ZX Spectrum at 40: a look back
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The built-in BASIC made the Spectrum very accessible. But it was also quite limited, mostly due to being very slow. But: the great thing was, all the machine code that processed said BASIC was right there, in the ROM, just waiting to be examined.
I still remember disassembling the machine code responsible for handling the "LOAD" and "SAVE" commands, which were an interface between memory and the tape deck (the only long-term storage available). It was surprisingly small and elegant, and easily modified to perform certain tricks, such as varying the baud rate of the cassette interface, the order in which bytes were loaded (allowing for cool effects like "the screen is populated, but not from top-to-bottom, but the other way around), and many other things.
And this was all waaaaay before the Internet, relying on (photocopies of) library books about the Z80 and magazine articles, which arrived late-if-at-all. At some point, I'm pretty sure I had memorized the purpose of every "OS-related" memory location of the Spectrum (all 16384 bytes of it).
The complexity of today's systems makes all of that impossible. But that's mostly nostalgia talking: the capabilities of the Spectrum would be laughed away (and rightfully so) these days.
I made the ROM writable by soldering a CMOS ram chip across the ROM (was it 16KB?) and any write to the ROM would end up in the RAM. A switch selected either the ROM or RAM to read from. On startup simply copy the ROM to the RAM and flip the switch.
After this operation, using 'The Spectrum ROM disassembly' book the world was your oyster. I modified the ROM routines for reading/writing those little tape drives and bypass copy protection, for experimental purposes of course :)
Decades later, I did (pre-)order and read "The ZX Spectrum ULA", which documents, in painful detail, the inner workings of the custom Ferranti chip that powered most of the Spectrum.
This really did drive home the message that, no matter how much I thought I understood the low-level workings of my Speccy, there were still many lower-level layers left to explore. Which, I guess, is the central lesson of IT...
My greatest sense of accomplishment came from figuring out how floating point arithmetic worked in an 8-bit processor, and then the sin, cos and tan functions.
As an inquisitive young person, you are, quite likely, at some point confronted with something that seems like magic.
If you're truly (or perhaps excessively?) inquisitive, you try to dissect that magic. Sometimes that leads to true understanding, sometimes just to confusion, or at best the understanding that you don't understand.
The "home computers" of the 1980s were still simple enough to allow "true understanding". But only up to some point: I could find my way around a ZX Spectrum memory map just fine, but could I have built such a machine from scratch? No way!
In hindsight, I only understood a very small portion of the technology I was working with, even though that understanding was absolutely mindblowing at the time. Today, that portion would very likely have been "higher up the stack": let's say, I would be an absolute master of the DOM using Javascript, instead of a master of the ZX Spectrum ROM using Z80 assembly.
But would that portion be less "worthy" or less useful? I'm not so sure...
But maybe I'm reading too much into their post.
I'm a dev of 12 years who cut my teeth on assembly and c, i currently write "modern" js and I feel this way, if it's far too complicated for me, it's going to be even worse for a newbie
This made computing with colour and enough memory to write programs that were substantial and interesting available to a much wider group than before.
Sir Clive Sinclair had a unique genius for designing and then marketing products that caught the public imagination. Sadly, he seemed to lose interest in building on his success and quickly moved on to the next project. Famously the C5 electric "car" but also wafer scale memory! [1]
If anyone hasn't seen Micro Men, on the Sinclair vs Acorn rivalry, its definitely worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM
And seeing some of the participants watch it and recall their own versions of the story is good too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaonVYOTSsk
[1] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3043/Anamartic-Wafer-...
This is a great point. The Acorn Electron (a £129 cut down version of the BBC Micro) wasn't available until a couple of years later.
That is one of the funniest things I've ever seen - you can tell the main cast are having an absolute blast. BBC Four at its best.
Did you spot Sophie Wilson in the Baron of Beef pub :)
At home, I went on and on about this to my parents.
My mother had done punch card work in University so recognized how big of a leap it was to be able to have a computer in the house. A few days later they announced that we would get one.
This was in Asia, and the Spectrum 48k had just been released there. Games rarely made it all that way, but the magazines did, so I spent hours upon hours typing code in, bug fixing, modifying things here and there. Save it to cassette tape. I still have dreams where the sound of software loading from cassette appears - kind of like the sound a modem makes connecting, but longer and somehow softer.
Every few years we'd go on holiday to the UK and I'd save up my pocket money to buy as many games on cassette as I could. Then I'd spend the rest of my holiday reading and re-reading the inserts, trying to imagine what the game would be like when I finally get it home. Titles like Ghostbusters, Dungeon master, The Hobbit, Zzoom, Chess, Horace and the spiders, there was even a 3d maze with skulls and jewels. It wasn't all good through - I waited weeks to play Cookie only to get home and find the cassette didn't load properly!
But the most time I spent was trying to write my own games in Basic. It was amazing - a machine with everything you needed right there, a language, colours, sounds, all built in, ready for a young mind to explore. The keyboard even had the keywords and colours printed on each key and the editor knew when to expect a keyword rather than a letter. The whole of Basic was right there in front of me to explore without having to read through thick manuals.
After a while the 128k came out, and the new games no longer worked on my lowly 48k machine, and as my cassette tapes started to wear out or worse (where I lived there was one particular insect that liked to make little clay nests in cassette tapes...). Soon I was a teen and more interested in meatspace than the gaming world, but that early programming experience informed so much of my life and career.
Fond memories. Thank you, Sinclair, for opening up a whole world to me.
Semi-related, I once opened the case of my DVD of Blade Runner to find a whole nest of ants inside it, complete with tiny eggs. I didn't ask who was the queen and, without much respect for any royalty, killed them all. To this day I wonder what on earth did they find so appealing about my DVD...
Years later in Canada, I opened up an old amplifier we'd brought back with us to see if I could get it running again, and inside was a mummified gecko, perfectly dried, sitting on the board. They were constant companions on our walls, keeping the house free of the moths and mozzies.
It was never really an open system. The firmware was closed source (you could eventually buy an unofficial disassembly) but you couldn't update it with your own changes. You could add external hardware, with some effort, but it was never trying to compete with a backplane system like S-100.
What it did have - apart from very low initial cost and wide availability - was instant-on (no formatting, no setting up, no downloading and installing), staged progress from beginner to expert (i.e. from BASIC to assembler), a small comprehensible system (the manual explained everything BASIC could do, assembler needed an extra book or two but was still very manageable) a very large market with very low cost of entry and high margins (you could write a game, advertise it for almost no money, and send out the initial copies from home with no duplication costs), and a supportive culture of print magazines, occasional TV news and documentaries, and computer shows. (Face to face clubs were much rarer and less influential.)
The physical case design was just plain cool. And it worked with your own TV, which was almost like being on TV.
So basically a combination of instant gratification, tiny-system simplicity with tough constraints that rewarded clever solutions and creativity, low-friction financial opportunity, cultural reinforcement and support among peers working at a similar level, distinctive aesthetics with a coolness of a sort, and affordability.
I don't think it's a coincidence that it happened not long after punk and synth pop in music. Even if their output was very different, all of of those had very similar cultural features.
I'm sure you could have replaced the chip containing the ROM and replace it with your own version. Things were a little bit more rough back then.
I made the ROM writable by soldering a CMOS ram chip across the ROM (was it 16KB?) and any write to the ROM would end up in the RAM. A switch selected either the ROM or RAM to read from. On startup simply copy the ROM to the RAM and flip the switch.
From there on you can read/write the original ROM and modify it to your hearts content.
The Speccy owners tried to prove otherwise during countless arguments in the schoolyard, but deep down they knew.
I used the C64 only for games, and the spectrum for my own programs and the odd top game
and yes I was on both sides in the playground,
but the C64 had something missing that the spectrum had, hard to put a finger on it, the spectrum did have inferior games (based on the specifications), but It was more accessable or hackable (in todays speak)
I'd say the spectrum kids was more into modding it, typing their own code from magazines and learning stuff, but the C64 kids used it more like console. and could not see the reason for having a spectrum (due to the inferior spec etc..)
But all machines of that era were so low level with plenty of tricks to exploit.
maybe it was the school I went to and the information the collection of kids had
The C64 was a great music-synth with the capability to do 1 certain type of game kside scrollers) in 16 shades of brown vut that was it.
The sheer endless variety of games the Speccy supported knocked the C64 into a cocked hat.
Back then, C64 vs Spectrum discussions were like vi vs Emacs. Good old fashioned tribalism is a thing of all ages.
I do find the Speccy charming though!
[All prices from Wikipedia]
But they both absolutely crushed the quality of almost any keyboard you get on a computer today.
But it was double the price, putting it out of reach for many more families than the Spectrum. This made a kind of critical mass that lead to a huge community around the spectrum in the UK. And a fantastic burst of creativity as the barrier to entry to writing video games dropped as low as it would ever get.
Perhaps the best thing about the Spectrum was that the manual, which documented the built in BASIC programming language and also the Z80 asm opcodes.
Edit: I should probably steer clear of culture war topics but let's be honest - the designers cut every corner they could think of and consequently the Spectrum looked and sounded atrocious compared to the luxurious C64. But I probably do owe my tech career to one.
I had to work for it, though! I had to raise my score for English from 3/10 to at least 7/10, or no speccy. Fortunately, all sinclair magazines were in English, so by Easter I had scored 10/10!
And after that... I coded, I gamed, I read books, bought extra programming languages, coded, gamed -- and by the end of my high school career, its keyboard had died.
The empty shell hangs from a picture hook in my study, to remind me of where I came from, and also, because I have always loved its gorgeous design.
(Weird to think that the speccy sold 5 million units or so... Which is about the number of people using my open source application Krita every month, too.)
https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
My personal-favourite was "Chaos: The Battle of Wizards", by Julian Gallop. I still play that every few months under emulation. There are modern sequels and remakes, but I've avoided them lest I be disappointed!
But there were lots of great games, the Dizzy series, RoboCop, Strider, R-Type, and many many more.
There was also the peculiar experience that the Spectrum version of a game would often be more playable or essentially faithful to its arcade parent than that of platforms with more power (even the C64).
Because the Spectrum developers had to work hard to make the game playable in essentially monochrome, with nearly no sound. There is no better way to make art than through constraints, and the Spectrum was all constraints.
All 8-bit systems benefited from this art-through-constraints situation, though, and gaming culture owes everything to it. This could be why I am more inclined to play a cartoon MMORPG like Dofus than anything else; if a games designer is unwilling to choose their own constraints I am going to find the game uninteresting.
[Edit to change last sentence: wrong choice of words]
On Christmas morning, I woke up to a BASIC program running on the TV screen welcoming me to my brand new TI-99 4/A. Probably a better choice for us as I don’t think I knew anyone else in the US with a Spectrum.
I still have the TI, it’s upgraded to HDMI output using an FPGA replacement for the display processor, and has all the software ever released for it installed on one cartridge. Fun to break it out when the family gathers for holidays. There’s even some modern game development going on that really shows how capable the old hardware was, but was limited by primitive software development tools and practices.
https://circuitmaker.com/Projects/Details/Matthew-Hagerty/F1...
It sounds like the TMS9900 has a very different architecture with the workspace idea although it looks like the ti-99 4/a only allowed you to do this scheme with only 128 words. The idea itself sounds pretty cool.
It happened to me as a middle aged guy when I remembered the C64 my dad sold in order to buy me my first PC XT.
That's why I ended up buying a retro clone of my cherished C64, TheC64. ARM-inside running VICE, but it looks and behaves a lot like a real C64. It has a real keyboard and you can use it to program, not just run games.
I got a cheap Vic20 when I was wee, so I never thought much of the rubber doorstep and was never a fan of Sinclair as he was seemingly some aristocrat who was gifted a commercial niche below the BBC Micro (as bbc/acorn didn't bother making a budget model until the slightly borked Acorn Electron). But in recent years I notice that the Spectrum demo scene has become fantastic, in artistry and possibly superior in code wizardry to the C64s own bedazzling competition. The retro Spectrum scene is producing surprising games and a game capable multicolor mode was even invented a few years back which was truly unimaginable back in the day. More groundbreaking than late c64 inventions. So fair dues neighbor... but come off it, speccy music in a big TV advert?? :}
Great times, to which I occasionally wish I could C9
I am 47. I am still coding. It's not BASIC but still. In my niche, I have become one of the world's top for doing what I do and I am paid far beyond anything that ten year old in socialist Hungary could've dreamed of. Not that boy had a lot in dreams beyond the fierce desire to live a different life... I wrote that up just two months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681279 Ironically, I still live in a concrete high rise built in the early 70s but a Vancouver high rise on the shores of the English Bay is slightly more livable than a Hungarian microraion.
Thanks Speccy for giving me the opportunity. I ran with it.
My ZX Spectrum was an upgrade from a ZX-81. I had the thermal printer and a microdrive at some point. I have a few microdrive cartridges still sitting around right here (I still have my Speccy and the microdrive as well).
Fond memories trying to write some simple programs, working around the various limitations. Monopolizing the family TV, sitting on the carpet in front of it tinkering with things...
Lots of games, lots of pirating (copying tapes around). I did actually buy a couple as well ;) Playing or programming with other friends that owned Spectrums (and some rivalry/jealousy with the guys with Commodore's or Apple II's).
Now I feel rather old, but happy to have been part of the 8 bit revolution.
So no need for being determined, those eprom cartridges where in every computer shop.
It's tiny, it's relatively cheap, it's simple enough to take apart (disassembled ROM, or dis-assembled hardware I suppose).
Sure, it was underpowered, and the keyboard was cheap. But for a kid, those can be features.
My first computer was a relatively luxurious TRS-80 Color Computer. My family could almost afford the 16KB version. It was a technically clean design, and I learned a lot, and here I am.
Give a kid a tiny machine, some documentation, and tell them it is theirs.
I was luck to have had a number of computers that were essentially "mine". First a ZX Spectrum, then the +2A, an ancient Compaq luggable (which had the most wonderful keyboard), and an ancient Toshiba laptop. The fact that these were mine to do what I wanted with, without worrying about breaking them, was really important in giving me the freedom to really explore them.
Frankly, to have this object at home in the 80 was classy! A work of art.
And for me it's what define the Spectrum. The main games were not the most beautiful but had a very distinctive and enjoyable touch. A tiny machine but which a lovely and specific spirit. It was a so nice time in my memory.
It doesn't have grey keys.
Sorry to be a negative nancy! - but whoever thought a new ZX Spectrum should not have grey keys, made a slight error on that decision.
On all other aspects, I love the ZX good stuff all round, all the best everyone working in this space.
If you just want a taster and/or to play games then I'd go for emulation.
[1] start with these two and follow the related channels: https://www.youtube.com/c/NoelsRetroLab/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/markfixesstuff
"Normal" means white text on a DARK background. It's sad that it has taken the industry 30 years to remember that.