Well color me old! The ZX Spectrum (affectionately known as “Speccy” or just “Spectrum” by its fans), one of the best-selling microcomputers of all time, was released 40 years ago today. Can you believe it still has a large and active community creating new content, archiving old content, and hacking on all sorts of hardware?
I have never owned or used one, but the Spectrum is one of those machines everyone is familiar with – like the C64, the Apple II, TRS 80, and so on.
My father bought one to do his teacher administration on. Programmed an entire system for that in Sinclair Basic together with his colleagues. My brothers and I played games on it until he bought a C64 and I an MSX2. Good times.
Long life ZX Spectrum.
My parents also bought me one in 1984, the machine that brings me to computing, thanks!
I much prefered the Amstrad CPC. Better graphics, less prone to fail and overall just a better machine.
CPC got released 2 years later, that might explain.
40 years! This is a rare case where the product was of incredible quality and sets an example worth striving for.
“Incredible quality” and “Worth striving for” are not terms i’d associate with the Spectrum. “Bang for buck”, “Budget computing” and “get what you pay for” would be.
We’re talking about a company whose product was so unreliable that nudging the table it was sat on could cause the system to crash. The official fix was to tape said RAM packs in, or stick them in with chewing gum or blue-tack. https://www.sinclairzxworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=3020
However, the real redeeming feature of the Sinclair line of products, was affordability. At a time when a computer system could easily cost you 4 figures, Sinclair could sell you a computer that cost just £99. Even with miniaturisation and cost reduction, you’d struggle to buy a laptop for £99 new today. This phenomenal feat of cost cutting and budget pricing allowed computers to get in the hands of near anyone who wanted one, which really helped cement Sinclair in the homes of millions around the UK, and the world.
Thanks to inflation, $100 in 1980 would be equivalent to $250 today. One can find a credible laptop for $250. There does tend to be lowest acceptable components and anything cheaper results in a product that will be returned or discarded as a spate of $100 laptops that attempted to be sold through pharmacies over the past decade will attest.
krebizfan,
I agree with your point about inflation, although I think you’ve underestimated it.
Using US inflation data the $100 would now be worth $348.91, however the feds were known for skewing data to deliberately under represent inflation, so this may be considered a minimum.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
The UK data is probably more accurate.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1980?amount=100
“£100 in 1980 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £456.91”
My own observation is that technology costs really came down quickly in the 2000s, but have been rising faster since. It hasn’t been a linear progression and prices have gotten relatively high even prior to the numerous world events that may be sending things out of wack for several years.
Keep in mind consumer electronic price was way more expensive than it is nowadays, mostly because novelty and lower production scale. So it was still an achievement for that era.
Kochise,
Indeed, computers costed a fortune back then. Although the inflation today is very worrisome and makes it hard to support a family. I am aghast at how much food and energy are going up (and computers too, but hopefully that was just temporary following covid).
Congrats Brits, sadly here in the USA we didn’t get the zed, we had the good old VIC instead but looking at vids of the Spectrum I can see why its so loved, happy Bday Speccy!
+1 ditto
C64 did pretty well, at least in Europe. Then Amiga and Atari ST… But that’s another story :p
Sadly I grew up poor so we couldn’t afford the C64, we had the VIC and a Trash 80 and i had an insane amount of fun with those but looking at pics of the Zed it looks like the Brits had a similar blast with their Zed as we had with the old VIC.
On a tangent anybody notice the gear back then had this thing called BUILD QUALITY while the modern stuff is just E_Waste specials? My VIC lasted nearly 15 years until it got lost in a move (may still be working somewhere) and my Compaq 486 ended up going for 20 until the lumber mill I sold it to finally closed, meanwhile the local wally world is full to the brim with E_Waste specials with everything soldered to the board and garbage Emmc storage that won’t even last a year…sigh it makes me sad man, it really does.
I mean even my over decade old EEE-PC with its teeny tiny AMD APU is still chugging along with a $12 battery replacement , $24 upgrade to 8GB of RAM and a $14 SSD and thanks to Zorin OS its still great as a netbook but I can spend double what I paid in 2011 for that EEE-PC and thanks to Emmc and junk battery it’ll be landfill in a year if not sooner, how wasteful things have gotten.
The Raspberry pi 400 reminds me of the Sinclair spectrum.
Great price and capable.
A generation of kids with close range CRT overexposure as Pong Zombies!
Ironically, talk of anything Zx reminds me mostly of the M68000 and the wonderful world of Assembly!
I still remember when teacher called us all for what she called special “computer lesson”. It was a father of one of the pupils who had good enough connections to be able to import one from the UK bypassing import barrier to Comecon countries. He did a basic introduction to what computer was and how it could be programmed then ran a simple game on it. I remember those magic flashing pixels like it was yesterday. I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and I was hooked.