Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Aargh, the horror! I’m having rubber key flashbacks. Why are you doing this to us?

The ZX Spectrum’s dead-flesh keys were an acquired taste, but even today there’s something appealing about that diminutive form. It looks like so much more than a typewriter keyboard with a badge slapped on – and it was cheap too: the Speccy was far more accessible than micros from US rivals. At £125 for the 16k model (£175 for the 48k version), and with programs loading from a standard tape deck, it was a computer for the rest of us. The rest of us who hated their eyes, what with this machine’s eye-searing colours… Remember, this was 1982. It’s not like home micros of the day had photorealistic graphics. But yes, the Spectrum had colour clash. Due to limitations imposed by memory-saving efforts, it could only display one foreground and one background colour per 8x8-pixel block. Also, the sound was a shrieking beeper. By comparison, the Commodore 64 was all flash with its sprites, multi-channel sound and hardware scrolling. Still, since the Speccy lacked those things, its game creators just had to work that bit harder.

Great. So the British machine made you work harder to end up with a worse result? Not really. Programmers saw limitations as challenges – less hand-holding meant the games had more character than sprite-based C64 efforts. The Spectrum forced people to be better coders, and many went on to great things. It’s a pity Sir Clive Sinclair never came to terms with games: he hated them and wanted his machine to be used for ‘nobler’ pursuits. But this thing really did foster a generation of coders – one that started out in bedrooms, pushing the ZX Spectrum far beyond what was thought possible.