

Sinclair's ZX Spectrum turns 30 - kingofspain
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17776666

======
coroxout
Good ol' rubberkeys, the computer I grew up with.

Today's UK Google doodle is a tribute to the ZX Spectrum and to St. George's
Day. I assume this isn't the case outside the UK, as both events are mainly of
interest to the UK.

American histories of computing or video games often show the 80s as a void
between the release of the Apple II in '77 and the Mac Classic ('90) or the US
popularisation of the NES (I'm guessing not until the Super Mario Bros / Duck
Hunt bundle in '88, at least - in Europe I didn't see one until 1990).

But in Europe, where nobody I knew could have afforded an Apple, the 80s were
the decade of the home computer for many of us. The Apple II sold for £2400 in
the UK, but the ZX Spectrum, Commodore C64 or Acorn Electron sold for less
than a tenth of that price, and by 1985 most of my schoolfriends had one.

Budget games were sold (on cassette!) in corner shops. Games magazines
included code listings. Libraries stocked Usborne's series of BASIC listings
books for kids. And many of us got our first taste of coding at the BASIC
prompt of an 80s home micro...

~~~
elorant
Let's not forget the Amstrads. My first home computer was an Amstrad 464 with
a tape recorder. Oh those were the days.

------
mibbitier
For a fantastic and entertaining look at the story, check out "Micro men"

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/>

~~~
alan_cx
I just want to add my recommendation for this little film. Its not just
technically accurate (well for a film!!!), but really entertaining. A
brilliant cast too. Its a good watch even if the one is not in to the subject
matter.

------
rsneekes
After playing with one at a uncles house, and not shut up about it, I got one
for my 10th birthday and I felt like I was king of the world. My parents first
made me work through the manual, which was how I started and fell in love with
programming.

Still have the original keyboard (the rest was sold in other case/keyboard),
maybe I'll try to use it as a Raspberry Pi case.

~~~
Joeboy
> My parents first made me work through the manual, which was how I started
> and fell in love with programming.

I guess given the complexity of modern PCs it's inevitable, but I feel like
it's a great loss that computers no longer come with a book that explains how
they work. I mean the ZX Spectrum manual not only documented every Basic
keyword, it listed the Z80 ASM instruction set, giving you both the mnemonics
and the bytes. Maybe Arduinos etc come with something equivalent (?) but the
idea that a "home computer" would include that kind of information has been
unthinkable for a long time.

~~~
rsneekes
> but I feel like it's a great loss that computers no longer come with a book
> that explains how they work.

That, and the fact it started with a basic "editor" begging for my input and
then doing what I told it to seemed magic at the time.

My brother on the other hand, was only interested in playing games and
didn't/doesn't care for programming.

------
andysinclair
Brings back good memories.

My dad returned from work one day with a ZX Spectrum 16k for me, I was
overjoyed. He worked with a guy who said computers were the future, and that
he should splash out (what was a fair amount of money in those days) for one
and encourage me to use it.

30 years later and my career is programming, thanks in part to this wonderful
machine.

I remember plugging it in and being amazed at the things you could do with it.
I avidly bought the various magazines of the day, and typed in the program
listings they published, and was amazed when they worked. I do remember the
frustration though of loading programs from casette tape, and the number of
time they would fail loading after waiting for 15 or 20 minutes.

I still have it in the attic at my parents house, might get it out when I next
visit and see if it still works...

~~~
praptak
15 minutes? Didn't it take about 5 minutes to fill the RAM from tape on a 48k
machine? Edit: It seems that 48k worth of ones (which were twice as long as
zeroes) is about 6 and a half minutes.

~~~
iuguy
The 48k model only had 32k of available ram, of which roughly 8k was screen
memory and system variables. The lower 16k was ROM.

~~~
praptak
Nope, the lowest 16k of address space was ROM all right but on top of that the
ZX 48k had a total of 48k RAM (as the model name implies.)

The lower 16k RAM was in fact a bit special in that it was shared with the
graphics chip (which read the lowest 8192 bytes of RAM constituting screen
memory and interrupted the CPU while doing that) System variables (POKE for
the win) sat on top of that. The upper 32k RAM was a bit faster since CPU had
it all for itself.

~~~
iuguy
Sorry you're absolutely right. I'm getting mixed up with the use of 64k chips
in the 48k model[1], which was a cost cutting exercise allowing sinclair to
use potentially faulty 64k RAM in the 48ks.

[1] - <http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jg27paw4/yr07/yr07_33.htm>

------
iuguy
I cut my teeth so to speak on a 48k rubber keyed ZX Spectrum. For years I
didn't have an assembler so I had to use the opcode reference in the back of
the manual, which would often lead to interesting if somewhat annoying
moments. It taught me the meaning of backups (SAVE your file before hitting
RANDOMIZE USR).

A few years later I got a Multiface One and a copy of 007 disassembler and my
life changed forever, or rather my infinite lives changed forever.

Eventually the spectrum got old and long in the tooth, I badgered my parents
to get me the spiritual successor, the Sam Coupé and got one, but sadly that
never took off.

~~~
rogerbinns
I only had a 16kb one and some of that memory was used for the screen etc.
Almost all the game and other program listings that were in magazines were
written for the 48kb version. Consequently an early skill I picked up was
typing in the programs and simultaneously editing them to take up less space.
Back in those days even comments took up memory so they had to go too.

I also had exactly the same experience with hand assembly. The first computer
book I ever got and thoroughly enjoyed was the Spectrum ROM Disassembly which
was a detailed commented list of the ROM (reverse engineered) showing how it
all worked.

Some folks have recreated the book:

<http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/rom-dis/>

------
viveksec
I had one too in India when I was 13. The ZX Spectrum 48K. Loved it to death.
Magazines were a bit hard to come by here, but I managed to get my hands on
one book, I think it was called "Machine code with ZXSpectrum". I remember a
program called HELPA, which you had to first enter by hand, then you could use
that to enter machine code. I remember writing my first program using HELPA, a
block which would change colors randomly. I still remember being stunned by
how much faster machine code was compared to BASIC.

Also cant forget my favorite game at the time - Highway Encounter.

------
mpclark
I was there, at the PCW Show at Earls Court, when the Spectrum was launched.
Well, it was actually just a brochure that was launched IIRC.

But it was incredible; the 13-year-old me and hundreds of other people all
just sitting where they could on the floor around the margins of the
exhibition hall, reading about this incredible game-changing computer.

Of course my dad got nagged to death for days afterwards, and eventually an
order was placed but, when the end of the school summer holidays came round in
September and it had still not arrived (I was up early every morning to meet
the postman, just in case) we eventually cancelled the order and bought a
Dragon 32 instead. That's a different story...

------
yeureka
The ZX Spectrum 48K was my first computer. I loved it to pieces but couldn't
understand the manual as my English skills were not good enough at the time (
I was 10 living in Portugal ) so I used it mostly for playing games. It took
me another 2 years to start programming on an Atari 800XL. I remember using it
with an old B&W valve tv set that kind of improved on the graphics because it
was so blurry.

"© 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd"

Fond memories.

------
elchief
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, circa 1983.

It had the add-on memory module (16kB I think). It might have even had a tape
drive later on, if memory serves. It plugged into my TV.

I had some book, looked like a comic book. Had some simple programs in them. I
typed them out on the god-awful keyboard, but had fun playing them. It was in
no way a good computer, but I'm glad my dad bought it for me, as I work in
computers now.

------
preavy
Since my dad had built a ZX81 from kit, we were on the Sinclair mailing list.
I remember reading the promotional leaflet announcing the Spectrum. I could
hardly believe what it could do. This leaflet would have been classic Uncle
Clive hyperbole. Yet, the reality of this little machine was even more
magical.

------
drsim
Having to find the right key for the BREAK keyword was especially interesting
(you couldn't just type out B-R-E-A-K).

I started programming without even reading the manual: having all the keywords
laid out there made me think 'just what is POKE anyway?'. Great way to pique
interest.

~~~
andysinclair
I remember being fascinated by the keywords PEEK and POKE, and fiddling around
with POKE statements to try to cheat at games.

Various Spectrum magazines would publish cheats based on POKEing memory with
new contents.

Ahh, those were the days!

~~~
drsim
Once I broke the loading sequence of a game and discovered I could see all of
the source right there. It was as simple as BREAK if I remember.

That kicked me off on my favourite learning method: reading someone else's
code.

------
DaveSapien
Sorry for the spam, but ZXPlectrum is free today to celebrate! Just cool wee
toy. <http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/zx-plectrum/id477244691?mt=8>

------
seclorum
I still use my Oric-1 and Atmos for fun .. got my 2 year old and 4 year old
sons hooked up with them, and they're very kid-friendly computers, still to
this day. We have a blast with the 8-bit world, quite!

------
PabloOsinaga
I am trying to get a sense of how popular its clones were back then.

I owned a TK90X (16kb RAM) - brazilian produced clone. I lived in Argentina
back then. Any other clone owners?

~~~
zavulon
Everyone in Russia had a clone, mine was built in Romania IIRC. This was late
80's - early 90's, way after Spectrum became irrelevant in other countries.
But nobody in USSR had money for real computers like IBM PC. The rich kids had
a Commodore, the rest of us Spectrum clones with tape recorders :))

------
iaskwhy
And that's how it all started for me (as in, that's where I typed my first
lines of code, good old orange book from Sinclair with code examples like
creating hangman).

------
flexd
I still have one in my parents basement.. I should play with that. It still
worked last time I tried it!

~~~
Joeboy
IME the keyboard membrane would degrade from overuse, and the power socket
would degrade from being used to reset the machine, but otherwise I think
their simplicity made them pretty robust.

~~~
gaius
Yes, Sinclair was incredibly bitter that he lost out to Acorn for the BBC
Micro, but there was no way that the rubber keyboard would stand up to use in
schools day in day out.

I still marvel that anyone did any serious development on it, without also
developing RSI too! Surely most professionals used cross-compilers/emulators
on real computers ("real" in this context meaning, with mechanical keyboards),
but I can find little evidence of that. You could buy proper[1] dev tools
(like Hisoft's Devpac) than ran natively on the Speccy.

[1] Of course the Beeb had an assembler built in :-)

~~~
Joeboy
> Surely most professionals used cross-compilers on real computers

I've often wondered about that. Writing machine code on an off-the-shelf
Spectrum with a tape deck was extremely painful, and I never really got beyond
a few funky machine code graphics routines. I'd be really interested to know
how many of the people that did were working with the same limitations I was.

~~~
mpclark
Early on there just weren't cross compilers and "real computers", at least not
in the British "back bedroom" games scene. I didn't write on the Spectrum, but
certainly on the Dragon and the C64 it was a case of write, save, execute,
reset, load, write some more.

It was this sort of tedium which provoked at least one of my more able chums
to write out his assembly in longhand and then produce pages of handwritten
hex to type in instead.

After I made a bit of money I upgraded to two C64s and two floppy disk drives,
so I could write on one and test on the other. That would have been about
1985.

And then a while after that a miraculous invention called "PDS" came along,
which involved a hardware connection from a PC to the target system, and
simplified everything greatly. You wrote code on the PC and just squirted it
into the target's brain. Oh how I wanted to use that, but by then I was out of
programming...

The Oliver Twins have written reams of background about the early days that
touches on this: <http://www.olivertwins.com/history>

~~~
gaius
Both of those had keyboards you could use comfortably for long periods tho'
(as did the VIC-20 and BBC Micro). Certainly they're as good as if not better
than many modern keyboards!

------
brackin
Shame I didn't get to experience any of this, my first computer ran Windows
95. My granddad does have an Amstrad in his back room.

------
Skylight
i use to have 16kb one and then commodore64 came that changed the world for me
:-)

------
nirvana
How the spectrum's cousin is in your pocket today: (shortened version, of
course)

The spectrum was produced by Sinclair. Sinclair was a partnership of the
eccentric Sir. Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry. During a bit of financial
trouble Clive Sinclair and Curry split. They were both working on reducing a
computer to the simplest thing possible so everyone could afford one.
Eventually Curry's company became Acorn and got the BBC home computer
contract. Acorn flourished and eventually migrated to a RISC architecture.
When Acorn was split up, Apple and others invested in them to produce ARM and
the ARM architecture. This ARM architecture lives on in every iPhone, iPad and
probably a majority of android devices. ARM stands for "Acorn Risc Machine"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers>

~~~
ConstantineXVI
> every iPhone, iPad and probably a majority of android devices

That's a mild understatement. ARM practically owns the entirety of the mobile
device market. Every major mobile OS is near-exclusive ARM based (Android
being a very recent exception, and Intel handsets haven't shipped yet) Outside
of China (where MIPS seems to have a bit of marketshare); you'd be hard-
pressed to open up a reasonably smart non-PC device and /not/ find an ARM
chip.

~~~
voltagex_
Some lower end routers/modems may still be MIPS and some set top boxes/media
players are as well.

------
nirvana
My first purchased computer was a ZX81. My second was a US variant of the ZX
Spectrum called the Timex Sinclair TS-2068. Yep, back then the home computer
market seemed so wide open, even watch companies were making them!

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068>

This was a great machine- it had a cartridge port, and was well appointed in
every way the ZX81 was lacking.

This was also the machine where I learned that the ecosystem around a computer
was at least as important as the specs. The TS-2068 excelled in all of the
specs, but unlike the UK, there wasn't much of a community. My dreams of
shelves full of game cartridges for this machine never came to pass- in fact I
don't think we ever got a cartridge for it.

That's ok, I was writing my own software.

Some of you may remember the noise that modems used to make when negotiating a
connection (it is kinda surprising that even that sounds ancient now) ... but
these machines used a tape deck, and would record their programs out on audio
tape. I remember entering programs from books and magazines line by line--
there were books like "100 games for the ZX Spectrum" and stuff like that.
Even a special magazine printing format that came with a hardware accessory to
let you read in the code in the magazine to avoid having to type it all out.

One of the great things about these machines was that millions of kids were
exposed to programming. At that time, "computer literacy" meant programming,
and it was obvious that you'd continue to need to program, because you'd
always want your own variations of things, or at least to be able to script
stuff.

I think its a real tragedy that schools have not taught kids this level of
literacy. At my high school in the 1980s, I learned Pascal and LISP and would
have learned BASIC if I hadn't already known it-- three languages coming out
of _high school_. Every graduate of that school in my day left knowing at
least the basics of pascal programming.

