The British Micro Behemoth

In August 1980 I was working as a lab technician in a secondary school and was spending my spare time observing variable starts with binoculars and analysing the results with my brother's pocket calculator. I used to regularly drop in on the local library on my way home to read New Scientist. One day I noticed an advert for the Sinclair ZX80.

And all of a sudden, I realised that you could have a computer at home. This had never occurred to me before seeing that advert.

I immediately bought one, followed by a small portable television, so I didn't have to use the family television as a monitor. I wrote several simple programs to parse and reduce my variable star observations but I fairly quickly outgrew the ZX80's limitations, and then upgraded to a 'proper' microcomputer, a Sharp MZ80k.

Several years later, I felt confident enough to switch my career over to computing and took an MSc course at Newcastle.

Several years after that, my mother told me that her Women's Institute branch had held an 'Antiques of the Future' competition and that she had taken along my long-neglected ZX80 and won first prize with it.

The ZX81 was my first contact with a computer - my parents bought one home just before Christmas one year. I must have been 7.

Learning how to program with the excellent manual was the first time I gained knowledge that me parents didn't have and it felt magical to control what was happening on the TV.

Of course, the ZX81 (1k!) was incredibly limited but that little box changed my life.

I got started programming with a borrowed ZX-81. It was magical, and also absolutely terrible. You could only load and save via tape, which took ages. If I recall correctly, both the power cord and the giant rectangular 16K RAM expansion we were lucky enough to have plugged into the back of the computer could completely reset it if accidentally brushed against.

Books of programs you could type in had a starburst with "1K" in it for those smaller programs that would fit in the limited default RAM. Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTNlMwTi1PTlVxc2M...

My uncle would always come up with fun ideas. I remember after we typed in a "put in the angle and velocity and try to shoot a cannonball over the mountain to hit a target", him sitting there and eventually figuring out the necessary parameters to have the projectile land on the target in a single step.

The ZX Spectrum (also borrowed or secondhand) we had next was a huge improvement, although still only used tape. Somehow waiting half an hour for "Commando" or "Top Gun" to load from tape made the games seem all the sweeter.

When we finally got an (again borrowed) Apple II clone with a disk drive, we thought persistent storage was magical and enthusiastically ported the "High score" routine from one program we typed in to a bunch of others.

Actually, we didn't even have a real Apple II. It was a CV-777, although the fact that the chips in these pictures -- https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/npgkhr/cv777_canadi... -- don't all have Asian writing on them make me wonder if it was a clone of a clone or something.

Anyway, good times. Always fun to be reminded of a time when I was absolutely fearless: I remember writing an assembly routine on the ZX Spectrum by writing it out on paper, and hand-converting the Z80 opcodes by looking them up in the manual, and expecting it to work.

Famously the Sinclair family died with the QL, but there was another machine designed for compatibility and which could have been a contender.

The SAM Coupé always looked pretty in reviews at the time, but I never met anybody who owned one, and I've never seen one in-person even now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAM_Coup%C3%A9

There are a lot of famous people who got their start in programming, game-development, and similar things from the ZX Spectrum in the UK.

A really iconic design and beautiful machine despite the limitations - or perhaps because of them.

I don't think the article says so, but the QL was what got Torvalds started on the path to Linux.

I remember when I was working at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London in the mid 80s we bought one to see if it could be useful to us. After about 20 minutes we gave it a resounding "No!"

Just a small detail, but Teignmouth is in Devon, i.e. the family didn't move from Devon to Teignmouth.

Assuming the snippet in the article was from Wikipedia, where it says: "He and his mother left London for safety to stay with an aunt in Devon, where they eventually moved to Teignmouth."

It means to say that they eventually moved to Teignmouth, Devon.

Sinclair also made some pocket-size black and white TVs, and we had one of those in the '80s: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/sir-clive-sinclair-pocket-...

The article is basically a short summary of this book: https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/UK-Books/The%20Sinclair...

I remember a guy at school in the 90s talking about the QL. He said it had a 32 bit operating system, but if you turned it upside down, the keys fell out.

pedantic comment but the screenshot of Elite on that site is of the original BBC Micro version, not the Spectrum version (which was a technical marvel in its own right)

Obligatory reminder about Micro Men, the BBC4 docudrama about Sinclair vs Acorn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men