Sinclair

Found some interesting videos about my first home computer on YouTube 🙂 It was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. My mother bought it for me around 1983 in England and smuggled it in her handbag to Poland – through the airport control – LOL – impossible today but seems it has not been a problem in 1983. Maybe the customs officials back then in Poland didn’t know how a home computer looks like and thought it’s a toy or something. Not sure. 😀

General overview & history – really worth watching:

An improved version of the Spectrum came out later. To be frankly I liked the rubber keyboard but every other computer had a plastic keyboard so everyone thought that the Spectrum also had to get one. The TV-ad for it rocks FTW.

Of course people from the demo scene (kind of underground computer-art scene – http://demoscene.info/index.en.html) are doing crazy things on this old ZX Spectrum hardware! Just watch! They use partly the Russian Spectrum clones Pentagon and Scorpion for the demos (see images below).

Source: http://www.interface1.net/zx/clones/pentagon128.html

Documentary about Spectrum nostalgia in Russia where the computer was very popular as well:

After the phenomenal success of the Spectrum home computer Sinclair lost the lead in the market. Commodore, Atari & Amstrad started to rule the market and Sinclair never really recovered.  The company tried the “turnaround” on the semi-professional computer market with the QL and failed. Other companies like Amstrad took that segment with the CPC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC). In 1986 the company sold its entire computer product range and the “Sinclair” brand name to Amstrad. Quite a sad story and every company today should be warned not to go a similar way. Sinclair never released the Amiga-Killer codenamed Loki.

“Loki: this project was an enhanced ZX Spectrum intended to rival the Commodore Amiga. Loki was to have a 7 MHz Z80H CPU, 128 KiB of RAM and two custom chips providing much enhanced graphics and audio capabilities. After the Amstrad buy-out in 1986, two engineers who had worked on the project, John Mathieson and Martin Brennan, founded Flare Technology to continue their work.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Research_Ltd

ZX Spectrum 48K photo by Martin O’Connell