As it is 30 years for the Spectrum today - let us remember the ZX81 too - the Spectrum was a leap forward, but it was the ZX81 that the IT Crowd circa 1980 cut their teeth on. after all, it was a bit easier to programme than using punch cards, wasn't it?

who needed more than the 16k expansion?

mine is in my garage having been rescued when my folks moved house, but I hear they made good door-stops...

Some of the best gaming in my life

Well, the ZX80 (the first sub-100 quid "proper" computer and a pretty big success in its own right) came first, but yeah, the ZX81 was the one that *really* took off and sold massively.

The ZX81 was my first computer. I had the expansion pack also.

There were several magazines that were born because of the 81. They had pages of program listings which you had to copy and after spending hours typing away and saving to cassette they wouldn't work because the magazine had errors within the programs. Either a full stop or comma missing would be enough to render hours of typing a waste of time.

After that for me, it was the ZX Spectrum, then a Dragon 32 then a Dragon 64 then a Commodore 64 then a Commodore 128 then an Amiga then a PC 486 then came the Pentium PC's and on and on.......



Oh happy days!

Ohh the hours of typing, I remember those, and all on that tiny 'touch sensitive' keypad.

I've still got mine and occasionally dig it out to show the kids and try to explain how much memory 16k is.


Anyone else remember having to blu-tac the pack on?

3d monster maze, the best programming ever, the amount they squeezed out of 16kb of ram makes current games a joke with their hardware specs