Sinclair & The ZX Spectrum - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

we're back with Spencer and uh We've Come to see his amazing collection what have we got here spenc it's a whole bunch of sin clear machines all from the 1980s or or they're Sy related at the very least going from the zx81 all the way up through to the Spectrum plus three and the z88 CL Sinclair was a British entrepreneur he had quite a history in the electronics business some of it more successful than others but he was quite big in in the high-fi side of things and the scientific instruments rang of stuff as well but he then went on to to make computers zx8 was groundbreaking in its day when it came out and then the zx81 went on to be the biggest selling machine of 1981 which is where I pick up the story I don't have a z x80 unfortunately but if anyone's got one that they don't want to want to give it away I'll happily give it a good home because they're about £400 on eBay and uh it's it's a lovely machine but it's not not worth that to me the variations I mean the majority of these are are Spectrum based but um yeah but but it does cover a few other um odd things along the way as well the spectrum is one that resonates with a lot of people I grew up with yeah the Spectrum really was one of the main computers which kicked the computer craze in the 80s so most people at school they either had a a spectrum or a Commodore 64 um unless their parents were teachers so they had a BBC model B if that was the case but you know early 80s they were just everywhere why do you think they permeated Society in such a way uh one of the biggest things about them was was the price they were cheap um you know CLI Sinclair really made things down down to a price so um you know be being that much cheaper it's that much more affordable but underneath that they are actually really good machines as well really really quite capable devices for their time that's a spectrum in the background there isn't it what's what's going on there at the moment that's manic Miner that's playing on there obviously that's the best game of all time yeah there there's no question about that it is games like this that I grew up on in the 80s and that's kind of why I'm here today until things like these that x81 and zx80 came out a computer you either only had little flashing lights and switches on the front to operate it or you had a main frame type thing ridiculously expensive kit this the computer plugged into your Telly which most people had a Telly back then um and a cassette deck yeah so most people had a tape tape recorder so really a cheap cheap medium for loading and saving the games I've just spotted these Micro Drive things what were they those were CLA Sinclair's alternative to a floppy disc because back in the day floppy discs were quite expensive these are little tiny tape cassette cartridges so you got one continuous spool of tape which normally takes 100K of data and it loads it a lot quicker than what it would do from cassette tape so you got more storage quicker easier random access to it as well that's the little Micro Drive cartridge itself so you see the smaller tape in there there's two tracks on there which are about 50k each or supposed to be that in in practice they never turned out to be quite as good as that so you might get about 80 or 90 C of data on there if you're lucky do you use them at all or is that I used to use them back in the ' 80s I've got them now just for um yeah for completeness effectively but uh yeah they aren't a practical Safe Way of storing data these days and presumably there aren't that many other the cartridges around no they stopped being made years ago we've talked a little bit about ramp pack wobble before and you know there were certain reliability issues sometimes weren't there do you think that was widespread or did he just get tainted by a few bad examples um there is definitely a history of of of him to cut Corners whenever possible you say save a couple of Pence here and there um so that there were there were some problems um what one of the other big issues is is the fact that he would pre-announce products and take take pre-orders and it it'll be delivered next month that actually turns out to be two months three months four months down the line um some of the very early models to go out just weren't weren't finished they they had lots of bodge wires in them and stuff like that so um yeah that that that didn't help his um reputation much I've uh heard that they used to use the uh delivery times as as a basically the finance for the devices so do you know about that your money wasn't exactly in the bank accounts to start with so if you can if you can pre-sell the stuff that gets you the money in that you can then start to make it and hopefully it's going to work before you ship it out when eql was announced I mean that took quite a few months before that was available but the first ones of those they actually had the ROMs hanging out the back on a little plug-in extra circuit board because they weren't finished so they had to ship something and he well that kind of normally sometimes works so ship them out cuz we we got customers that need them the original Spectrum was was a huge big hit um obviously there was pressure on it on him to come up with something bigger and better and he wanted to get into the um into the business World a bit more um so the the was launched in 1984 um so and and that come out with a proper keyboard almost real Keys yes it's just like a keyboard that was obviously an improvement on the dead flesh keyboard of the um Spectrum what what did you call it dead I don't know if you felt dead flesh lately but it's just like that oh okay the Spectrum was revamped at the end of ' 84 with the Spectrum plus which is effectively exactly the same computer as the original Spectrum the same motherboard only difference being you got the real keyboard and a reset button other than that Spectrum plus and the Spectrum 48k are the same Beast so so now you could do turning it off and on again with a button that's right yes yes because the the power socket was always a little bit fragile and if you done it too quickly you could you could damage it so uh yeah having a reset button probably saved a lot of machines there that was kind of a normal operation of loading a program wasn't it you did have to turn it off once you'd finished playing your game you wanted to play something else that's kind of what you did yes yes and and there and there's there's there's no shutdown procedure or anything like that there's no startup procedure either it's it's just a case of yeah there's power it works there's no power doesn't work that's that's as simple as it got and no multitasking of course oh no it was a lot more flexible um there's also a decent sound chip in there as well um as opposed to the beat be beep that you got out of the old Spectrum uh a whole number of sectors or technically we use clusters which is multiple sectors join together to store