30 years ago on March 5th 1981, Sinclair Computers released the ZX81.



Life would never be the same again. Computers were small, accessible, and easy to use (that being relative). I got mine about a year after after a lot of saving up (I was 14). From then I progressed to a BBC B via an Acorn Electron. I spent a few years with the little black thing, wobbly RAM Pack and all. I sold it on (oddly to someone who wanted to give his daughter a C64 for Christmas).

I found a boxed ZX81 with extra bits (including a RAM pack) in a junk shop in Yorkshire a few years back. It cost me a tenner. Later that day, I found a fiver, so a good day all round

The BBC Microcomputer will be celebrating it’s 30th later on this year too.

Heh, I had an idea what this thread would be about and who had posted it just from the title

* tear wells in the corner of my eye *

the good old days ..

Is that a kempston interface?

I remember one of my fave bits of the zx spectrum was the way everything just slotted in and started working instantaneously. No stupid drivers to install. No silly cables to buy. Truly plug'n'play.

Never had the original one with rubber keys. I had the 48k which had plastic keys but you have to oress various key combos to get the commands, and the 128k one where you could type like a normal person and it'd convert the words into commands. Loved it.

Had the Interface 1, though not Interface 2.
Had Kempston Interface.
Had two microdrives
Had one zx spectrum printer. Loved the black/silver printouts.
Had the obligatory joystick and cassette recorder.

I was a ZX Spectrum boy xmas 82 or 83.... spending the whole day trying to land the plane in Flight Sim then just going for the easy option of taking off in a straight line, flying off the end of the map, popping back on the other side in a perfect line for approach.... touch down

Burnt all the programming game books after spending hours keying them in and then trying to sort out all the errors

Manually upgraded to the solid keyboard when it came out

No - it's the 16K RAM pack. Despite tieback of the ZX81 being shaped, this add on didn't conform to the shape, which added to the instability problems.

What was good was that the peripherals could be daisy-chained. My ZX81 had a joystick interface between the computer and the RAM pack.

Are we all old on here...........

I had a BBC Micro; can still remember the endless wait while loading games on from a cassette player. I'd like to have a C64 now.

Ah yes, the bliss of screaming games loading keep fingers crossed that the tape didn't chew up.

Oh and writing a BASIC database got me my A in GCSE Computer Studies.... Ah, memories when times were simple....

I got some kind if qualifcation at school for writing a BBC Micro drawing program. It was great. Acorn User published a method for spooking in bits of program from a floppy drive so the core program did the drawing, but if you wanted to do more it would dump a part of itself and load in other bits. All written in BASIC too. A friend of mine drew HeMan pictures with it! I should have tried to sell the program. That wasn't in my kind at the time. I just wanted to draw pictures n a computer. That's why I wrote it.

Saving and loading from tape was painful. When I got a job, I bought a disc drive for my BBC B at home and never looked back. I cost a fortune, and I had to fit the interface myself, and fiddle with chip jumpers. Not helped by the instructions which assumed you were looking at the circuit board from underneath! Thanks, Solidisk.

I had a BigByte 16K RAM Pack and a Kayde keyboard for mine. Due to RAM Wobble, I built a wooden base unit with sides and a rear and fastened the ZX81 and RAM Pack to the base...

The RAM wobble was made worse with the inner workings of the RAM Pack. The Sinclair one had two layers of circuit board, joined at the top with some ribbon cable. This effectively meant that it was folded in half, and the two half could, when the pack was moved, touch and short out. The solution was to put some insulating material (bit of plastic from the lid of a margarine tub will do) between the two layers. I did this, following instructions in a Sinclair magazine of the time, and RAM pack wobbles were far less fatal than they were before.

Afraid so - as I also had a ZX81 when I was about 13.

From there it was on to the Spectrum and beyond.