ZX Spectrum Documentary 'The Rubber Keyed Wonder' Gets London Premiere | Hacker News Reader

ZX Spectrum Documentary 'The Rubber Keyed Wonder' Gets London Premiere

timeextension.com

69 pointsrcarmo37 comments

Can't wait for this. Also take a look at 'Spectrum Diamond' an unusual documentary about the enigmatic coder Matthew Smith, who made Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy.

https://youtu.be/2ro5acUgqzY?si=ZLYhKtc9C8Y8yEnQ

Micro Men (2009) is also a fun movie: it's a dramatised version of the Sinclair vs Acorn story.

I second this recommendation.

Both SD and HD versions are on Youtube in their entirety.

This is the 720P version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Thanks. Looks more fun than OP documentairy. Not keen on yet another "Steve Jobs of UK" angle about Clive Sinclair or whomever.

The documentary is in Finnish and the subtitles are in Italian .. Do you know if there are English subtitles available somewhere?

I don't know about subtitles but allegedly there is a better quality version on Vimeo somewhere.

Dreamy!

Had one. 1982. Still remember sitting in a large swivel chair in front of a huge TV late at night when no one needed the TV. Boosted the beast to 16k of RAM but was always frustrated trying to save and recover my programs on the cassette tape. ("You kids have it easy!" he said from his rocking chair on the front porch.)

My dad was one of the first people to use computers in human resources for a shipping company, Matchbox, and then PBS. He brought the ZX81 home and I had no real idea what it was.

The focus of the documentary is the ZX Spectrum, the (far more successful) successor of the ZX 81 that you had. It came with 16KB or 48KB standard, and featured 16 colors.

> It came with 16KB or 48KB standard

or eventually, 128KB

> but was always frustrated trying to save and recover my programs on the cassette tape.

you didn’t save up your pocket money for the “Interface One” and a Microdrive? I found them very cool - and they worked pretty well

OP is referring to the ZX-81, the tape loading/saving reliability was much improved in the Spectrum.

I remember transferring all my dads files from his Spectrum to a new PC with a serial cable, and then getting to have the Spectrum for myself. The serial cable worked surprisingly well, on the first try.

Cut my teeth on one of these back in the 80's.. it was a wonderful mystery to explore. BASIC keywords, learning Logo, the mad sounds of loading and saving. Stepping up from the Spectrum to an Amiga 500 was like disembarking a dusty coal cart and hopping into a luxury sports car. I can still remember the clean smell of warm electronics.

We've come so far, and yet all these advancements are so far beyond most people's reach. Instead of unleashing creative freedom, all the supercomputing devices in our pockets do is enable people to work for free for Meta, Google, etc. Sit there and swipe the glowing screen, peasant.

Still got mine. Still write code on it, too[1] although it's now connected to the Internet with a Spectranet card. My 9-year old self would have been astonished that there's still a lively scene surrounding the Spectrum and some quality games still being released for it today. Or that I'd still be writing Speccy BASIC code projects[2] in the 21st century!

It's remarkably fun to tinker with still, and I don't think it's purely nostalgia for me. Although there's certainly an element of that at play, I think it's more the "zen" like simplicity that's appealing these days of hugely elaborate cloud-native stacks and hardware so complex there's no way anyone can hold it all in their heads. The Spectrum and other 80s home computers in contrast were so accessible and people did (and still do) astonishing things within those limits. The Speccy no doubt launched hundreds of thousands of careers, mine included.

Plus, with those limitations, games simply had to be playable to be successful as they couldn't on gimmicks! I honestly prefer a good game of Manic Miner over any modern title. The Spectrum & Amiga years were the glory days of old-school gaming for sure!

[1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2021/12/21/devops-for-the-sin... - If you've ever wondered how to do CICD and client/server for an 8-bit computer from the '80s :P

[2]=https://jsspeccy.markround.com

Micro Men is worth a watch if you're interested in 80s British home computing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Working title, "Syntax Era" :)

The ZX Spectrum was my first computer. Sure, I'm nostalgic for the games, but what I truly miss was the feeling of having what was then a fairly sophisticated device while being able to fully understand it. Nowadays, with the one gazillion layers of software, firmware and complex hardware, that's pretty much impossible.

Decades later, memories of my early gaming and programming days inspired me to create my own game company, https://galantrix.com. Hail to the Spectrum!

In Europe (in my case, Spain), it was the door to enter to computer science for a lot of children.

And personally for me, it was too the door to thinking about something like as free software. Because when I was a child, I remember my frustration with my small games coded in basic, they were terrifyingly slow. And I wondered why...and decades ago when I knew the free software philosophy, I finished with my pain about these remembers.

The whole Iberian Penisula was all about the Speccy during the 80's, I also owe a lot to MicroHobby, Micromania, and a few others, not only for computing stuff, I got the side effect of Spanish at the same level as Portuguese.

IIRC correct there is a speccy museum somewehre in West Portugal.

Yes, started by former Timex employees, which was the model that original got widespread, the classical Spectrum came afterwards.

https://loadzx.com/en/

https://loadzx.com/timexcomputerworld/

I remember walking into my mum's friends house when I was 7 or 8 and the friend's husband had one of these in his hands and he was typing something into the tv and then there was a noise and some lines on the screen and I WAS HOOKED.

So strange to think that where I come to work every day, that very machine was probably assembled about 10 metres away from where I sit now.

Ah the rubber keys! I didn't have one but my friend did. With the little printer that printed on metallised paper. Great fun.

I had a weird but brilliant machine called the Tangerine Microtan 65. The home computer scene in the 80s was fantastic.

My first computer was ZX Spectrum 48k. Wow. Time flies.

They had me at the loading sounds.

I often crack open my ZXPlecturm app to play those wonderful loading sounds. Chills.

Pffft! Those new fangled computer thingies will never take off. I'm perfectly happy with my Sinclair ZX80 and its spacious 1k of ram.

Commodore VIC 20 and Atari 400 better. :)

The ZX Spectrum computing nostalgia highlights the abyss between what could have been and the state and direction of personal computing technology anno 2024.

In four decades we went from zero, to infinite possibilities and then (de-facto) to zero again, even as the planet is drowning in oceans of smartphone electronic waste.

Back then you would plug your rubber key wonder into a TV and could program the device right away [1]. Think of what it takes to program [2] a smartphone today. Its practically impossible unless you are a professional developer with very specific specializations. Yet we now "own" devices that are infinitely more capable than the ZX, in every possible dimension (cpu, disk, memory, comms, screen, camera, microphone, you name it)

Mass personal computing has been hijacked, sealed up, dumbed down and thoroughly diverted to serve pretty much only one objective (out of the vast range of social and economic opportunities and challenges): consumer tracking and profiling, for the purpose of intermediating online consumption.

We can only guess at what wonders would have developed in the intervening four decades if the original ethos and creativity of the tech industry had survived even in part the onslaught of the particularly virulent type of commercialism that has come to define digital technology.

[1] https://worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanchap1.html

[2] "programming" meaning in this context any advanced controls a user has over a digital device, providing agency and abilities to shape its function for their own benefit in ways that are not pre-programmed and fixed by the vendor.

> In four decades we went from zero, to infinite possibilities and then (de-facto) to zero again, even as the planet is drowning in oceans of smartphone electronic waste.

However, there are far more people being creative and generating "things" with a computer now than when the ZX was available. They may not be programming directly but are using spreadsheets, music generation software, graphics packages, video editors etc. to do things they value more.

The computer used to be a bicycle for the mind and now it's a high speed train. The train is better in every technical aspect, but it only goes to a limited number of places.

> However, there are far more people being creative and generating "things" with a computer now than when the ZX was available.

I think you miss the point. While there are professional programs to do X, overall usability went down because people cannot (due to complexity, are not allowed to) write glue code. Yes, these professional programs can sometimes be "programmed" visually, but it's inside the niche.

Moreover, the real productivity requires desktop and cannot be reproduced on mobile devices.

I agree with the programming part. I just started playing with GForth on Android, but I wonder if people know of other options. (IMHO something like Emacs or Factor would be ideal.)

On Android you can use a lot of programming languages inside Termux[0]. It is a terminal environment with a package manager. I'm mostly using it for writing small automation bash scripts and a little for Nim programming.

What surprised me is the fact that Termux always ships the latest version of Nim. They're practically the first to update the compiler on new version release, even compared to rolling Linux distros, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch taking second and third place after a week or two.

I also have full blown Neovim IDE configured for Nim. In combination with a custom 7-row keyboard[1] it's even somewhat comfortable to use for a quarter of an hour =).

[0] - https://termux.dev/en/

[1] - https://github.com/Archargelod/jbak2Templates-Skins

Termux is an incredible project. Could not believe it the first time. You can even run a web server etc.

One challenge is to evolve the terminal / text paradigm so that useful tinkering becomes possible/confortable on the smaller mobile devices. It doesn't help that these devices are being reduced to optimizing finger swipping ("software" keyboards etc.) and little else.

And of-course who knows where it would lead if it was actually a first class member of the OS...

You both probably already know this, but just in case you (or some onlooker) don't, termux lets you run an sshd. So, for those stints > a quarter hour, you may be able to actually "log in" to your phone over wifi from a more comfortable environment such as a laptop/desktop (if you are near one, anyway).

I occasionally use Python (Pydroid) and C# (C# Shell) as well, the commercial versions.

There used to be a Clojure one with the challenges from Clojure, but no longer works in recent Android versions, and the server no longer exists (4Clojure).

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