Happy Birthday ZX speccy (and on St. Georges day as well)

carmel_andrews · April 23, 2012

Yep, another one of mr Sinclairs classic designs (after the zx80/81 and his single board offering, a'la altair 8080 stylee) celebrates 30 years today

interestingly enough, the proto version was called zx 82 (i guess sinclair wanted to keep things uniform, i.e zx80/zx81 etc)...imagine a zx81 with a sort of proper keyboard

And ofcourse, just like Atari in the US had a few spinoffs, so did sinclair

like for instance Chris Curry, who after a fight (as in a bout of fisticuffs) with Clive, went on to form Acorn, or John Mathieson and Ben Cheese who went on to form flare/flare II (designers of the KMS and Atari Jaguar as well as the gfx chip in nintendo's 'star fox' game) and lastly Miles Gordon, who went on to design the first 'official' sinclair compatible computer, namely the sam coup'e

And of course it was Sir Clive that helped the company that pioneered mobile computing come into being,since Psion started out in the computer industry as a publisher of sinclair computer games/software, as well as inspiring lots of 'back bedroom' games developers to form what is now the worlds 3rd largest games development industry (after the US and Japan)

here's a couple o' pics of some of the designs

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-17793214

Interestingly, today is 'the bards' birthday as well,

Edited April 23, 2012 by carmel_andrews