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Sinclair & The ZX Spectrum - Computerphile
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- Опубліковано 6 сер 2024
- Often described as the UK's answer to Steve Jobs, Clive Sinclair created a strong brand and his ground-breaking products and their low prices helped the UK's computing boom in the 1980's
Thanks to Spencer, more about what he gets up to here: bit.ly/SpencersRetroComputer
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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharan.com
In 1981 I bought a mail order ZX-81 kit in the U.S. for $100 and it worked after I assembled it! I was driving a truck at the time and my employer thought I might be interested in a computer operator job at a new data center they were opening. I worked there for 30 years before retiring. Thank you Sir Clive! You provided me with a career. The ZX-81 was a great introduction to the basics of computing.
That's a great story and I am glad things worked out for you.
Thank you. It was a life changer for me.
Agreed - great story!
I learnt to code on a ZX too when I was a kid, beautiful machine! :D
This man has a transparent beard!
You realise that beards are not uniform, solid objects, right?
it's a transparent texture
beardControl.Renderer.Alpha = 0.25
He's talking about BRITISH computers whilst wearing an AUSTRALIAN shirt. I can't handle it. (seriously though, it's cool. I bloody love Sinclair machines, and Australians). Also, wizard beard.
One might say he has a..... spectrum of Spectrums
Boooooooooooooo :)
Those were the good ol' days... oh, and the 'Turbo loader' border-flicker... fantastic!
Now I have to rewatch Micro Men again...
I still regard the ZX Spectrum as the best computer I ever had. Sinclair basic was an incredibly good version, and the auto completed programming command by the keyboard an amazing aid to learning. I taught myself basic quite easily at 14 years old and when went to college to learn COBOL was way ahead of the rest of the class.
OMG, COBOL! I spent about a year writing COBOL programs on - get this - punched cards! Horrendous!
Love the little ZX printer.
Oddly enough I have just inherited a whole box of Sinclair computers. Several Spectrums, 48, 128, QL, Plusses and micro tapes etc. Not sure if any of it works but I will try them at some point. Only thing I don't have is power supplies.
This is the first time i've seen the Microdrive things, and try are actually pretty impressive. Very small.
RIP Clive Sinclair, gone to silicon heaven.
Great stuff, I had a ZX81 then Spectrum, then upgraded that to the Spectrum+ (you could get a kit to do that). Then got the Spectrum +2, which was released after the Amstrad takeover. I was quite disappointed with the +2, the built in tape deck was crap, no tape counter or level controls and no external audio in/out jacks (I hacked those in myself). Also the picture quality was fuzzy from the +2 compared with the original Spectrum.
I still have a few ZX-80s kicking around here. They were the 4K integer basic version. You could get an assembler and write Z80 assembly language code. Your compiled code would live in the first line of the basic as a remark. This way you knew its address to run it.
Somewhere, I still have the code for doing an FFT in ZX-80 basic. I used two integers to hold each number. It was a complicated mess but it worked.
The microdrive doesn't have two 50K tracks, it has two 100K tracks which both contain the same data. I seem to recall it's something to do with synchronising the data coming in from the read heads as the motor speed isn't particularly constant. It's been a while since I had a working microdrive system though.
The ZX Spectrum was and still is a awesome machine.
Good look back on history. I went ZX81, ZX Spectrum 48, Spectrum 128 then I went Atari ST. I still have three spectrums in my attic + a wafadrive, an interface one + microdrives. I also have an Alphacom printer which was a sort of clone printer but it used normal thermal paper.
Same path as me Mark. I haven't got any in the loft tho but I do have a BBC Master, monitor and disk drive, might get them down and have a play one day.
I bought an Amiga A500 whilst I had my Atari ST. I have an Amiga 1200 somewhere. I still have an Atari STe and Atari Falcon setup but have not turned them on for about 4 years.
I can't hear 'Sinclair ZX-81' without thinking of Holly's line from Red Dwarf, "I was in love once. A Sinclair ZX81. People said, no, Holly, she's not for you. She's cheap, she's stupid and she wouldn't load, well, not for me anyway."
I had the 48k ZX-Spectrum, I loved it to bits but I wished that it a proper interface to use 5 1/4 Floppy Disk and a A4 sized printer, because at school we used the BBC Micro and all of our Computer Studies home work was BASIC Programming and Plotting graphs, which the Speccy was more than capable of doing.
Once the School upgraded to RM Nimbus machines and I got a hand me down Amstrad 1512, I was fully compatible with the school machines.
Thanks. Good video. The guy interviewing also needs a mic. That would make it much better.
Join us next week for our upcoming new episode: Typewriters & Paper!
You can use them! To type! On paper! :O
Excellent video
The ZX81 was my first computer. I still have it, and it stills works :) .
Yes ZX81 was my first, but the TI-99/4A I picked up 6 mounth later for $20 when Sears was dumping the thing, So the first two computer I got for less then $100 bucks US. I never really got much out of the ZX81 the membrane keyboard drove me nuts.
loved that period from the Spectrum & Vic 20 to the Amiga - on switching to the PC I lost all passion for computers as a hobby.
Still got my Spectrum 48 downstairs - Adventure Island FTW!
Different game I think. The original version was a verb noun text adventure.
I played Wonderboy a lot in the arcade. Great game! They renamed it for Adventure Island for the home port for some reason.
ah... I was hoping to see a bit of the plus 2/3.
My 1st computer was a Sinclair - still have it!
Preselling items to finance production. That sounds kind of like Kickstarter. At least Kickstarter campaigns pretty much tells you that is what they are doing.
Not old enough to have been aware of this age.
Although I did experience some of it in the early 90's by way of getting some secondhand Atari 800 XL's to play with.
Will you ever do a video on the Amiga???
My first computer was ZX Spectrum 128
Spencer: Sinclair collector and undertaker.
I've got a speccy 48 with a Lo-profile keyboard. its nice!!
Hey Guys, Don't forget the Amstrad CPC range of computers in the mid 80's.
I soo want my 16k spectrum back.
rampack wobble was definitely widespread. :)
Still have my 128K+3 somewhere. Last time I checked, the keyboard looked like a half-pipe. I was a salty kid back then. :)
I used to type "POKE USR 12345" on the demo machines instore. It used to drive the staff crazy.
Wouldn't POKE require an extra parameter? In addition 12345 is ROM space, so you shouldn't be able to POKE it even with the extra parameter.
even randomize throws a wobbly, which is the traditional method for executing machine code. Interestingly Print seems to lock up the machine quite well though.
I remember the mono cassette deck I bought especially for loading my Spectrum games was advertised specifically as a "data" model. I wonder whether it was actually any different to other mono cassette decks or whether that was just a bit of canny advertising.
They might've contained filtering circuits to limit the frequency response a bit. I did have one and it was always considerably more reliable for loading than your bog-standard cassette deck.
Nick B Interesting, thanks :)
Can't you put the links to the videos at the end for those who can't click annotations e.g. on mobile?
* put them in the description I mean
+Ichabaud Craine I think I did.... >Sean
if you're up to date on the official UA-cam app, it has annotations now :D
If he's such an avid collector I'm surprised he hasn't gone for the ZX80 by now despite the high price?
Exactly, think I've got 3 here - plus white 3kb ram pack
ZX80's have been a higher second hand price since the 80's! lol
not everyone has loadsamoney.
I had a dragon 32 and then an Amstrad cpc 464
I had the zx80 with internal memory hack and the extra 16k expantion.
Since when was Clive Sinclair into Hi-Fi's? You're confusing him with Alan Sugar there mate!
+Larry Bundy Jr Sinclair definitely did hi-fi too!
I think there's a reference to it in the BBC drama "micromen". Sir Clive was/is one of the greatest British inventors of all time.
I had one! I remember Gulpman (clear pacman rip off) fondly
there was multitasking BETA BASIC could play beep music and continue functioning!
The QL multi-tasked.. If only he'd released a dual processor z80 + 680xx QL that ran specky games and could use either processor as a multimedia co-processor. The 1985 model could have had a disk drive and GUI. What were they thinking.....
VIC20... my parents decided we needed a real keyboard and WHSmiths had sold out of Spectrums.
I unplug my raspberry pi's without shutting them down, no problems so far :) In fact, I might have a problem when I just pull the SD card out but probably not...that's with the pi's under heavy load. It's just funny how different people treat their electronics...I like to test failure points
The hardware never has any problems at all with you removing the power. It's the software which fails miserably when you interrupt it in the middle of a non-atomic operation. On the Pi you're running GNU/Linux, which is written specifically to not corrupt anything when you cut the power. Windows would be another matter altogether.
*****
my comment was based on the assumption that NTFS doesn't have journalling. It seems I'm misremembering.
Remember the jet set willy coloured card to stop piracy?
YAY Australia!
Hello!
ZX80's are $400 on ebay in the UK? There's one on US ebay right now for US$30. A ZX80 was my first PC. I built it from the kit version sold in the US. Commodore for a while ran an exchange credit for any computer. Turn in a computer and you got a discount (US$100, I think) on a C64. They got so many ZX80s that they used them in their offices for door stops.
But it's listed as untested (i.e. broken) and it looks like people have been resting a soldering iron on it.
If you can find one in unassembled kit form, it'd go for a lot more than £400 on UK eBay.
"I didn't really look at it closely. I recall looking for one a few years ago and they weren't so insanely expensive"
Condition is king with these units - boxed clean working examples go for silly money as you can see from the completed listings. Not sure how repairable broken units would be these days.
So - has anyone tried to use an mp3 player as storage for a Sinclair?
Arnim Sommer google .tap files for spectrum emulators
Daniel Perestrelo I was thinking on a hardware level...
What sold the Speccy to me was the ease of programming and the version of Basic which helped especially the error checking. The C64 was horrible in comparison
Mike Dench
Hey there fellow WOS'er :D
I agree 100% about the superiority of the ZX entry system
P.S. My WOS name is The_Bert - we have exchanged a few comments in the past, that's how i knew your name :)
I think this guy was featured for his beard
A baby Rubik's cube!
I've got one of those but you have to be very careful when using it, or the individual cubes fall out. It is a fully working Rubik's Cube though.
Monitor is hanging off of the desk. LITERALLY UNWATCHABLE
The only thing I don't like about Speccy is palette clash that wasn't present in any other computer at the time.
QVear I think the c64 had that on colour pictures.
Only in hi-res graphics mode on the C64, and only if you weren't bothering with hardware sprites and were drawing them directly into the bitmap.
The MSX had this problem too, but since only one person outside of Japan ever bought one it's not surprising that it's not common knowledge
Matthew Harrison (matthehat) Ah, that'd be me. I had a Philips NMS 8250. Wonderful machine. Apart from the colour clash of course.
Should've bought a Dragon 32, then you could've had any colour you liked, as long as it was green. ;-)
Man... Dizzy...
C64 FTW , sorry Spectrum
Sinclair products downfall was APPALLING built quality and being acutely unaware as to what consumers wanted or needed.
good to see some e waste still running .......... kinda !!
first computer
LOAD ""
Beard.
Pah , Sinclair computers , what a joke. Acorn for life !
Do not preorder!!!
I dunno why there is such a rivalry between Commodore and Spectrum folk. Obviously the 64, even the Vic20, was light years ahead of this garbage.
schitlipz lol. what did you expect? the commodore 64 cost £399 at launch, the higher end 48k ZX spectrum cost £175.
It's like asking why someone would buy a commodore 64 in 1985 when they could've bought an Amiga 1000.
The Spectrum was way more powerful than the price difference would suggest.
Not that I care, as I was too young to bother with either. besides, the only computer I owned from that era is an Atari 800XL - given that I got it in 1991 or so, or rather, two of them, 2 tape drives, joysticks, a plotter, about 20 games on cartridge and 400 on tape... For nearly nothing. Even so, to my young mind it was a frustrating mess to use, and I preferred my snes unless I felt like messing around with weird primitive looking stuff.
The Amiga sucked. Esp. the 1000 with its 256k memory, no hard drive, disk-loaded Kickstart OS, no compatibility with 64, and expensive everything. Then the 500 came with its backward ports... Commodore DIED due to the Amiga. I hate that later era in computer history. Thankfully we're in a good age right now. Incidentally, my first job, after being a paperboy, was selling Amigas.
The Atari wasn't _that_ bad, but more than twice the price of 64. The 80s were ruled by the C64. If ya bought a cheaper Vic20 they'd accept a switcheroo with an extra one or two hundred bucks (I forgot which). So it was marketed really well.
I'm in Canada. I only remember using one of those Spectrum things. It had a membrane keyboard and output only black and white video. This was just after my Atari 2600 and before my Vic 20. Other than that, I don't think they really existed in North America other than in magazines, and I was a techno nut.
Was the UK going through some kind of depression in the 80s?
Not really. Back in 1983 one of my friends had a VIC=20 and he was ashamed of people knowing he had one, and bemoaned that his dad was stupid and should have bought a ZX Spectrum 48K like I had. Also at school saying you had a VIC=20 was a recipe for disaster, and later on saying MSX was just as bad.
Haha, I guess when we were kids it was about popularity... and easy access to games. But looking back today I'd definitely say the 64 was stellar. Today I use an emulator to play Gyrus and other little gems :) warm feelings.
I had a friend in the mid 1980s from Hackney, London and he was a total C64 fanboy. He mocked my Spectrum 48K but did enjoy some of my games. However once I got an Amstrad CPC464 his opinion changed, and he was often visibly and audibly pissed off because many of the games were far superior on the Amstrad that he liked.
Many times I would visit his house and notice he had bought games which he had first played at my house on the CPC. Sometimes he would refuse to load them to show me, and angrily muttered bad things about the C64 conversion. I did get to see them eventually though and I could see why he was pissed off, e.g. glitchy, chunky badly drawn graphics, buggy coding and faults etc.