The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread:
It has been 40 years since the launch of Sinclair's ZX81, a device that welcomed countless Brits to the delights of home computing at the dawn of the 1980s.
Released on 5 March 1981, the ZX81 was the successor to 1980's ZX80 and, like its predecessor, was based around a Z80 CPU. Both machines also featured 1KB of memory and required a UHF television to display the monochrome output.
The ZX81 was, however, a far sleeker affair than its white plastic-encased stablemate. A Rick Dickinson-designed case made for a more consumer-friendly computer, even if the pressure sensitive membrane of the keyboard was somewhat less easy to use.
[...] The BBC Micro would launch toward the end of 1981, and the rivalry between Acorn and Sinclair has been well documented over the years, including a dramatization in the form of the BBC's Micro Men.
[...] You can't beat the real thing, however. Fitzpatrick pointed out that the Centre for Computing History had a number of the devices, including some featuring creative modifications to overcome limitations like that keyboard. "There's always one on display," he said, "there's never a display without a ZX81."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 06 2021, @07:29PM (3 children)
Well this was a first computer memory.
So great to get magazines showing the next up and coming models.
Soon there won't be many of us left that sat down eagerly typing in a Basic program on one of these.
If you were from Europe you spoke in Fourth.
Guess the next generation will have their own memories like a touch phone was a thing.
Dialing?! What was that?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Saturday March 06 2021, @09:32PM
I fondly remember my Acorn Atom...except for trying to save those hours of typing and de-bugging. Could never get the tape recorder to save properly. :(
Had to keep remembering to type 'p.' instead of 'print'!, lol.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07 2021, @01:25AM
> Dialing?! What was that?
It was slow...and I was somewhat impatient.
I modified the speed governor in my dial phone to speed up the return of the dial. The Stroger switches at the local exchange must have been in good shape because I never had any problem when "overclocking" them with the faster dial pulses.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday March 07 2021, @11:40AM
Yup. We had one on display on the wall in the lab, an M16x350 coach screw through the centre of the case holding it onto the wall like a wooden stake through a vampire.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday March 06 2021, @08:07PM (3 children)
Only keyboard worse then the 48k is the ZX80/ZX81. Still I do have fond memories of it, my friends father had bought one and brought it with him home from a trip to the UK. I recall us sitting there infront of a small black and white telly and playing a boxing game. It was fantastic, for the time being. This was also I think the first machine I actually typed in a program for from a magazine (it didn't work, I blame the magazine cause my typing was perfect ....)
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday March 06 2021, @09:17PM
Was it actually worse than the TRS-80 CoCo? That keyboard was fucking terrible, and made even more frustrating because it was paired with a version of BASIC that didn't allow line editing: if you made a mistake (which was likely even if careful, the keyboard was awful) you had to retype instead. I think the homogenisation of computer architecture in the 90s was unfortunate and destroyed a lot of innovation in both hardware and software, but at least it standardised keyboards a lot. Even the worst of the cheap, junky laptop keyboards is still better than the wild west of everyone having their own weird, custom, and usually unpleasant keyboard.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday March 07 2021, @02:09AM (1 child)
I don't know, I never owned a coco. I think it was a very american machine and I'm not sure if it had a been following over in euroland, odd tho that there are quite a few texas instruments machines -- but I guess those could have sort of snuck in due to the calculators.
The thing is I'm not even sure we would call it a keyboard today, the machine is very small. It doesn't really have keys. It's a membrane below and a plastic sheet glued to the case above it where they printed all the key information, if one wants to call that keys then sure. The feeling was somewhat like typing on a modern phone where you just touch the glass/plastic. I guess it might not have been the worst when I think about it. Still it was horrid.
The weird part about the Speccy and such in general was that you didn't really type out a lot of commands -- you hit various key combos and altered the cursor so that when you did press like L or whatever it would print LOAD on screen, you never really typed it out and if you did then it would give you an error. Eventually you got sort of used to it.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday March 07 2021, @06:00AM
Ah, that's odd. I had access to the CoCo because a Radio Shack (back when they still existed) in my area found one that got lost in storage or something and my grandfather bought it for a song and gave it to me to play around with when I was a kid. I remember the keys being awful, it was this chiclet style keyboard with no contours to the keys, odd spacing between them, and a truly baffling layout for some of the non-letters [wikimedia.org] compared to later PC keyboards. It was close enough to normal but things like the arrows and some of the punctuation were especially frustrating, though it was mostly the awful keys and spacing that really made it frustrating to use. Especially combined with the aforementioned lack of line editing.
I also somehow ended up with a second-hand Commdore 128D [oldcomputers.net] from my grandfather as well. Its keyboard layout was still weird compared to later PC keyboards [the-liberator.net] but at least it put the arrows in the same place and had things like escape, control, and alt, and more importantly it had proper contoured keycaps with sane spacing. Even going back to it later after getting a proper PC it didn't feel awful to type on like the CoCo did, just a lot of typos from the odd key placements. I had much fonder memories of that computer than the CoCo, in part because it was nicer to use (and had line editing!) and in part because the manual was comprehensive and extensive so I learned a lot from it; plus it was mine rather than a shared family computer, which as a kid made it special, even though by the time I got it there was no software (C64 or otherwise, since it supported both via multiple CPUs) available. Despite that I still got a lot of use out of it because of the manual and its built-in BASIC dialect.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by turgid on Saturday March 06 2021, @08:49PM (3 children)
I've still got my ZX81 that I got when I was 8 years old, and learned to write my first program:
Next came a bit of Z80 assembly language, assembled by hand and typed in with a hex loader, and stored in a REM statement at the top of the program.
I got a 16k RAM pack to expand the meager 1k that it came with. That let me play Psion Flight Simulator, chess, 3D Defender and other 3D Grand Prix, but the best was the multi-tasking FORTH ROM (Skywave Software). I also had an upgraded keyboard.
There were even some very clever pieces of software that did "hi-res" graphics through some sort of timing tricks with the processor and the character bitmaps in the ROM.
I couldn't really afford to buy much software in those days so I wrote my own games. I haven't stopped writing code since,
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07 2021, @07:37AM
You will eventually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08 2021, @12:37AM (1 child)
Those upgrades sound amazing. Mine had a malfunctioning expansion so 1k it was, and none of the software you name was known to me. But yeah, many fond memories of writing one's own games on that keyboard - the buttons sucked, but since almost every word was just one button, it probably averaged 1/3 to 1/4 as much sucky button pressing when not entering text or numbers.
I had no manual, and it was years before a chance snippet of code from some book briefly turned off the "flash the display on button press" headache, and that was an eye opener. I can only imagine what having the code for flight sim and whatever "3d defender" was must've been like!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday March 08 2021, @10:12AM
It was all blocky graphics at a resolution of 64x48. The blocks were special characters with different quadrants coloured in, and the odd bit of ASCII art, but the character set wasn't ASCII. 3D Defender was surprisingly fun. You were flying over the Earth, which was a curved grid, shooting down alien flying saucers. The Psion flight simulator was excellent, despite the primitive graphics. It was very hard to land the plane, especially in a cross wind. That Z80 CPU was surprisingly powerful.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 06 2021, @09:44PM (1 child)
The ZX-80.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zx80 [wikipedia.org]
That was actually my first computer. Never actually used it for more than just playing around, what with the unreliability of the cassette tape mass storage system. It had two headphone jacks in the back, that could be plugged into a cassette player to save/load programs. Slow as molasses and only worked about 3 out of 10 tries.
And, it had another interesting quirk. The Z80 was also used to generate the TV raster scan, so when the Z80 was busy doing something else (like responding to a keystroke or running your basic program), the video blanked out.
The other quirk was that one did not enter basic code by typing P R I N T to get PRINT. Each basic keyword was silk screened next to one of the keys and there was a special "shift" key that was used to select one of those keywords. So you'd hit the "special shift" and press "O" to have PRINT appear on screen, then you'd type in the rest of the statement. That had the advantage of always having a reminder available of what BASIC keywords were available, and the disadvantage of having to "special shift" plus press the keyword key to get that keyword.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday March 06 2021, @10:52PM
The ZX81 had two modes: SLOW and FAST. FAST was like the ZX80 and the screen blinked whenever you pressed a key when entering code,or went completely snowy when running a program, but in SLOW mode the CPU devoted about 80% of it's time to generating the display, which was smooth. Programs ran a lot faster in FAST mode. The other big improvement over the ZX80 was floating point. The ROM was doubled to 8k and had a very comprehensive 5-byte/40-bit floating point suite. All the trig functions were there. I learned trig on my ZX81 years before we did any in school. I used to plot the graphs in lo-res (64x44).
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07 2021, @12:53AM (3 children)
The ZX80 was designed for Europeans who at the time were much poorer than Americans. Overwhelmingly, Americans could afford a "real" home computer. Fond childhood memories and all that, but the ZX80 was true piece of junk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07 2021, @12:56AM
^^ include the ZX81 in comment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07 2021, @01:48AM (1 child)
Anyone else remember Sinclair's scientific calculator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Scientific [wikipedia.org]
Don't know Clive Sinclair's full story, but this product must have sold well enough because he continued and later make home computers. Eventually he blew a good chunk of his fortune on the nearly complete flop of a three wheel electric trike for "personal mobility".
My brother had one of these little scientific calculators. As noted in the wiki article, some functions took seconds to calculate. Went through batteries pretty quickly with the red LED display. It was always in scientific notation, so you had to watch the exponent all the time. Amazingly this site has reverse engineered the code and the emulator works...about as fast as the original: http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simulator.html [righto.com] It speaks its own dialog of reverse Polish, the "+" key does dual duty as the Enter key on HP's
A little later the price of a Hewlett-Packard HP-35 came down to where we could afford a real tool and the toy Sinclair Scientific was put aside.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07 2021, @11:54PM
I read your link and struggled to think who was the target audience for the Sinclair calculator. It was very inexpensive, but also very inaccurate (only 3 significant figures of accuracy!). It must have been meant to replace slide rules for people who didn't want to spend a lot.
(Score: 1) by vali.magni on Sunday March 07 2021, @06:51AM (1 child)
The membrane keyboards on the ZX'es were horrible to use. The first Sinclair keyboard that was even remotely useable was the Spectrum 128K. I still have unpleasant memories of one row of keys just dying, having to send the ZX in for repairs, and waiting a few weeks to get it back.
The Acorn and eventually the BBC micro felt like miraculous wonders in comparison. The keyboard was absolutely fantastic by any measure. Sure, it was a fatter machine, but, oh boy, what a machine it was. The BBC was the first machine where I could write assembly inline, run it and see a huge speed increase in some graphics routines I was working on.
It was sort of unfortunate, since the Z80 is a very powerful processor with some super-powerful instructions like the exchange (EXX) and block transfer like LDIR and LDDR, block IO (INIR, OTIR), the different addressing modes, and so on. It was only later when I designed embedded systems much later in my life that I got to appreciate and love the Z80's power.
The 6502 on the other hand is just a work of art, a beautiful and minimalist piece of design and engineering, something that exemplifies the RISC philosophy. The design and instruction set is simple enough to get started in a few minutes. It's elegantly efficient in its operation compared to the Z80, generally taking half or fewer clock cycles per task compared to the Z80.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Sunday March 07 2021, @09:21AM
A BBC Model B with 32k RAM cost £399. A 16k Spectrum (there was such a thing) cost £99. £100 was a lot of money in 1982.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].