Retro & Vintage Computers, old consoles and classic gaming.
Posts tagged sinclair
MJ Hibbett – Hey Hey 16k LIVE
08 months ago
by Andy
in Andys Retro Computers
MJ Hibbett – Hey Hey 16k LIVE at Spectrum 30
Making computers part of every home
08 months ago
by Andy
in Andys Retro Computers
The Centre for Computing History and Jason Fitzpatrick have been published in the Cambridge Evening News.
It might have had a tiny memory by today’s standards but the memories of those who found joy in their ZX Spectrum live on today. Reporter RAYMOND BROWN takes a trip back in time.
Jason Fitzpatrick sits in a C5 holding a ZX Spectrum and a calculator
It was 1982 and Chariots of Fire won a raft of Oscars, the Falklands War was raging and Prince William was born.
And the ZX Spectrum, the brainchild of Cambridge scientist Clive Sinclair, hit the shops – and changed the world.
He is probably most well known today for the commercial flop that was the C5 electric trike.
But in May 1979, his engineers began work on the machine that would give rise to the multi-million selling ZX Spectrum. Mr Sinclair – he wasn’t knighted until 1983 – wanted to create a home computer people could afford.
Read the rest of the article at : Making computers part of every home
Code like it’s 1982! – SpecBAS
310 months ago
by Andy
in Andys Retro Computers
Sinclair BASIC is back – and can be run under Windows, Linux or on the Pandora handheld.
SpecBAS is a remake of Sinclair BASIC – it’s faster, far more powerful and more colourful than Sinclair BASIC has ever been!
SpecBAS incorporates all the features of Sinclair BASIC, but with more:
Procedures, with both referenced and normal variable parameters
Flow control with DO..LOOP, WHILE..LOOP, DO..UNTIL
Better array handling, with variable BASE settings and FOR..EACH support
Better string handling with LEFT$, RIGHT$, MID$, REPEAT$ etc
Memory banks which can be loaded, saved and utilised to hold a variety of data types
Many, many more maths functions, with both radians and degrees support
Graphics with 8bpp in any supported resolution with full palette changing, rotation, scaling etc
Sound support with MOD/S3M/XM/IT/MP3/VOC/WAV etc
Turtle graphics, sprites, tilemaps.
And it has less:
No more attribute clash
no 48k restriction
full disk access, so no tapes!
No more beeper 
More information about SpecBAS can be seen on the following site : SpecBAS
ZX Spectrum’s chief designers reunited 30 years on
11 year ago
by Andy
in Andys Retro Computers
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
Sinclair ZX81: Small black box of computing desire
02 years ago
by Andy
in Andys Retro Computers
The Sinclair ZX81 was small, black with only 1K of memory, but 30 years ago it helped to spark a generation of programming wizards.
Packing a heady 1KB of RAM, you would have needed more than 50,000 of them to run Word or iTunes, but the ZX81 changed everything.
It didn’t do colour, it didn’t do sound, it didn’t sync with your trendy Swap Shop style telephone, it didn’t even have an off switch. But it brought computers into the home, over a million of them, and created a generation of software developers.
Before, computers had been giant expensive machines used by corporations and scientists – today, they are tiny machines made by giant corporations, with the power to make the miraculous routine. But in the gap between the two stood the ZX81.
Source : BBC News – Magazine | ZX81 Information
