Sinclair ZX Spectrum: 25 years on

The ZX Spectrum is 25 years old. Wow, that’s a long time ago. That machine was my first real introduction to computing, specifically to programming.

The early days of what was called “home computing” were very exciting. There were those of us with Speccys and The Other Lot with Commodore 64s. There were also a few odd characters with BBC Micros and various other things. But by far the most popular system to have was the Spectrum; possibly because it was the cheapest and also possibly because it had the best games available.

The Spectrum came in two flavours: 16K and 48K. That’s kilo-bytes, not megabytes. It is a credit to the programmers of those early software titles, especially the games, that so much could be squeezed into just 48K of RAM.

When I first got my Speccy, the first program I wrote was probably the eternal classic:

10 PRINT "I am brilliant"
20 GOTO 10


or something very similar. Everyone did this, just because you could. (This program prints “I am brilliant”, line after line, forever).

Since I probably presented my parents with the idea of getting a computer as an educational tool, I had to use it to write programs. My first ever proper program was something like this:

10 RANDOMIZE
20 LET x=INT (RND*100)+1
30 PRINT "I am thinking of a number between 1 and 100"
40 PRINT "Your guess?"
50 INPUT a
60 IF a=x THEN GOTO 100
70 IF a<x THEN PRINT "Too low..."
80 IF a>x THEN PRINT "Too high..."
90 GOTO 40
100 PRINT "Well done!"


Fantastic. I think my parents were reasonably impressed by this at the time.

Of course, back then, it was all about the games. They’re all classics, now. JetPac, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy … You can still play them if you use a Spectrum emulator for the PC too! They load in about half a second now. In 1982, you had to let your tape recorder screech away for five minutes to load most games, and often it wouldn’t work first time either … 😉

Other things I remember:

• Typing in program listings for games that were printed in dedicated ZX Spectrum magazines, then spending hours trying to find the typos when it wouldn’t work. Only to then find an “erratum” apology in the following month’s edition of the magazine;
• The rubber keyboard: I actually really liked this. The multiple functions available on each key made programming much more reliable. I never bought a Kempston Joystick: I think that would have been too much of an admission that it was a computer for games, rather than Real Programming;
• You had to plug it into the TV. This occasionally caused “… but I want to watch $THING and he’s on the computer” conflict;

Great fun.