One of the purchases that got away still makes me wish I had the chance all over again: a ZX Spectrum with a huge set of accessories for $25. This was just over 3 decades ago in a thrift shop. As a grad student, I had to think carefully about the purchase, and I (over)thought to leave the Spectrum there. I hope someone that still treasures it made the purchase.
The first ZX Spectrum prototype laid bare... (What? It was acceptable in the '80s)
The Saints of Silicon at the Centre for Computing History have got hold of the original build of Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, courtesy of Kate and John Grant. Grant, who also worked on the guts of Sinclair's ZX80 and ZX81 (and can be heard talking about his experiences in Randy Kindig's Floppy Days podcast), donated the prototype …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 13:17 GMT Dan 55
There's an easy fix to make 48K machines output composite instead of RF.
128K machines output RGB and can be converted to VGA.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So it got delivered...
>So it got delivered......faster and in better condition than a Vega+?
The Vega was just being true to the original and laughable Sinclair promise of "Please allow 28 days for delivery"
I see from the picture and it's condition, it was eventually delivered by Amazon.
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 09:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 16K
The things youngsters today think: "Not that there is an awful lot one can actually do with a 16k ZX Spectrum." We used to know how to write efficient code, I worked in IT for a bank and I remember the engineers proudly showing me the massive (several large filing cabinets) 1mb of core memory on the mainframe that ran the entire bank.
I wrote a "Fox & Geese" type game for the original 1k ZX80 (I built from the kit) using BASIC and sold enough to cover the cost of the device, got sales from as far afield as Iceland and S.Africa. I've still got a file of letters from grateful buyers somewhere because getting anything remotely interesting in BASIC with only 1k was to say the least "a challenge", don't forget that the screen map used most of that 1k. To my intense frustration I had one byte free and couldn't find a good use for it.
Some better games emerged later by writing in machine code but then we got the memory expansions.
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Friday 31st July 2020 20:27 GMT ridley
Re: 16K
I worked on HMS broadsword and her seawolf missiles (we were adding thermal guidance), I was somewhat surprised bag the core memory and paper tape programme loading, including a strip taped to the side of a filing cabinet that needed to be loaded to avoid firing the missiles at the superstructure...
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 11:12 GMT tapemonkey
Re: 16K
There was and a line drawn 3D Defender. On the Speccy there was also Spectrum Voice Chess that somehow managed to eek out speech from an 8bit sound processor. Have had all of these machines and the one that still holds a place in my heart was the first ZX80 ordered it from an ad in the newspaper took 6 weeks to arive and when it did it came in kit form.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 15:52 GMT Trev 2
Re: 16K
I had an entire shelf of games that would run on the 16K one, although it did get a lot better when they switched to 48K admittedly. Pretty sure Hungry Horace would run on 16K.
There was even a 3D tank game, well kindof, it was 3D but with line drawings only but for the time that was impressive. Plus everytime you blew something up it had to redraw the objects exploding ...slowly...very slowly. But we had patience back then. :)
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:31 GMT AndrueC
Yeah the BASIC was a bit lethargic but I wrote a few games entirely in BASIC (a version of Snake was one, a turn based graphical exploration game (viewed from above with visual field calculated) was another. I also did a very large maze game, no monsters but it was 3D! (although to be fair that's pretty easy to do). But still if speed mattered there was always the USR function to call into some machine code. I tried to write a couple of more advanced games (Lunar Lander for one) using a mixture of assembly and BASIC but the assembly defeated me. The ratio of instruction count to work done was just too high and when it went wrong the machine froze or crashed and the frustration factor was too great.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 20:24 GMT cat_mara
Part of the reason for the lethargic BASIC was that Clive, cheap sod that he was¹, refused to give Nine Tiles the time to properly optimise the Spectrum's ROM routines for speed-- given the time & financial constraints, they basically took the ZX-81 ROM & hacked in the colour, sound, hi-res graphics, new tape loading code, etc. on top of what was already there. No mean feat on John Grant's part given the time he was given to do it in, and no disrespect to him, but no wonder the thing runs like a 3-legged dog. It was something I realised years later when I used interpreted BASICs on CP/M machines of similar vintage to the Spectrum and they were much snappier... I'd love to see what could have been done do the BASIC's performance with a bit of tweaking of the ROM code but maintaining the entry points would be tricky.
¹ Then he had the cheek to whine about how his computers weren't taken seriously as business machines, how they were only used for games, after it was his own relentless penny-pinching and nothing else that made them unattractive to the business market! Fucking hypocrite.
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 13:30 GMT cat_mara
I had a friend with a 464 who later upgraded to a 6128. Locomotive did a good job on the CPC BASIC-- no way I was telling him that back then, though ;-) IIRC, Locomotive went on to design the operating environment for the PCW series of word processors for Amstrad which got a lot of tech journo careers off the ground, including some around here, I believe.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:36 GMT David Lawrence
Not much you can do.....???
"Not that there is an awful lot one can actually do with a 16k ZX Spectrum" ???? Tongue in cheek I hope. OK I admit the larger-capacity one was better (can't remember if it was 32k or 48k) but initially there were bucketloads of programs and games that it could run. Sure it wasn't meant for business use, although things improved marginally when the Microdrive came along. I still remember buying mine, and hooking it up to the TV in the living room. Games! Colour!! Sound!! It didn't get much better at the time, unless you were rich.
I lived in Portsmouth at the time - home of Automata, who quickly recognised the machine's potential and started producing games for it. Ah yes those were indeed the days.....
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:40 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Just use emulation
I know I'll get a bit of shock and horror for this, but last year I 'wasted' most of a day playing with my old 8 bit MSX, and for the most part it's not worth the effort.
Use emulation, you won't notice the difference, and the save states will be a boon. 8 bits really are starting to look a bit creaky, although 16 bit graphics are still fluid and sufficiently fast they're not showing their age as much.
The one exception was Boulderdash, which still plays amazingly well despite the ageing graphics. Elite is now in the category of brilliant for the time, but not standing up to modern tastes. I'd probably give a pass to the Magic Knight series too, and that's one set of games that had a special Spectrum 128 version and is best played on there.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 16:22 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: for the most part it's not worth the effort.
That's been more a PC thing for me, home computers just turned on and worked for the most part. I did have to create a cable to connect the MSX to a tape deck as I temporarily displaced the data recorder, only to find that some games of the period put the data on the wrong channel (mono channel is left, they stuck it on the right)
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 15:46 GMT A Non e-mouse
Re: Just use emulation
The thing I loved about the old 8-bit micros was that you could understand & program everything. The manuals gave you so much detail too. I'd love to tinker with something like that nowadays.
I still dream of building my own small machine - just for the pleasure, not because I think I can do it better than anyone else. But modern things like USB, HDMI, ethernet, etc. make that practically impossible.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 16:02 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: Just use emulation
They don't make it impossible, but you find yourself questioning why you're doing it.
Personally if I built an 8 bit micro, I'd tinker with CP/M, more useful than fiddling with a home computer. You can make HDMI 'just work' fairly easily, and USB can be exposed as serial or similar. All the CP/M (and MP/M, and others) source code is available, and the documentation is quite good.
The issue is with Ethernet, or more specifically a half decent TCP/IP stack, which 8 bit micros weren't really designed around. There are a lot of powerful embedded controllers which talk serial at one end and TCP/IP out the other and viola, your CP/M machine is on the net!
However, when the embedded controller is more powerful than your host box the question of 'why bother' becomes rather prominent. 8 bit micros just don't belong as an integrated part of the modern age. Sure, use them for a bit of data processing, serial, and other I/O, but that's as far as it goes.
I loved using my Amstrad PCW; it was a perfect mixture of productivity, pricing, and usability at the time, but it could never really compete against the PC if you threw enough money at PC software.
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 23:57 GMT martinusher
Re: Just use emulation
>The issue is with Ethernet, or more specifically a half decent TCP/IP stack, which 8 bit micros weren't really designed around.
TCP/IP didn't really get going until the 90s, it wasn't because of a lack of a stack but the absence of a reasonably priced Internet connection. Local area networks were dominated by SMB hosted networking -- PC-NET (IBM), MS-NET (Microsoft) or Netware (Novell). Early Ethernet was also a bit of a nighmware; the triaxial hosted Ethernet proper was very expensive to work with so the most common network you'd find would be hosted oh a daisy chained coaxial or maybe phone cable.
The most common TCP/IP stack was a knockoff of the Unix stack recompiled for a PC. It was usually a crude port sold at very high prices (and may have led to the adoption of proper open source licenses -- it was common practice for people back them to take some code they'd got hold of, change the copyright banner and claim it was their own).
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 16:09 GMT Dan 55
Re: Just use emulation
The 8-Bit Guy has just started a project to build an 8-bit computer using modern parts, but if you're a regular viewer you may be unsurprised to find out that seems set on re-inventing a Vic-20 or Commodore 64.
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 06:37 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: Just use emulation
Hah. I'm currently building (another) processor -- not system -- from discrete HCTTL. This one's by way of being an instructional project for some of the younger guys at work, and it replicates most of an 8080 only in a lot fewer clock cycles. The system is the easy bit.
Emulation programs such as Logisim make this kind of thing very easy these days. I should get around to doing some screen movies and dropping them onto youtube. I expect to get Ron Cain's C up and running on it.
I can't be doing with this modern stuff, where's me pipe?, who's got me slippers? etc...
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 19:20 GMT Dan 55
Re: Just use emulation
If it's not 6502-based or Commodore BASIC he doesn't like it, which is odd as both 6502 assembler and Commodore BASIC are both pretty poor examples of assembly language and BASIC.
Also, the hatchet job he just did on the ZX80/1 was rather uncalled for. Nice to see Jeff Minter put him right in the comments.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 16:46 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
It's also important to set expectations
You might reasonably expect that an old 8 bit micro would be suitable for the class of applications it ran at the time, but this fails to realise that the apps might have been closely tuned for the machine.
Adventure games, right, must be suitable for that? Not so. Just as DOOM and Quake were tuned for machines at the time, and Fortnite/whatever FPS are popular these days is a step forward, interactive fiction hasn't stood still.
Fire up ZXZVM (Z80 Z machine for CP/M, will run on your Speccy +3 in addition to a PCW), and it'll play a lightweight but fun modern IF Z machine (Infocom) game such as Conan Kills (2005). Try the more heavyweight Curses (from 1993) and it'll work but you'll be waiting thirty seconds for responses from the parser!
(Graham Nelson did develop it on an Archimedes, however, which is just a smidge faster than a Z80)
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 18:42 GMT AndrueC
Re: Just use emulation
Does anyone else get that 'how the hell?' feeling when they realise that you can write a Spectrum emulator in JavaScript and it needs to be slowed down to be useable?
I mean it can even correctly emulate the result of 'randomize usr 1331'.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:44 GMT DJV
Saints of Silicon at the Centre for Computing History
Are they related to the elders of the internet?
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 13:56 GMT Dan 55
Penny wise, pound foolish
As for the eventual ZX Spectrum itself, it would launch in April 1982 with unfinished firmware and a BASIC ROM that could charitably be described as lethargic. A plan to ship an upgraded ROM was dropped due to the popularity of the thing, with the finished firmware shipping on peripherals, ready to take over from the Spectrum’s incomplete ROM when needed.
It wasn't upgradable because Sinclair wanted to save pennies (of course) and soldered the ROM to the circuit board instead of pushing the boat out and using a DIP socket, and the ROM software was unfinished because Sinclair wanted to save pennies (again) and fell into a dispute with Nine Tiles. A lot of the functionality which was in the Interface 1 was originally meant to be in the Spectrum ROM.
The closest approximation of what the ROM should have been like is here (Sea Change ROM). Over the years this turned into the Gosh Wonderful ROM.
Of course nowadays there's interpreters for Windows other OSes like this.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 14:02 GMT sabroni
Re: Penny wise, pound foolish
I disagree. Spending more and driving the price up could well have pushed the Spectrum out of the range of affordability for a lot of families. It wasn't easy to persuade parents you needed a computer, the fact you could upgrade the ROM wouldn't have added any weight to the argument. An extra fiver cost might have been enough to persuade them to say no though....
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 14:30 GMT Dan 55
Re: Penny wise, pound foolish
For some reason I had this nagging doubt so I went back and looked on the net, it seems the ROM was originally socketed but the socket was dropped somewhere through issue 2.
In an age where people updated the memory themselves and transplanted the board into a new keyboard case (I did both), I'm sure early adopters would have paid for a new BASIC ROM if it were objectively better.
And to be honest I was jealous that the Acorn machines had the proper OS...
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 20:47 GMT juice
Re: Penny wise, pound foolish
That tallies with what I've heard, though I'd go a bit further and note that as far as I'm aware, the code missing from the original ROM was mostly orientated around peripherals, and I've not heard of any contemporary plans to build a new ROM with better BASIC performance - though there were no shortage of third party alternatives and "compilers" to boost the speed of your programs.
Equally, modern "homebrew" patches have mostly revolved around fixing known bugs and adding new functionality. I dont recall anything related to BASIC performance - at this point, if youre still interested in writing stuff for ye olde Speccy, you're likely to be using assembly or some higher level toolkit.
Otoh, I'm always happy to be pleasantly surprised!
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Sunday 10th March 2019 11:03 GMT Dan 55
Re: Penny wise, pound foolish
OpenSE BASIC might be what you're looking for.
No Spectrum code in it, just Nine Tiles code and new reverse-engineered code which maintains compatibility.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 16:28 GMT David 132
Ah, memories.
I grew up with a ZX81 (with a dodgy tape interface that made saving my programs difficult).
I first encountered the Spectrum circa 1983 on a visit to friends of my parents', in Garstang, Lancashire. I spent hours in a state of gobsmacked wonder, using the CIRCLE, INK, PAPER and BORDER commands to explore the new world, feeling like Dorothy entering the technicolor Land of Oz for the first time.
I was lucky enough to be given a Spectrum+ for - I think - Christmas 1984, at a price of 179.99 (and kids, that was a lot of money back then). So many happy memories.
Sorry for the unfocused rambling, but this article's been kind of a madeleine moment for me.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 16:48 GMT ThomH
Re: Ah, memories.
It's the equivalent of about £600 now, according to the very first inflation calculator I found.
But I think you've also hit on the proper response to the article's "Not that there is an awful lot one can actually do with a 16k ZX Spectrum" taunt: it really depends on your imagination.
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 23:17 GMT Dave559
Re: Ah, memories.
A world of new imagination…
Even the “Horizons” demo tape of sample programs, covering all bases from the “Through The Wall” Breakout game, to a simulation of fox and rabbit populations, to, umm, many other things which I have now forgotten, was enough to whet the imagination of any young teenager suddenly presented with all this potential power to program and create (not just to “consume”)…
And that space-age sky city SF cover art of the Spectrum manual…
And Oli Frey’s cover art for Crash magazine…
And…
There are many of us who owe everyone involved in the whole Spectrum scene a drink of some sort for the new worlds that it opened…
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Tuesday 5th March 2019 21:43 GMT David 132
Re: Ah, memories.
You sure? I distinctly remember writing a simple program to draw circles all over the screen on my friends' rubber-key 16KB Spectrum... no Beta Basic or similar language extensions in sight.
Maybe the amnesia of old age is creeping up on me... what's that in there? who are you? are those my feet?
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 04:44 GMT ThomH
Re: Ah, memories.
If it's not straying too far, I'm pretty sure that it was in an issue of Electron User that I first saw the argument that a circle turned on its side looks like an ellipse, so if you use sin and cos to calculate points on an ellipse and join them with lines, you can do a sort-of rotating polygon. Which sparked pretty much my entire first decade of programming.
Also, it made the centrepiece question on my maths GCSE, about equally-spaced carriages on a Ferris wheel, super easy to solve. That was lucky!
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 16:58 GMT Peter X
Re: Ah, memories.
| Spectrum had a CIRCLE from the start
I was absolutely 110% certain there wasn't and was about to reply as much and point out that there is no CIRCLE command on the Speccy keyboard... and then I noticed that there is. It's actually terrifying how much of this I've forgotten!! :O
Well done you! :D
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 14:21 GMT 5p0ng3b0b
Re: Ah, memories.
I remember my first hardware mod. My ZX81 and speccy would crash when my mum switched on the hoover due to poor power surge protection in the PSU. Fitting a VDR inside the plug socket fixed it and everyone at school wanted it done. Fixed the school ZX80 and other IT tasks and was awarded a BBC cassette player which anything would load from it. Used it to broadcast games over CB radio for my mates to load.
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Wednesday 6th March 2019 13:18 GMT juice
It's worth bearing in mind that Sinclair was a general electronics company
The computer industry was just a lucrative cash cow which they milked to fund further developments, such as the QL, C5 and manufacturing processes.
Then too, they pretty much invented the "Good Enough" business model with a mix of innovative hacks and the use of cheap components (which were then often pushed past their design limits): you got 90% of the features/performance for 50% of the price, but then had to deal with functional workarounds and accept a much higher risk of systemic failure.
E.g. this article on their calculator line covers several of the hacks which they used, from repurposing a TI processor to using a plastic lens to magnify the LED display - this reduced manufacturing costs and improved battery life. And it also notes how high the failure rate was!
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sinclair_executive.html
Unfortunately (and perhaps ironically), Moore's law worked against this business model - as the cost of components dropped, there was less of a case for using low-cost "hobbyist" quality hardware. And proprietary hardware such as the microdrive were on a road to nowhere: Sinclair simply didn't have the economies of scale to compete with the hardware used by other computer platforms (e.g. the C64 and the PC compatibles, which all used variations on the 5.25 floppy - and later, 3.5" drives), especially when government-subsidied components from Japan started to flood the market.
The world was moving on, and as the infamous spats between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry - plus his dismissal of Alan Sugar as a common "barrow boy" - both Sinclair the man and Sinclair the company failed to move with it.
Still love my old Speccy, mind ;)
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Sunday 10th March 2019 21:28 GMT Dan 55
Re: It's worth bearing in mind that Sinclair was a general electronics company
I was never quite sure why, if they were going to get people to supply their own TVs and cassette recorders, they thought Microdrives were necessary.
It would have been better to have made the Interface 1 hold the DOS and disk controller chip and for the user to source their own drive. Maybe Sinclair could have bought NEC drives in bulk and stuck power supplies and cases on them if he wanted an official drive.
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