Retro & Vintage Computers, old consoles and classic gaming.
ZX Spectrum’s chief designers reunited 30 years on
The ZX Spectrum is 30 years old. The successor to Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX81 – at the time the world’s best selling consumer computer – it introduced colour “high resolution” graphics and sound.
It also offered an extended version of Sinclair Basic, a computer language with which hundreds of thousands of users were already familiar.
The thin Bauhaus-inspired design was sleeker than anything else on the market, but what was more impressive was its price: £125 for the basic model with 16 kilobytes of RAM, or £175 for the 48k model.
That allowed adverts at the time to boast: “Less than half the price of its nearest competitor- and more powerful”.
You can read the rest of this article at the BBC - ZX Spectrum’s chief designers reunited 30 years on
As much as many would like to claim the BBC Micro was the most important UK machine of the 80′s (due to how many machines were in schools), actually, it was the humble Speccy that launched as many (if not more) careers in IT. Cheap, affordable, plenty of software. What’s more, I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this in, avoiding doing some SQL/C# development, without the Speccy.