BBC News is celebrating the thirtieth birthday of Clive Sinclair`s groundbreaking ZX Spectrum by interviewing the boffins behind the computer. Sir Clive himself declined to contribute, but engineer Richard Altwasser and industrial designer Rick Dickinson give some insight into the building of this iconic home computer.
Interestingly Dickinson makes a typically arrogant Designer statement about the comment the keys of the original ZX Spectrum were like "dead flesh" - he says he "loves" that kind of comment but there was no cheaper way of doing the keyboard so tough.
I had a 48K Spectrum. It had its shortcomings, but it was a great machine - the first genuinely useful computer I ever had as it could output to a printer. Later on I rehoused it in a proper keyboard which could be bought as a kit.
Although at the time it was expensive, it wasn`t as cripplingly expensive as the competition. I had no chance of affording the Commodore 64 or the BBC Microcomputer, but I could just afford the Speccy.
For me, the most important aspect of the Speccy was that it got me on to the idea of using a computer as a writing tool. Up to then computers had all been about learning Basic to write computer games. With the Speccy you could buy software ready to run, and a very basic text editor proved a real eye-opener for the potential of computers as word-processors (at the time I was using a bog-standard typewriter and wasting reams of paper typing and retyping.) Suddenly a computer wasn`t an end in itself - it became a tool to do other things and I was on the slippery slope of tech addiction.
ZX81 - ZX Spectrum - Sinclair QL - Atari ST and finally my first PC in 1995.
J Mark Oates
Hear All, See All, Say Nowt.
Eat All, Sup All, Pay Nowt.
And If Tha` Ever Does Owt For Nowt,
Do It For Tha` Sen.
sprockethole.myreviewer.com
This item was edited on Monday, 23rd April 2012, 03:25
RE: Sinclair Speccy Turns Thirty
I`ve re-edited out a bit I added to the above about a piece of kit I`d almost forgotten. I`d mis-identified it as the Cambridge Z88, Clive Sinclair`s 1988 successor to the Speccy. The thing I was remembering was the Amstrad NC100 or Amstrad Notepad. It was very similar to the Z88 - a portable device with a narrow LCD window across the top. It offered word processing, a spreadsheet and a few other goodies, and it had an early version of a PCMCIA slot for a battery backed-up solid state storage. What they didn`t tell you about it was it would crash like a bastard at the drop of a hat - usually when you were right in the middle of typing something and you would inevitably lose everything you`d keyed in (even with regular saving to storage.)
I can`t believe the damn thing was in 1992!
J Mark Oates
Hear All, See All, Say Nowt.
Eat All, Sup All, Pay Nowt.
And If Tha` Ever Does Owt For Nowt,
Do It For Tha` Sen.
sprockethole.myreviewer.com
I always thought the most amazing part of the ZX spectrum was the optional printer, which use a silverised roll of paper, that printed out your `BASIC program` in burned on lettering.
The smell of it burning and the racket it made, was computing in motion.
Considering it was ony 48K memory, it did have some very remarkable games produced, like `Dizzy the Egg`, and it was not like nowadays with instant game solutions and walkthrough off the internet, No, you waited for one of only a few monthly game magazines at the store to give you advice (in my case it was posted to me all rolled up in brown paper packaging, to Oz).
Even then you would get `trolls` giving false advice for fun in these magazines, like if you waited `Dizzy the egg` at the Pier terminal for four hours (real time), a ship would come in and take you to another Island in this platform game. Always remember that to this day, as the ship never came in after four hours, as it was a lie and total fabrication to fool us all 
This item was edited on Monday, 23rd April 2012, 11:33
RE: Sinclair Speccy Turns Thirty
RE: Sinclair Speccy Turns Thirty
RE: Sinclair Speccy Turns Thirty
Quote:
Jitendar Canth says...
Jet Pac calls.
BEST game ever!
(Regardless of what Mr S comes back with 
)
I may have to dig out my old speccys now too... and I think our Mr S has some links to online versions of Speccy games.
Quote:
kebabhead says...
more of a games console than a computer Of course, because all consoles in the 80`s came with a flexi keyboard, a wobbly RAM pack and tape loaded games.
No wonder I put my NES away for my speccy cos the games were so much more detailed, better graphics and much easier to play using the keyboard (where`s that rolling eye emoticon when you need it)
I played games on my Speccy (and my ZX81) but I`d find myself more often than not playing around with stuff on BASIC (most of which I`ve now forgotten) and as to the BBC and the Acorn I never liked their input formats.
They may have been more like the industrial units of their day but the Spectrum brought home computing to the masses and IMHO helped get us to where we are today.
If all that were available had been the BBCs, Commodores, Dragons and Atari machines I think we would have been much further back in development.
Jimbo : oÞ
"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"