TW Blog :: Archives for November 2004

All New ZX Spectrum

Relates to Basic and Nostalgia

I can once again say I own a speccy! In fact it is the first ZX Spectrum 48K I have ever owned. By the time I convinced my parents we needed to upgrade our ZX81 first time round (i was pre teen then!), the ZX Spectrum Plus was on the market. So the rare opportunity I had to caress those colourful rubber keys was on visits to my Grandad who had become quite pre-occupied with writing BASIC software for every game and quiz show he could think of. Sadly his early versions of Countdown, Trivial Pursuit and a precursor to the key thumping Daley Thompson's Decathlon called Greasy Poles never made it into the software houses, but they used to keep me and my brother very entertained on family trips.

Well my grandad's old computer has now been passed on to me, along with an entire shelf worth of Spectrum programming books, several megabytes worth of hard drive in the form of several box loads of cassettes, and, notebooks containing all his code snippets and full program listings - full being about 2 pages in some instances! At first the keyboard failed to respond, but a quick dive under the hood, and a little sticky tape later, I was tapping away at those auto-complete Sinclair BASIC programming keys. It is amazing to think that this machine, at only 22 years old, had a mighty 48KB of system RAM, a standard cassette deck as a hard drive, 8 colours and just plugged into the television aerial.

To quote the cover of a BASIC programming book from 1983

The incredible ZX Spectrum presents its user with virtually unlimited scope. It allows versatile use of colour, offers high and low resolution graphics and also adds sound. The result can mean some very effective and exciting programs from BASIC - if you just know how! The Art of Programming the ZX Spectrum by M. James

Indeed! By the time I had reached my teens, and with Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy under my belt, I was insisting that it was time to once again upgrade to the Commodore. Bring on Wizball…!

It may not be very productive for me to while my hours away plugging code onto my television screen, but the occasional minute can always be excused as a brush up on BASIC!? If this entry has made you nostalgic, read up on the early 1980s history of computers.

Posted on Friday, Nov 05, 2004 at 22:20:44.