The BBC looks at Clive Sinclair's revolutionary brainchild: the
ZX-81. In 1981 it cost £50, I had to put it together myself, only had a kilobyte of memory, a membrane keyboard, a proprietary programming language that was a bitch to use, needed a cassette recorder to store programmes, and made the Tandy that replaced it look like Deep Thought, but God, I loved that little black wedge. What was particularly mind-blowing was that the computer (singular) they had back at university was a monster that weighed tons and still took punch cards. The standard computer histories may credit the Apple II with sparking the desktop revolution, but it was Sinclair's small-is-beautiful-and-who-cares-about-practicality approach that really put computers into people's hands for the first time.
It's like being able to tell your kids that you were there when they rolled out the Mark I fire.
5 comments:
Funny, I used this piece of inferior gear and came to a different conclusion. I was in middle school (many years ago), and the library had a few it was checking out. This was when my family was still struggling to make it in the new country, and I hadn't settled on computers as a specialty, and owning a computer was out of the question. Brought the thing home, hooked it up to the TV, started typing on the execrable keyboard, wiggled the 16K memory sidecar by looking at it, more or less---and the thing reset itself. Packed it back up and went back to playing on the Apple ][+s.
Lesson for me: there is such a thing as simplifying something to its most essential basicness, and there is such a thing as cutting so many corners that it's a piece of trash however many shiny lights you put around it in the magazine ads. I have since learned about the special kind of problem-solving it takes to program a sub-minimal piece of equipment, when this is necessary. But the lesson that some things are simply a waste of manufacturing steps remains with me.
Next up: the Lada.
DON'T YOU DARE DISPARAGE THE LADA YOU FIEND
I've still got one! With the 16k additional memory and even ganes stored on real vinyl discs. Brought a few memories back that did!
TTFN
When the market for these things fell through the floor and they started (practically) giving them away, a number of hobbyists bought them as a cheap source of Z80 motherboards.
Sergej, don't be such a grumpy bear! The Zeddy rocked! Christmas day 1981 was the day. It was my very first computer as well. Of course it got replaced with something better, but there's still a warm place in my heart for it.
I went to some retro computer bash last year, they had a ZX81 set up with all the other old machines. It could actually deliver quite a serviceable version of Galaxians where someone had bothered to program it properly in machine code.
And there are emulators of all the old machines of course, if you feel like a quick blast down 16k avenue.
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