30 Years Of The ZX81

It is almost staggering to realise that it is now 30 years since Clive Sinclair unleashed his cheap home computer, the ZX81 upon the World. For many, myself included, this was our entry into the joys of modern computing!

Clive Sinclair was a remarkable man for his time who believed that computers were not just the future, but that they could and should be affordable for all. Apple had been making computers for a few years by then, but they were extremely expensive and barely affordable. Utilising the fact that Silicon chips were becoming inexpensive, Clive was able to produce a lump of hardware that could be sold for less than £100, a major breakthrough in technology since it opened the doors for a new burgeoning market that was to dominate the 1980's as computers and gaming became all the rage, with millions of children, teenagers and young adults preferring to spend pocket money on games for their computers than records and tapes. It was a major cultural phenomenon that continues and progresses to this day.

For instance, I'm typing this on an average Dell laptop. 30 years ago, such a device would had been the realm of science fiction, let alone hand held mobile devices on which one can do almost anything. Looking back now at the ZX81, it's specifications and capabilities are absolutely laughable.

For a start, it contained just 1k of memory! This necessitated the purchase of an add on RAM pack which one would slot into the back of the computer to upgrade to 16k! Bear in mind that the size of an average jpeg image today is 100kb or more, you'd need several RAM packs just to display the picture above... but even then, the ZX81 was not technically capable of that.

It's output was in black and white. The graphics were literally square blocks of grey, black or white. Sound? No sound. None whatsoever. To load programs into it required a bog basic cassette player connected via a lead. Great care had to be taken to ensure you got the volume level just right or else nothing would load at all. Tapes could also be easily damaged and it was a regular headache to spend a few hours typing in a program to 1 - find it didn't work because of one slight typing error and 2 - you would record it to a tape which then wouldn't load the game up again.

Joysticks? No. Keyboard? Well, that was regarded as being revolutionary at the time but was a real nuisance to work with consisting of a flat touch pad. When you pressed a character, you wouldn't get a letter or number, but a code word so trying to learn which buttons to press gently to produce a code word depended on squinting vainly at the keyboard to find it. Yet millions put themselves through the bother since before long, magazines appeared which invited you to type in games written by readers. Problem was, you had to save it to tape before you ran the game or else there was no way of aborting the game... there was no on/off or reset switch! Worse still, the RAM pack had a nasty habit of coming slightly loose which would totally screw up the computer.

Now, it all sounds like an eccentric nightmare and in many ways it was, but hey, at the time, we shrugged it off and accepted it. This was after all, a window to the "future!" Before long, Sinclair unveiled the ZX Spectrum, which had more memory, a better keyboard of soft rubber keys, colour, sound and much better graphics. Commodore came along with the Commodore 64 which became the rival to the Spectrum. These machines were bought and loved by millions.

The mid 80's saw the arrival of the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. More sophisticated machines generally designed for business use, these pushed the boundaries ever further, now utilising floppy discs which enabled programs to load and save much quicker, boasting much better graphics, gaming capabilities and multi channel sound. And all using just 1 megabyte of memory! Traditional PC's were becoming available as well, with the advent of Microsoft Windows, but these machines cost well over £1000 each... boasting expensive hard drives that could store 16 megabytes of data!

The internet also existed in the mid 80's - the Amiga and ST had such capabilities using primitive modems. The phone costs were prohibitive and the speeds laughably slow - could take an hour just to receive 2kb worth of data.

Now of course we have laptops, PC's, iPads, mobile phones, Blackberries, Kindle... everything is now mobile, compact and fast. We may well take all these things for granted, yet one should never forget how it all truly began 30 years ago!

Unfortunately, Clive Sinclair ended up boobing big time when he came up with the Sinclair C5, a battery operated electrical tricycle. These looked rather daft and people felt they were too embarrassing to invest in. It cost Clive his entire fortune in the region of £8 million. 17,000 of them were sold, and whoever owned one felt too embarrassed to admitting having one. I certainly never saw anybody using one.

But Clive will always be fondly remembered for breaking down the barriers of home computing. He made it affordable, accessible, opened the doors for millions of youngsters such as myself to own and experience our first tastes of computing. I was therefore able to grow up moving from one generation of computing to the next. Therefore laptops and all we have today are logically easy to use. I understand the technology. It grew up with me!