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Comment by wateralien | Hacker News Reader

I had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.

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The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.

It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.

Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)

I was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.

deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge

It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard.

Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way.

But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.

I've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book.

The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.

If they don't want to print and ship a manual, offer a PDF online for curious people to download. Problem solved.

Or, do what my car from 2014 did: The manual came on a USB stick.

The problem isn't distribution, it's laziness and greed. Documentation takes time and money. It's seen as a cost by people who don't understand the benefits.

I think a proper manual for a modern computer at the same detail level as the Commodore one would be much bigger than a car manual! It's not as much printing costs, but developing that documentation would cost a lot. I think that would make sense for big venders like Dell, Apple etc, but I wonder if anyone would actually read it. It's too much information...

And, of course, with the Speccy you had the Microdrive - an affordable middle ground between tape recorder and a disk drive. I still remember the excitement of not having to record/rewind/play (to verify). Good old times...

Fewer Spectrum's of all models combined appears to have been sold than the C64 alone, so it dominated very few places.

They had high market shares in countries with much smaller populations than the US, so in terms of number of countries (particularly in Europe and South America), it dominated in far more of them than the C64 did.

Not only this.

I had a ZX Spectrum, and at some point my dad got me a C128.

I was taken aback by how poor its BASIC was in C64 mode, but on the other hand, adding sprites that moved freely across the screen without being bound to the 32x24 character grid felt like magic to me.

Commodore 64 in 1982 cost US$595 ($2,059 today).

ZX Spectrum in 1982 cost $200 ($692 today) for 16 KB model and had a 48K model for 40% more.

It was the difference between affordable and unaffordable for many people.

The launch price for the 64 was $600, but by June 1983 it had dropped to $300 and was often on sale for less (I paid $250).

I visited this ZX Spectrum museum in this summer: https://loadzx.com/en/

So strange to stumble upon this blast from the 80s in a small town in the middle of Portugal. But I think this reinforces the fact that the Spectrum was to Europe what the C64 was to North America.

Anyway, wonderful memories in there!

The Speccy was very popular in Spain (and I'd assume Portugal too). As well as -probably not coincidence- in South American countries.

Arab countries & Europe's Eastern block each have their own computing histories that's very different from the usual US-centric tale.

>there was no hacking around allowed

You fool! That was to encourage latent hackers to emerge into the world.

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