ZX Spectrum

~ the last words ~

The last ZX Spectrums came off a line in 1992. I was eight years old that year and six years away from my first modem, and the machine's world was somewhere else entirely: mail-order backlogs and cassette tapes traded in school corridors in a country I have never lived in. Turkey had eighties home computers, but not this one in anything like British numbers.

Sinclair Research put it on sale in Britain on 23 April 1982 at £125 for the 16K version and £175 for 48K. The Cambridge team designed it to be as cheap as a working machine could be. A Z80A ran at 3.5 MHz, the picture went to the family television through an RF modulator, and programs loaded off compact cassette at a speed you learned to wait through. Rick Dickinson drew the case with its rainbow stripe and the rubber keyboard everybody remembers. Timex built them in Dundee.

It went out by mail order first, the backlog got bad enough that Sinclair moved it into High Street chains, and over five million of them sold. That made it the best-selling British computer of its era, a title it held until the Amstrad PCW passed it in the nineties. More than 24,000 software products were written for the thing.

~ the record ~

~ color clash ~

The Spectrum could show 15 colors at 256 by 192, but not freely. Color was stored per 8 by 8 character cell rather than per pixel, so any two objects overlapping inside one cell had to share an ink and a paper color. That is the smearing visible in every Spectrum screenshot, where a moving sprite drags a rectangle of the wrong color along behind it.

Programmers built an entire aesthetic out of working around it: monochrome playfields with color kept to the border, sprites drawn to sit neatly on cell boundaries. Sound had the same character. The 48K machine had a single-channel beeper driven by the processor, so music cost you frames, and only the 128K models got a real AY-3-8912 chip. The way a Spectrum game looks and sounds is a direct readout of two decisions Sinclair made to save money.

~ the bedroom industry ~

Because the machine was cheap and a tape deck was a duplication system anybody could operate, the barrier to publishing a game came close to zero. Software houses formed around one or two programmers and sold through mail order and newsagents. Ultimate Play the Game, which later became Rare, started on it.

The magazines were half the ecosystem. Type-in listings ran for pages, covertapes came stuck to the front, and a review score decided whether a bedroom developer ate that month. A generation of British professionals learned to program because a Spectrum was sitting on the table and there was nothing else to do with it after the tape finished loading.

~ the amstrad years ~

Sinclair Research ran out of room after the QL and a run of badly timed bets on other products. On 7 April 1986 the company sold its entire computer range and the Sinclair brand name to Alan Sugar's Amstrad for £5 million. Sugar was buying an installed base and a software catalog.

Amstrad shipped the +2 later that year with a built-in tape deck and a keyboard you could type on, then the +3 in 1987 with a 3-inch floppy drive. Seven models existed by the end. The line was kept alive into 1992, well past the point where 16-bit machines had taken the market, because the catalog was still there and buyers were still there. Then Amstrad stopped, and the last British computer a child could talk their parents into went out with nothing said about it.

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