a video camera poked out of the side window of your car, and you're driving down a road alongside a wide field. The field is sparsely populated with trees, and there are mountains far off in the background.
With the use of video in such a case, the depth information can be pretty accurately inferred from the parallax effect, due to the fact that your car (and camera) are moving along the road.
This is sort of how the Pulfrich effect works anyway.
You have a camera moving sideways while pointed at a relatively static scene. Any two frames a moderate fraction of a second apart will thus effectively have been taken from slightly different parallax positions, like twin stereoscopic 3D images.
The key is when watching this film on an ordinary 2D television you view it through a pair of glasses with one lens darker than the other. Due to the way the brain processes images, the eye viewing through the dark lens lags behind slightly and "sees" a frame slightly behind the one the other eye is currently processing.
So each eye gets a different frame- and as described above, if the camera is moving in the appropriate manner, each eye is getting a slightly different parallax view of the scene, giving a 3D effect.
The Volt is by far the best car that came out of America in recent times. They all know Chevrolet scored some seriously good car here and lots of people are driven mad about it.
Ironically, it's not being sold as a Chevrolet in Europe (they're going to call it the Opel (or Vauxhall) Ampera).
That's presumably because over here the Chevrolet brand- which was almost unknown until a few years back- is now used for (and associated with) low-end vehicles made by what used to be Daewoo in South Korea.
Lions (as used in the Volt) are not destroyed if they are discharged completely.
The Volt uses lions? My god, I can see that *would* be a problem- even if undamaged, they'll generally be very pissed off and aggressive after a crash, and therefore even more likely to bite your damn head off.
Not that they're particularly safe in that respect even under normal use. No wonder GM went bankrupt if they were doing expensive and dangerous things like putting lions in their cars.
It's not good for them, it reduces their lifespan.
Having a lion in one's car is even more likely to reduce your lifespan for the reasons given above.
I propose that it would make a *lot* more sense to use batteries to power the car instead. Preferably using Titanium-Germanium technology, or Ti-Ger for short.
I don't know how Seattle compares to Scotland in general, but I did know that it's further north and generally not as blessed as California is when it comes to sunshine.
(*) Although people do forget that the shorter days in more northerly locations is balanced by the fact that in *summer* they're conversely longer. Then again, you also have to consider that (i) the sun is going to be lower in the sky in general- and hence weaker- the further north you go, and (ii) that the generally greater levels of cloud (from poor weather) robs you of significant amounts of daylight.
I can't work out whether this is meant to be a joke or not, or whether the people who modded it up as "Funny" misinterpreted it as a joke, or whether they thought it wasn't a joke, but modded it up as "Funny" anyway to show how laughable they thought it was....:-/
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Weird though that they would build something for home users with ZERO sound at all though since the VCS could even do bleeps and bloops in 77.
Not really, they were probably pushing things quite far to get it at that price- even the TV signal was mostly generated in software with just some basic interfacing hardware. And AFAIK the VCS was quite a bit more expensive. Also, the VCS would actually have been entirely unsuited to use as a "real" computer (at least without any add-ons). Why?
The VCS spec was tailored specifically towards playing pre-programmed games, whereas the ZX81 was a "real" computer. All the following is to the best of my knowledge, so don't take it as gospel. However, consider...
The unexpanded ZX81 has 1KB, i.e. 1024 bytes of RAM, and even that was considered tiny. The VCS?... the VCS had 128 *bytes* of RAM! (i.e. one-eigth of a kilobyte).
They actually released a BASIC "programming" cartridge for the VCS that had 62 bytes free space left after overheads.
Of course, this is missing the point; I assume the original intention was always that programs were supplied on ROM cart (up to 4KB) and that the tiny RAM was meant for data storage only. Home programmers, of course, couldn't do things that way. My point here is that the VCS got away with having a lower spec because it didn't need to cater to that need. The ZX81 did.
Similarly, the VCS had no proper screen memory- AFAIK only one line's worth of sprite position and background could be stored at any one time, and these had to be updated on the fly to generate the output for successive lines (and hence a complete picture).
Also, (again AFAIK) the VCS had no native character generation support, all number/letter graphic generation etc had to be done "manually" via software.
It also had no input or output for backing store or anything other than joysticks/paddles and TV. AFAICT it had no operating system as such. The most visible difference- that it had no integrated keyboard- is actually far less important than what I described above, since there were actually a number of crude keyboard-like attachments anyway.
My point is that although the VCS was much better at playing games than the ZX81, one might argue that the ZX81 was actually more powerful in terms of being a "real" computer! The VCS, not pretending to be as flexible, could afford to "cut corners" without this being obvious, presumably letting them concentrate more on graphics and sound.
True- but I'm sure that you'd also have to spend almost as much as a BMW to make a much cheaper family car run as well as a BMW. That's not really the point. :-)
The bottom line is that the base Spectrum was affordable for the man in the street, whereas the base BBC was much less so. Yes, one could argue that it was worth the extra money, but most people couldn't- or wouldn't- have spent that much, and wouldn't have planned on upgrading it to BBC spec anyway.
The Atari 400 was half the price of an Atari 800
And that would still have been many times the cost of the ZX81.
or you could buy a Tandy Color Computer for around $400 new
Oh, so only four times the US price, then.
Either way, almost any other computer was far superior to the Sinclair.
And significantly more expensive.
My first computer was the Atari 800XL
As I said, that computer came out two years after the ZX81 had been released in the UK, so you clearly weren't making the same choice as that of people when it first came out. By then the market had moved on quite a lot and prices of more capable machines had fallen (like... the Atari 800XL!)
but it was a birthday gift plus I had saved up some money from my job as a PaperBoy.
Okay, so you didn't pay for it all yourself, then.
Also bear in mind that you're (apparently) arguing from a US perspective. The TS1000 wasn't launched properly in the US until well over a year later, by which time things had already moved on significantly (we already had its successor, the ZX Spectrum). Hence it was never as important over there, at which point it was just a cheap machine rather than the difference between being able to afford a computer and not afford one. (I discussed this in greater depth here).
The context in which it's most important was the context in which it was launched, i.e. the UK market of early 1981. But feel free to point out that the plebs should have saved up their pennies for a much nicer BMW instead of the mundane family car they bought themselves...
The Atari 800XL (essentially an Atari 800 in a sleeker case with some other improvements) came out in 1983, two years after the ZX81, and was nowhere near as expensive as the original 800. By the mid-80s, the later models were being sold by UK chain Dixons for circa £80 for a system with cassette deck or £120 for one with a disk drive, which was fantastic value even then.
If, as a kid, you'd saved up enough money for an Atari 800 at its original 1979 release price, you were either *exceptionally* hardworking or you had rich parents giving you lots of pocket money!
The old ads ARE great!
I believe that some of the ads for the ZX81 (or for its even more basic predecessor, the ZX80, not sure which) made the bold and somewhat ludicrous claim that you could run a nuclear power station using one(!!!)
;-)
Actually, this is probably technically correct, I just wouldn't want the Rampack wobbling too much if I was using it for that
No point turning your volume up for that one: no sound, natch.
You *could* do ersatz sound by (e.g.) repeatedly switching between FAST and SLOW mode quickly or running COPY without a printer attached, etc.
;-)
The effect this had on the sound output of the TV (which you were normally meant to keep turned down) gave a sort of buzzing that could be "tuned".
I remember creating a slightly strange tune with bizarre vocals I made by recording this onto a cassetter recorder. It would probably be considered early minimalist electro music by today's standards, and I'm only half joking about that
As I said, it wasn't a criticism really, as I appreciate that it was really focusing on that particular relationship and battle, not the market as a whole. It was just a simple caveat that those not already familiar with the UK 80s market *might* get the wrong impression that Sinclair and Acorn were the only players (or even that the latter was dominant in mass market terms).
Certainly, Sinclair and Acorn were rivals on a "personal" level, in that both wanted the BBC contract and Sinclair wasn't happy that he didn't get it, but ultimately they operated in different segments of the computer market. (Though the later QL, had it been successful, might have competed with the Acorn's own BBC Micro, and some suggested that this was in part the motivation behind its early release).
My point was that the BBC Micro *was* a great machine in many respects- I would have loved one at the time. However, it was still too expensive for most people, which was an issue with a machine meant to promote computer literacy to the man in the street. Whereas the Spectrum- regardless of its shortcomings- was affordable, and popular for that reason.
Two built-in ZX [85 KB] Microdrive tape-loop cartridge drives provided mass storage [for the QL], in place of the more expensive floppy disk drives found on similar systems of the era.
Yes, but this is what I mean about hobbyists vs. business. Hobbyists would have been willing to tolerate the non-standard nature and (arguably) lower reliability of the microdrives, but I suspect that this wasn't so much the case for businesses.
(IIRC I read somewhere that the QL Microdrives were more reliable than the Spectrum version, but still).
Also, there were things like the QL being released what some people considered way too early, with early versions having bugs and requiring "dongles" where they couldn't fit all the OS chips inside the case (or whatever the deal was), and there were still the notorious Sinclair shipment delays. Bottom line, it may have been a good value machine in some respects, but my gut reaction is that business users would have been put off by the Sinclair way of doing things, which would have been more at home and tolerated in the hobbyist field.
You forgot that the Spectrum was originally launched in a 16k & 48k format
Actually, if I'd thought about it I'd have mentioned that, as well as the variants- but that aside it was meant to be a brief, clear and concise overview of the machines, not a complete history. That's what Wikipedia's for, after all ;-)
Anyway, AFAIK, the QL partly flopped because Sinclair aimed at the business market instead of hobbyists.
Even then (apparently), IBM PC compatibility was quickly becoming more important to such people. Also, I'm assuming that the quirkiness and flakiness of Sinclair products would have been less tolerable to business users in the quickly-maturing mid 80s market than it would have been to grateful first-time hobbyists a few years later.
In some senses, the real successors to the Speccy were consoles and the PC, depending on how much money you had and whether you were just playing games or were determined to write software as well.
Not quite, or at least, not directly. The late-80s and early-90s successors to the Spectrum were really the Atari ST and Amiga, the latter of which may have flopped in the US, but was massively popular in Europe around the turn of the decade. It wasn't until circa '92-93 that the ever-falling price of PC clones and the Mega Drive (AKA Genesis) and later SNES took over and *really* started to dominate the home market.
(Remember that the original NES was never as big a deal here as it was in the US at the time- it was even outsold by the Sega Master System in the UK).
(*) Sinclair sold the QL on the basis that it was a 32-bit machine, which the 68008 *was*... internally. But then, the Amiga and ST's 68000 was generally considered a 16-bit processor (not 32-bit) due to the size of its data bus, so following the same system the QL would only be an 8-bit machine. It depends what slant you want to put on it!
Prior to my parents buying my a ZX81 for Christmas, my home computer was an Atari 2600 with a BASIC Programming [wikipedia.org] cartridge. It had 62 bytes of code memory.
I read a bit about that "BASIC" cartridge a while back. It's obviously a ludicrous idea.
But then, I'm not attacking the VCS / 2600 in itself for that- it's clearly *not* what the machine was ever intended for. The machine has 128 bytes of RAM but supports up to 4KB ROM cartridges- obviously designed such that the program was stored on ROM, with the precious few bytes of RAM being used for data storage. (And *that* was using assembly language, and it was still apparently damn hard to develop "regular" 2600 software).
I imagine the BASIC cartridge is concept is actually impressive in a "singing pig" way- the amazing bit is that you can get the pig to sing at all, not that it sings remotely well. But you still wouldn't want to listen to it for long(!)
Similarly, it's somewhat astounding that they could write a system that left enough RAM to hold *any* program at all once the overheads have been taken into account, but 62 bytes is still.... wow.
Ironically, I'm guessing that they probably sold this to complete newbies expecting to be able to do *something* with it. Ironically, such people would have been least aware of the potential limitations, least able to get round them, and the most likely to have been put off their first programming experience by something so limiting and unsuitable.
The ZX81 came with a whopping 16KB, which seemed mansionlike to my very inexperienced mind. But that's like having a better civil rights record than North Korea. It wasn't the worst of the worst but it wasn't far from it.
As others have mentioned, it only came with 1KB- the 16KB was with the RAM pack. But 16KB was actually quite a decent amount for that time- the Vic 20 only had 3K by default with another 16K using an expansion, so that was in the same ballpark.
If you haven't seen the movie Micro Men about Clive Sinclair, it is very entertaining. Now playing at your nearest torrent.
I've a couple of points to make about the programme. It was okay in some respects- nitpicking aside, I knew most of the details already and it seemed to get them broadly right.
However, I did have a problem with how "Clive Sinclair" was played. Whatever one thinks of the guy- and I've heard some things said in the past that don't cast him in the greatest light- I think he deserved a fair portrayal. Whereas all the other parts (including Acorn's Chris Curry) were acted pretty much straight, Alexander Armstrong's portrayal of Sinclair was- IMHO- not merely tongue in cheek, but an outright comedy-sketch type figure of fun, portrayed in a manner that would have been more at home in one of Armstrong and Miller's own shows. He was basically a foaming-at-the-mouth borderline nutcase with an unconvincing ginger hairpiece, and I doubt that the real Sinclair was ever anything like as ludicrous as portrayed here. It was the contrast between the "comedy" Sinclair and the "straight" everyone else that made this all the more jarring.
Secondly, not really a criticism, but bear in mind that while the programme might have given the impression that the UK market was just about Sinclair (and the ZX Spectrum) vs. Acorn's "official" BBC Microcomputer, it wasn't. While it's true that there was rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn to get the BBC contract- which the programme focuses on- Acorn's machine (which became the official BBC Micro) ultimately wasn't the Spectrum's rival, as it was far more expensive and ended up selling primarily to the educational market.
For example, the Commodore 64- although it's not mentioned at all IIRC- was still a major player on the UK market and far closer a rival to the Spectrum, albeit with both machines having niches at slightly different price points.
Acorn's BBC Micro meanwhile was a great machine, but also too expensive for most people. For all its shortcomings, one wonders if the mass-market, affordable Spectrum wouldn't have been a more suitable candidate for the BBC's aim of computer literacy. Ah well, everyone ended up buying the Spectrum anyway(!)
The Atari 800 came out in 1978 and was 10 times the computer! When I think of the Sinclair, I think of an oversized calculator, my Magnavox Odyssey could do more. I'm sorry, but the Sinclair was a POS back then and still is today!
Well, the Atari 800 was 10 times the price of a TS-1000 ($999.95 vs $99.95)
You said exactly what I would have! The Atari 800 was an absolutely fantastic machine for the time it came out- I owned a later version called the 800XL, so I've no axe to grind- but it was also damn expensive when first released (late 1979, not 1978).
Everything I've seen indicates that even at the time people knew damn well that the ZX81 was a pretty basic machine in most respects. Yet it fulfilled the essentials of computing for the hobbyist market, for people who couldn't have afforded a computer before, and for that and the fact they figured out how to build a simple but nevertheless "proper" home computer at such a low price deserves respect.
Actually, I'm guessing that this is why the ZX81 (and its US version the TS-1000) generally doesn't get as much respect in the US. It wasn't the difference between "having a computer and not having a computer" over there.
Partly (still guessing) because the TS-1000 didn't come out in the US until over a year after the ZX81 was first launched in the UK, which is a *long* time when the market is evolving as fast as it did in the early 80s. (The ZX Spectrum was already out in the UK by that time). Partly because Americans generally had more disposable income. And also (I assume) because the Vic 20 was cheaper in its home market over there(?). Also, I understand there was a shortage of the RAM packs needed to make the most of the TS-1000, and they weren't that cheap.
Still, in the UK, it was a milestone machine despite its limitations, and for good reason.
Most of the shortcomings of the ZX81 that some people like to get snotty about were forgiveable because they were what made the computer affordable.
For example, a real keyboard would have been nice, but it would also have massively increased the price.
However, the notorious "RAM pack wobble" (and yes, this was very common- there was even a joke on Red Dwarf about it!) was just crap design. One explanation I heard was that they reused the RAMpack case from the ZX80 for the ZX81 (whose own case was a different shape and wouldn't have fitted as snugly). Don't know if that's true, but it might be:-
http://www.cosam.org/images/zx81_ram_closeup.jpg
http://www.polymathperspective.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ZX80-RAM-Pack1.jpg
Was the ZX-81 the same as the TS-1000, or was it the same as the one that came after?
The ZX-81 came before, I ordered mine from England. The Timex-Sinclair was the U.S. version, already assembled for you.
There were three distinct "original" ZX machines sold on the UK market:-
* ZX80 came first in 1980. Black and white, text-based display, 1KB RAM, 4KB OS ROM with integer-only BASIC. Yes, it was very basic, but it was also very cheap- first computer under £100 back when even the Apple II cost many, many times that. Apparently it was also sold in the US in both kit and assembled form. (I don't know if the pre-assembled version was ever sold in its native UK?)
* ZX81 came next and was even more popular. Essentially an improved and cost-reduced refinement of the ZX80 design. Still black and white with 1KB RAM (expandable to 16KB) and a new improved 8KB OS and BASIC ROM. The Timex Sinclair 1000 mentioned above was an NTSC version with 2KB and other minor differences for the US market, but to all intents and purposes the same machine.
* ZX Spectrum followed on in 1982. Colour, high-res graphics, sound (albeit crude single channel). There was a US machine based on the Spectrum design (the failed Timex Sinclair 2068) but unlike the TS1000, it made significant changes and improvements to the original design.
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There were very many clones and variants- both authorised and unauthorised- of the above machines in various countries. In part because their architecture was based around clever design using cheap off-the-shelf parts (e.g. the ZX80's inability to compute and display at the same time was because the display was primarily generated in software). This made them easier to rip off than (e.g.) the Commodore 64.
The ZX81 replaced the ZX80 as it was essentially a refined and improved version of the latter (better OS and moving graphics possible- the ZX80's display flickered and went blank whenever it was busy) and at a lower price (18 chips in the ZX80 replaced with a single functionally equivalent chip). In fact, the ZX80 could be almost upgraded to a ZX81- minus the steady graphics- simply by replacing the ROM OS.
The Spectrum was a slightly more expensive machine with colour and high-resolution graphics and (very crude) single-channel sound. It was sold alongside the cheaper ZX81 for some time. (I think they stopped making the ZX81 in 1984?) In the long term the Spectrum was the most successful as it was usable for games- its success quickly spawned rivals, but its early lead had already established a network effect (i.e. users led to support and software which led to more users, which led to more support...) and it survived until the early 90s.
You could use a balloon to cover much of the altitude, but you'd need some other means of propulsion to get it to leave the atmosphere entirely.
Hmmm... What if you attached the whole thing to another helium balloon?
One more balloon might not be enough. You might need to add more. To those who would argue that this isn't going to work and ask "what's supporting the final balloon?", I'd have to say "You're very clever, young man, very clever... but it's balloons all the way up!"
I forgot to add- if you have existing material that pans from (IIRC) right to left in the appropriate manner, you may already be able to get a 3D effect simply by viewing it through a pair of dirt-cheap Pulfrich glasses!
Let's say you have a video camera poked out of the side window of your car, and you're driving down a road alongside a wide field. The field is sparsely populated with trees, and there are mountains far off in the background. With the use of video in such a case, the depth information can be pretty accurately inferred from the parallax effect, due to the fact that your car (and camera) are moving along the road.
This is sort of how the Pulfrich effect works anyway. You have a camera moving sideways while pointed at a relatively static scene. Any two frames a moderate fraction of a second apart will thus effectively have been taken from slightly different parallax positions, like twin stereoscopic 3D images.
The key is when watching this film on an ordinary 2D television you view it through a pair of glasses with one lens darker than the other. Due to the way the brain processes images, the eye viewing through the dark lens lags behind slightly and "sees" a frame slightly behind the one the other eye is currently processing.
So each eye gets a different frame- and as described above, if the camera is moving in the appropriate manner, each eye is getting a slightly different parallax view of the scene, giving a 3D effect.
They've used the Pulfrich effect for novelty TV shows, including a notoriously horrible Doctor Who "special" in the early 90s.
The Volt is by far the best car that came out of America in recent times. They all know Chevrolet scored some seriously good car here and lots of people are driven mad about it.
Ironically, it's not being sold as a Chevrolet in Europe (they're going to call it the Opel (or Vauxhall) Ampera).
That's presumably because over here the Chevrolet brand- which was almost unknown until a few years back- is now used for (and associated with) low-end vehicles made by what used to be Daewoo in South Korea.
Lions (as used in the Volt) are not destroyed if they are discharged completely.
The Volt uses lions? My god, I can see that *would* be a problem- even if undamaged, they'll generally be very pissed off and aggressive after a crash, and therefore even more likely to bite your damn head off.
Not that they're particularly safe in that respect even under normal use. No wonder GM went bankrupt if they were doing expensive and dangerous things like putting lions in their cars.
It's not good for them, it reduces their lifespan.
Having a lion in one's car is even more likely to reduce your lifespan for the reasons given above.
I propose that it would make a *lot* more sense to use batteries to power the car instead. Preferably using Titanium-Germanium technology, or Ti-Ger for short.
From your nic, I presume that you're not much up on the leading edge of computer hardware.
You mean he has an ancient ISA one with 10Base2 BNC connectors or something like that?
The /. history has articles about taxi driver training leading to neural restructuring in favor of mapping and geographical awareness.
Apparently, Taxi Driver training also has some *negative* side effects on one's mental state though!
If that were the case you wouldn't expect the highest rate of MS in the world to be in Seattle
MS was recently linked to vitamin D deficiency.
Hmm interesting. I wonder if there are large number of vegans in Seattle?
There are a large number of clouds in Seattle. Sunlight is a primary source of vitamin D.
You got there before me, as I'd originally intended saying this to the OP.
I live in Scotland, which has the highest prevalence of MS in the world, and it was in the news here recently that our general lack of daylight (*) may be one possible cause for this.
I don't know how Seattle compares to Scotland in general, but I did know that it's further north and generally not as blessed as California is when it comes to sunshine.
(*) Although people do forget that the shorter days in more northerly locations is balanced by the fact that in *summer* they're conversely longer. Then again, you also have to consider that (i) the sun is going to be lower in the sky in general- and hence weaker- the further north you go, and (ii) that the generally greater levels of cloud (from poor weather) robs you of significant amounts of daylight.
I can't work out whether this is meant to be a joke or not, or whether the people who modded it up as "Funny" misinterpreted it as a joke, or whether they thought it wasn't a joke, but modded it up as "Funny" anyway to show how laughable they thought it was.... :-/