Happy 30th Birthday, ZX81

[VectraMan]

5 March 2011, marks the 30th anniversary of the arrival of the machine that did more to awaken ordinary Britons to the possibilities offered by home computing: the Sinclair ZX81.

While its successor, the Sinclair Spectrum, got the nation playing computer games, the ZX81 was the tipping point that turned the home computer from nerd hobby into something anyone could buy and use.

Sir Clive Sinclair would later say his Science of Cambridge company - later Sinclair Research - developed its first computers to make the money needed to fund other projects closer to his heart: the portable TV and what would become the infamous C5 electric car.

Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old tomorrow ? reghardware

I never had one. Or a Spectrum. Or a C5.

[DimPrawn]

ZX81.

Pah, new fangled fashion gadget.

I built a ZX80 from a kit when I was 14.

[Cliphead]

I did buy one along with the 16k rampack thingie. Lots of fun

[amcdonald]

Any true geek had a 128k ram pack

Then had a speccie

The QL seemed a bit of a damb squib at the time, but looking back it wasn't that bad. I just never bought one

[OrangeHopper]

Any true geek had a 128k ram pack

RAM pack, printer and, wait for it, a Memotech keyboard. All in the loft in their original packaging.

[thunderlizard]

Happy birthday!
A shame that there are no longer any computers whose keys you can press just by blowing hard on them.

[Paddy]

Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old tomorrow ? reghardware

I never had one. Or a Spectrum. Or a C5.

ZX81 Download Page

For your PC, ZX81 emulator and games etc

[amcdonald]

ZX81 Download Page

For your PC, ZX81 emulator and games etc

3D Monster Maze, ah nostalgia isn't what it used to be

[NickFitz]

3D Monster Maze, ah nostalgia isn't what it used to be

3D Monster Maze was the killer app for the ZX81

I was an Acorn chap myself, but I remember looking at the screenshots in the computer mags and thinking that there was nothing of that kind for the Atom. Ah well, we got Elite first on the Beeb a few years down the line

As the Wikipedia article I link to above points out, the canonical way of distributing a machine code program for the ZX81 was to embed it in line 0 of a BASIC program as the content of a REM statement that caused the BASIC interpreter to treat the Z80 code as a comment; the rest of the BASIC program took care of any startup housekeeping, and the system wouldn't allow you to edit line 0 as 0 was an illegal line number in BASIC. Upon such recondite hackery was the entire "computer revolution" founded

[Cliphead]

3D Monster Maze was the killer app for the ZX81

I was an Acorn chap myself, but I remember looking at the screenshots in the computer mags and thinking that there was nothing of that kind for the Atom. Ah well, we got Elite first on the Beeb a few years down the line

I bought a Commodore 64 just to play Elite and all these years later I still get the urge sometimes.