ZX Spectrum Anniversary

I just realized that Sinclair ZX Spectrum is 25 years old.

It’s difficult for me to convey the impact Spectrum, (like Commodore 64 or Amiga) have had on entire generations of computer enthusiasts. It is such a simple machine (8bit Zilog Z80 processor running at 3.5 MHz with 48b of RAM and a display of 256×192 px in 16 colors) yet at the time the possibilities seemed endless.

ZX Spectrum blueprint

For me, the experience was even more exciting, for a quite simple reason: I was a kid living in a Eastern Bloc communist country, behind the “iron curtain”.

Living in Eastern Europe, we didn’t have access to most western hardware and software; in the early ’80s, the local computer industry was creating computers designed for data centers, not for personal use. Still, my father was lucky enough to spend a month in Italy on a computer architecture course. There, he managed to find the schematics for Spectrum.

In 1983, by the time I was 7, he had completed building a 48K Spectrum from scratch. The Z80 processor was bought from the East Germany; the EPROMs were from USSR; the keyboard and case were salvaged from other computers. In lots of areas, because original components were impossible to obtain, he had to redesign the whole hardware logic using soviet counterparts. He made the PCB by himself, as well as the 72 TTL circuits and the ROM programming.

Later we managed to get our hands on an East-German Robotron 5.25″ floppy drive and a dot-matrix printer so he made an Interface 2 board. The heat generated by all the components was causing our Spectrum to be somewhat unreliable during summer but who cared! We were using 360Kb Bulgarian floppies to keep the programs. Their protective sleeve had to be cut and they had to be manually flipped on the other side in order to record on both sides; still, it was ages better than using audio tapes.

The dot-matrix printer was even more unreliable as its heads would burn quite easily. However, in an era where typewriters had to be registered with the police, having a printer at home was a small treasure, even though its mere ownership was punishable by prison.

By the time I was 12 I was busy cracking the games’ copy protection just to be able to copy them from tape to disks. Of course, the software had to be smuggled in country – one such underground network used airline pilots, some of the few kind of people who could travel outside the country with ease.

The books were scarce too. Finding a book about anything Spectrum-related and bringing it in country was difficult. Copying it was even harder as even access to photocopiers was restricted and monitored. I can only imagine the bribes that had to be given so that my father could get his hands on a faded copy of “Exploring Artificial Intelligence on you ZX Spectrum” – hey, don’t laugh! It taught me about making a checkers game, expert systems and language processing. It even had the code for an Eliza clone, what more could you possibly want?

The first “official” Spectrum clone arrived by 1985; it was called “HC85″ (Home Computer ‘85).

Twenty years after those days, I still remember debugging assembly code using Zeus. I’ve learned programming and graphics on my Spectrum; it was its legacy that made me embrace the early versions of Flash – that basic actionscript in Flash 4 reminded me of the ‘good old days’.

I wish more people were exposed to Spectrum and similar computers as I believe we would have less bloated, more efficient software today. When you only have 48Kb of RAM, you really need to optimize your code. Despite having such a tiny amount of memory, I had access to programs like Artist II which was actually better than the Windows Paint, The Writer (similar to Windows Write), a spreadsheet program called VU-Calc, databases and more.

I find it amazing that 25 years later there’s still a vibrant community around Spectrum, with hardware and software still being released for it. There are also emulators for all platforms, from PC to smartphones, including my favorite – a ZX Spectrum emulator written in Actionscript 3.

Thank you, Sir Clive Sinclair!