25th Anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Alioth writes "Twenty five years ago today, Sinclair Research launched Britain's most popular home computer of the 1980s — the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Costing about one third of the price of its rivals such as the Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU and a better BASIC interpreter, the machine sold well in many guises throughout the 1980s and had more than a staggering 9,000 software titles. The machine may well have done well in the US too, had Timex — the company building the machine under license in the US — not already been in financial trouble and about to fold. The machine was also extremely successful in Russia, although not for Sinclair Research — because the Russians made dozens of different clones of the machine, and did so right into the mid 1990s. The machine still has a healthy retro scene, including the development of new commercial software by Cronosoft, and new hardware such as the DivIDE, which allows a standard PC hard disc or compact flash card to be connected to the machine."

And, as we all know...

The Speccy was better than the C64. Obviously.

Re:And, as we all know...

Me too. Seeing this thread made me feel really happy and pretty old at the same time.

A 48K Spectrum was my second computer after a ZX81. I don't think I ever got so much pleasure out of any other possession I had as a child (and I didn't even have Sam Fox Strip Poker [props to those who actually remember her, and double to those who remember the game]).

The Spectrum just went to show how limited hardware resources would force game developers to write creative, original and addictive games. Knight Lore, RedHawk, Manic Miner, Heavy on the Magick, Spellbound, Knight Tyme, Skooldaze, Sweevo's World and above all Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge were among the best games I have played on any platform. Shame on game developers for the formulaic crap they spew these days.

Does anyone else remember CRASH magazine? Whatever happened to those guys? It was almost worth being a spectrum owner just for that mag. Best and funniest game reviews ever, and Oliver Frey's covers were fantastic. For years I wanted to meet a girl like the one on this cover he did.

ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/magazin es/Crash/Issue18/CRCover18.jpg [worldofspectrum.org]

Re:And, as we all know...

...although it should be noted that Elite was better on the BBC Model-B; especially if you had analogue joysticks.

Your problem is caused by the "keyword" system

Huh? The C64's MS BASIC implementation was crude and archaic; it originated on the PET. That lacked support for the most simple facilities; you had to use POKEs to get them. The Spectrum BASIC was not brilliant, but it was better than that.

I think that your problem with Spectrum programming is due to Sinclair's "keyword" system. This first appeared on the ZX80 [wikipedia.org]. A single touch of a ZX80 key gave you a whole BASIC keyword (e.g. PRINT, GOTO). This was fast and simple. Symbols were accessed with SHIFT, and you could still type single letters when it was required.

A similar system was used on the ZX81 [wikipedia.org] , but because it was more powerful, there were more keywords to squeeze onto the keyboard. Thus, some keywords required the user to type SHIFT+NEWLINE *then* hit the key.

Sinclair retained the "keyword" system for the ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately, this was *much* more complicated, and there were lots of keywords to fit in. This made the system complicated. Even at its release, the Spectrum was criticised for this. From "Your Computer" magazine:-

Sinclair invented the "one-touch key" system for the ZX-80, which ensured that the computer knew that the first key pressed after a line number, or after the word Then, would produce a keyword, such as Let, Print, Poke or Goto. This meant that programming was fast and positive. The ZX-81 demanded a sequence of key presses - such as Shift, then Function, then a key - to get the results you wanted. Sinclair is obviously wedded to the one-touch entry system, but it is really not suited to the Spectrum. The sequence of key presses required for Ink and Atn, for example, requires the same number of key presses as would be needed to type the word in directly. [..] The one-touch entry system, retained from the ZX-81, is not suitable for the Spectrum and leads to complicated multi-shift operations when keying some functions. It should have been discarded.

I also found the Spectrum's keyword system too complicated. I remember having an argument in the school playground where a Spectrum owner said that he could type "RANDOMIZE" in less key presses than my machine.

Of course, at that time, I didn't realise that many BASIC keywords on my Atari 800XL could be abbreviated; for example "PRINT" could be "?", "LIST" could be "L.", and so on. Sinclair should have done that on the Spectrum instead.

Incidentally, when the enhanced 128K Spectrum was released, the new BASIC abandoned the keyword system.

Spectrum will never die.

Spectrum's ghost is still alive and kicking.

Why not emulate? fun for all bored students!

All of us math students with Ti-89/92 partial with the ZX can emulate it right on the calculator [ticalc.org]. No more waiting to be at home to play our favorite ZX programs. (mind you the screen may be small, but it's still better than nothing!)

Why is this in 'Games'?

I learnt to program on my Spectrum - and a lot more besides. It wasn't just a gaming console, and it's significance for the industry was much wider also.

Z80s all around us

A friend who did ASM on these chips said that the Z80 processors and variations there of is still (or at least until recently) the most common microprocessor in the world.

Apparently they are common in dishwashers, washing machines and other programmable appliances. (Can your dishwasher run Linux?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z80 [wikipedia.org]

My childhood in a nutshell

I started with a Sinclair ZX81, 1Kb of RAM expanded to 16Kb with a "RAM pack" that had an edge connector to the main PCB inside. It got hot (as did the power supply) and was often unstable. You could suddenly lose everything you were working on because the system just froze.

Along came the ZX Spectrum, 48Kb (and later 128Kb) with 8 colours (the ZX81 was black & white), sprites (the ZX81 was limited to the built in character set which included blocks & things until someone worked out how to hack that) and rubber keys (the ZX81 had touch sensitive membrane things).

It was a revolution, at my school we swapped tapes which didn't always load, had multiface cartridges to enter POKEs (changing a value at a particular memory address) for cheats and in order to create backups... and a big magazine scene.

I even ran an emulator on my PC to play one game in particular: the game that everyone tried to beat, and still fiendishly hard (and created by a mysterious genius who "disappeared", Matthew Smith [emuunlim.com]) : Manic Miner [xmixdrix.com] (link to a Windows version).

Those were the days [caperet.com]. The UK 8 bit scene was dominated by this machine.

Happy Birthday Speccy!!!

I was 11 y.o. in 1984, got a Timex Sinclair 2068 for Christmas (they were being dumped into Argentina, where I live). I got that manual (basically the same as the ZX Spectrums) and in a couple of weeks was writing Basic programs. It was really my way into programming. I think the manual was as important as the machine. I DID stumble when I got into 4th dimension Matrices, though. The book said something like "If you can draw a 4th dimension Matrix, then you dont need to be reading this book" :P

Thank you Sir Clive

Here's me and a million other Brits aged 25-35 saying 'thank you' for the Spectrum. If it wasn't for this little rubber wonder I doubt I'd be sat at this desk today, working in IT as a career. I'll be botting up the emulator" [geocities.com] tonight to celebrate!

It's also worth noting Amstrad's healthy attitude to the retro scene (they bought Sinclair Research in 1986, and many of those million Brits will think of Spectra every time they watch The Apprentice...). Anyway, the Spectrum ROM was cracked & emulated before permission was sought. When someone decided to approach Amstrad to seek permission, one Cliff Wilson [worldofspectrum.org] stepped forward with a simple reply: "Yes, do what you like with the Spectrum ROM, just don't charge money for it and don't remove our copyright message." Such an open attitude towards the scene in 1999 means that it's still thriving today.

Nice little Speccy tribute in flash

Hey Hey 16k [b3ta.com]

First and Most Significant For Me

It was the first computer in our household, and in many ways by far the most significant.

I remember learning BASIC and assembly (Z80), playing Elite all through one night, playing games and learning lots of stuff.

And that little silver-paper thermal printer!

I've still got the 1981 ZX-Spectrum 48K in a box somewhere, with tapes of many games and that printer (and some spare 'paper'). The keyboard membrane has pretty much had it, making the computer almost useless, but one day I'll get a replacement, just for the nostalgia.

Market vs "good products"

ZX Spectrum was meant to be an aid to the young programmer, not the gamer. But the "market" was made by gamers.
Sr Clive also gifted us with the Sinclair QL [wikipedia.org], another product the market largely ignored despite its potentials.
The Acorn Archimedes [wikipedia.org] was meant to be a powerful innovative PC. But the "market" was aimed to IBM PCs and to Amigas
That was the history: the market can esily ignore techinical advances against fancy worse products!

THATS NOTHING

I got my spec
trum 48k to c
onnect to the
internet and
work with sla
shdot.

REM disconnec
t

I was a zx pirate

I'll admit I ordered games from Britain, copied them and sold them to my mates and people I hardly knew. I was only 13. Attic Attack was a big seller. Happily my life of crime finished there, and my life of programming took off.

As a 25th anniversary tribute

I've also made a 25th anniversary hardware project for the Sinclair Spectrum - an add-on board to be used for helping diagnose problems with sick Sinclair Spectrums:

http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Spectrum-Diag [alioth.net]

It uses LEDs to display the test progress and status, so even if you can't get a picture out of the Spectrum, you can at least find out if the CPU and memory is working, and a good idea whether the ULA is servicable.

I'm a woman with blunt, square-tipped fingers...

And I blame it all on my using a ZX81's membrane keyboard when puberty hit. Instead of developing sleek, feminine fingertips I have hands that resemble welding gloves.

Thanks a lot, you bastards. :P

And, here's to the next 25 years

My proudest Spectrum moment remains getting two solid colours in the border using a clever switching technique with no attribute clash. Took me weeks to figure out how to do it. Things were sooo much simpler back then. :)

The spectrum was only beaten by one machine in the 1980s, the BBC micro. Without that, it has no equal.

Commonly repeated incorrect factiod alert!

"Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU"

It did not have a faster CPU. It had a CPU running at a higher external bus clock. You'd think that after all these years that people would realize that MHz != performance, but I guess not.

The 6502 ran on a bus multiplier, meaning it ran faster internally than it did externally. This is true of practically any modern CPU, but was not so common back in the day. In general terms the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 ran at the same internal speeds. That said, the 6502 was much more efficient and RISC-like. In practically any benchmark that scales for speed, the 6502 comes out ahead.

Arguably the fastest, in theory, 8-bit machine was the Atari series. They ran a 2 MHz 6502 (declocked to sync with video), which was twice as fast as any of the other 6502 machines and effectively the same as an 8MHz Z80. But again, these machines always finished at the bottom of the heap in BASIC benchmarks, which again demonstrates the point at the top.

Maury

Great machine

I purchased a zx80 kit early on, a little bit of assembly (and a phone call to Sinclair to help me un-fuck-up what I did) and it was running with 1Kb and a zilog cpu. Learn't Z80, fiddled around with it a lot and it helped me understand the basic architecture because it such a low-level computer. There were a few quirks, plus it tended to get really hot. I don't know what happened to it in the end, I think it was passed onto a family member. Then I upgraded to a ZX Spectrum 48K. Colour, swimming in RAM (after 1Kb, 48Kb was a dream), improved BASIC support, more peripherals (scored a speech synthesis add-on from somewhere and a thermal printer, oh I still remember the smell!). Upgraded to a +2 when Amstrad released the integrated tape recorder onto a 128Kb version. Thank you for the education Sir Clive Sinclair!

But honestly, the C5? WTF were you thinking man, a 3 wheeled lay-back scooter made from a washing machine motor?

Yea, it was 24 something years ago, and i remember

some acquaintance of my father brought a zx spectrum, and i played with it just 50 cm away to where i am sitting now. i remember it like tomorrow. i was what, 7 or so then.

Homage post

Not really much to add, but I feel compelled to post in homage of the computer that changed the life of so many people, including my own.

My very first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48k. I still remember the beautiful banner: "(c) 1982 Sinclair Research, Ltd. Chuckie Egg II was my very first game, and BASIC the very first programming language I tried. The ZX Spectrum and the Timex had an almost monopoly here in Portugal in the '80's, to the extent that I never really saw a C64. The Timex plant in Portugal continued making them after the main branch closed its doors, and exported the machine to several countries (Poland was one of the main markets IIRC).

To Sir Clive: Hip! Hip! Hurrah!

Nostalgia time

I started with a ZX81 and its 1kb of RAM, little flush keys and built-in BASIC. Moved up (or should I say 'was moved' - I was five years old) - to a ZX Spectrum when that came out. Ahh, the white-knuckle action of Arcadia [wikipedia.org]! The blistering platform mayhem of Horace and the Spiders [worldofspectrum.org] (by Psion no less)! I spent many a late night (sometimes not retiring until 8pm) hammering away at the rubber keys, navigating some hideous pixellated sprite.

Damn I can still hear the staticky 'eeeeeee-ktsch' of the tape drive now.

Modern computing seems so flat, routine and devoid of character by comparison. What happened?

Memories

I remember that machine well - a friend of mine actually had one. Without the memory expansion pack, it was pretty much useless. Still, if you you wanted a computer (And who didn't?) you couldn't get any cheaper than that. I remember towards the end, they were literally giving them away for free at our local service station with purchase of an oil change.

Hail Sir Clive

Just to say I had a 48k, 128k, +2, +3 before moving onto the Amiga 500.

The Spectrum made me who I am today. All hail the bald git, Clive!

Not so much a game, more a way of life

Jet Set Willy! Yay! We were obsessed with it. The holy mantra "Poke 35899,0" was branded into our consciousness.

ZX Spectrum book.

Finally, I can post this without feeling like off-topic pimping... I've actually written and published a book (http://zxgoldenyears.com/ [zxgoldenyears.com]) on the ZX Spectrum (full-colour, coffee table format) which I decided to do last year as a 'tribute' to the machine that defined my youth... The Spectrum was a fantastic machine for the time, even though it had weedy sound. It's a shame the Clive lost his way after the Spectrum+ and didn't add enough improvements to the 128k edition of the machine. I wonder if things would have been different if he'd just repackaged the American enhanced Timex TS2068 and brought it over. Still, even though I lot of my friends had Commodore 64s (http:c64goldenyears.com [c64goldenyears.com]), I still preferred the speccy. Andrew

SAM Coupé

I have to represent the SAM Coupé [wikipedia.org].
The logical evolution of the Spectrum, it could even emulate it perfectly (in 1989!).
Abject commercial failure, but it is the reason I am in this business at all
I have two, still fully working, and it has what is still my favourite keyboard of any machine ever.
I can't condense my feelings for this box of chips into a /. post. Thinking about it gets me embarrassingly emotional.
Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon are hugely important figures in my childhood.

My ZX

I bought one for my girlfriend for Christmas. They were long since out of stock in the catalogs by then, but I found one for sale at a little gas station. The owner told me he had ordered one for himself, using his business address, and had promptly gotten a letter: "We have no dealers in your area, would you be interested...." It was the last one he had, he ordered 3 at a time and kept them under his counter.

I set the thing up (it was the week before Christmas, and I wrap fast) on my parents' kitchen counter using a 9 inch B&W TV they had. I made a display of 3 linked rotating rings (they each had a gap that made the "rotation" visible) that completely blew my father's mind -- the idea that something like that was possible. Compared to the punched cards and half day delays I was used to at college, it was a darned nice system.

It was popular in Eastern Europe too

Living in Eastern Europe, we didn't have access to most western hardware/software.
When I was 7, my father built a 48K Spectrum from scratch using smuggled components (the Z80 processor, the EEPROMs), parts from other computers (the case and keyboard); he made the PCB by himself as well as copying and programming the ROMs. I still remember the hardware debugging sessions.

Later we managed to make the Interface II (I think that was its name) addon board and get a floppy drive to work. It was an East-German Robotron 5.25" drive; we were using 360Kb Bulgarian floppies (sorry, can't remember the brand).

It was a wonderful machine and it's the way I got into computers and learn assembler (Zeus ruled). At 12 I was busy cracking the games' copy protection to be able to copy them from tape to disks. Oh, btw, games had to be smuggled in too - one network used airline pilots, some of the few kind of people who could travel outside the country with ease. Don't get me started with books, it was hard even to photocopy one, as access to photocopiers was restricted.

Healthy retro scene

Here's [pouet.net] another source of recent (and less recent) prods for the ZX Spectrum. This one is more specifically oriented towards demoscene and technical feats.

(The link [worldofspectrum.org] mentionned in the article seems to be slashdotted, btw.)

Sinclair story

My dad told me a story about a friend of his that purchased a Sinclair. He was so excited to have a computer. He hooked it up, turned it on, and thought he'd ask it a simple question. "Who was the first president of the United States?" "SYNTAX ERROR" What?! My dad explained to him that he had to write a program to tell the computer how to answer that question. "Well if I have to tell it what I already know, what's the point?"!

Yeah, he didn't get it. Actually, I imagine he's a lot more into computers these days. Finally got what he wanted, twenty years later.

Anyone fancy a game?

I'll use the occasion to promote Bacteria, a full Spectrum emulator a friend has programmed, allegedly the smallest in the world (just 4 kB) http://www.speccy.org/bacteria/ [speccy.org]

Speccy Memories

Crash Magazine, Monotone games to avoid "Attribute Clash", tinny "speaker", rubber keys with 9 different functions on each key, game swapping, Head Over Heals, KnightLore, Batman, Fairlight, Quazatron, Commando, Yie Ar Kung Fu, the Way of the Exploding Fist, Uridium etc etc. Those were the days that computing was fun. :)

Have to disagree with the comment about it having the best BASIC. BBC BASIC was the best.

First Computer

The Timex Sinclair 1000 was my first computer. I spend many nights programming that thing. I would leave it on for weeks because I had no way to back up anything. So I would just write code, play with it, then erase it all and start something else.

It was the host of one of the greatest games ever!

...which is none other than:

Jet Set Willy! [wikipedia.org]

ZX, commodore vic20 and logo

this brings back fond memories of me as a ten year old kid way back in 1985 learning logo on a commodore vic20, later 64, with tape drives and hooking it up to the television and making the turtle go forward 50 and right 90 repeat 4 [fd 50 rt 90] the sinclair zx spectrum was reserved for my older cousin who used it to run VUcalc off of a cassete tape, i remember being amazed at the small silver keyboard with the little rubber keys, it looked like something from a sci-fi movie for my ten year old eyes he was also very proud of tornado notes, an early word processing pogram today with a pentium4 3.2Ghz and 1Gb RAM this seems like centuries ago, but good memories nevertheless...

Speccys in the US

The machine may well have done well in the US too, had Timex -- the company building the machine under license in the US -- wasn't already in financial trouble and about to fold.

There were 3 big barriers (at the time) to stop British machines taking off in the US:

1. The TV standard - NTSC has less scan lines than PAL, so while a US computer could easily be tweaked to output frequencies that a PAL TV could cope with, going the other way tended to mean losing a row or two of text or graphics from the screen - which broke any software with the screen size hard-coded in (which, in those days, was most of it).
2. EM emission standards. At the time, I don't think the UK had got round to regulating this and a Speccy or BBC Micro had no EM shielding and would wipe out any FM radio within earshot, so cases etc. had to be redesigned to accommodate EM shielding.
3. Price - despite the Pound varying between $1.40 and $2 over the years, there is a long and continuing (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) history of US firms setting UK prices by crossing out the $ sign to a £. In the UK, Spectrum vs. C64 argument tended to be a non-argument because the former was so cheap. This advantage tended to evaporate once the computers hit the US market. Once the price advantage was removed it became kinda obvious that the C64 was better built and had more sophisticated hardware than the Speccy. Likewise, the Apple ][ was fairly unaffordable in the UK and never had much market share - leaving an open niche for the BBC Micro that didn't exist in the US. Sadly, instead of consolidating this niche by producing a BBC with more memory and 80-column text (actually, the first would have enabled the latter) Acorn tried to compete with Sinclair by prodicing a BBC-with-all-the-good-features-removed and lost ground.

I typed "LOAD article", ...

... and started my casette player, but all I got was an

"R Tape Load Error" :(

New BASIC Interpreter

I am making a new system (it is much more than just a game console system...) which should be a good BASIC interpreter when it is done. Better than ZX Spectrum. If you disagree that it will be a good BASIC interpreter, please tell me. Opinion is a good things to know about. One time I made DS-BASIC (which isn't very good, it is retarded) but that was because of the limitation I had. Entirely new system cannot have such limitations.

Family's first computer was a ZX81

My family's first computer was a ZX81. My father purchased it 'unassembled' and it actually sat on our kitchen table for six months before he gave in and paid someone to professionally put the computer together.

My father was always trying to turn it into something 'useful' and kept purchasing Spectrum magazines to for code. I remember when he actually tried writing up a report for work and printing it off on the "receipt" thermal printer that went with the computer.

I was always pouring over the THICK manual that came with the computer, and even brought it to school to 'explain' AND and OR conditions in 3rd grade.

My first "cheat code" was hacking a game called "Red Alert" so I would never run out of lives. I wanted to see if the 'map' actually had an end, like the story that came with the game implied. It seemed amazing to me, as previously all I had ever gotten to play with were cartridge games for an Atari 2600, that I was actually 'allowed' to mess with the game like that.

Eventually, my father lost interest in the computer and passed it on to me when he got an Atari ST (Dad didn't have the best of luck when it came to picking computers that would survive in the marketplace).

I can't remember how many days I wasted playing with that thing, making simple XP and gold accumulators/dividers for imaginary D&D sessions, using a basic DB program to create a record for all the lands in my campaign world, trying to type in those effing 100 page programs for games (only to have a typo around line 270 cause it to never run).

Then one day, it just died. I spent a whole month trying the mojo a 6th grader might try to convince the ZX81 to come back to life. I was "good' for a week, I left it unplugged for days, I even pulled apart its shell to see if something had come loose. But it was essentially a door stop.

By then, I had also gotten an Atari ST. Not my dad's this time. My own, it was cheap even since this was near the end of the ST life cycle (STe I think it was), but it wasn't the same. Basic in it was crappy. You could buy 'nice' versions like STOS, basically pimped up version of Basic designed to make small games, but even then it was so much more difficult to get the ST do to anything that amazed me half as much as the ZX did.

If I were a better person, I'd buy one of those kits they still sell to make a ZX81. But like my dad before me, I'm sure it'd just sit on a table for months before I realized that I wasn't going to do anything with it.

I never got to see the Speccy in person. As a kid I was slightly jealous of the computer itself (kid logic) since it had more than the ZX81, but I'm glad to wish it a happy Anniversary all the same. If it was half the machine its ancestor was, it deserves the remembrance.

LONG LIVE THE ZX SPECTRUM! LONG LIVE SPECCY!

Nothing to add

I just wanted to add my own nostalgic bit. I ownded a ZX Spectrum 48K+ (plastic keyboard instead of the membrane one). 8088 based IBM PCs were already in the scene but this one was my first home computer. Paid 3850 INR (Indian Rupees) to Computer Point in GN Chetty Road, Chennai and waited for about 4 months to get it in hand. Lots of great addictive games were Jetpack, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Matchpoint (Tennis), Full Throttle, Sabre Wulf and a lot more that I don't remember off hand.

Tape loading was a bit finicky; I bought a Philips variable speed player/recorder where I could slightly increase the speed for faster loading. Oh those were the days! I learnt my assembly programming on the spectrum; manually poking in hex opcodes before I managed to buy an assembler. This was in high school. 2 years later in my CS Engineering course, I had a course on 8080 assembly programming and remember thinking wow, they actually teach stuff what I did for fun.

I can't say the Spectrum was very popular in India. It was released quite late and was still out of reach of most people. While I didn't have access to user clubs or other ways to talk to other owners, what I did have was access to very cheap Spectrum related books from the UK available in book sales. I still have most of them somewhere in the attic :-).

Happy birthsday from Poland!

I can safely say that my parents buying me ZX Spectrum+ in '89 (some of my friends already had Amigas back then, but we couldn't afford it) was one of the best things that happened in my life.

That's when I got infatuated with computers, programming and, above all, games. That's where my fascination with insides, outsides and the logical part of electronic devices stems. That was the beginning for me.

Imagine how many possibilities this gave, how many doors to visionary worlds opened