Google doodle for Spectrum and St George's day
Conn and I are old enough to remember the ZX Spectrum, so Google’s “doodle” on Google UK this morning both brings back memories for me and makes me feel a little old :)
I remember picking up a secondhand ZX Spectrum 48k a couple of years after their initial release. It was a wonderful machine, though having to borrow my mother’s TV to use it was a little annoying. Oddly enough having to wait for ages while programs loaded via tape didn’t bother me that much.
Looking back it’s pretty amazing what we managed to do with only 48k. These days the amount of computing power we can carry around in our pockets completely dwarves even the very large computers of the time.
The Guardian has a good overview of the Spectrum here.
So how many of you owned ZX Spectrums? Did you have a ZX 80 or 81? Or were you one of those posh people who could afford the much more powerful 128 k machine?
Related articles
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum 30th Anniversary (hardware.slashdot.org)
About the Author: Michele Neylon
How many of you had Spectrum computers? :) http://t.co/OwphW4pj http://t.co/dUL7ESpK
Daily Thompson’s Decathlon was fantastic. High octane game playing with great graphics! http://youtu.be/p4QOgvN6wC8
The beauty of the Spectrum, as I recall, was the price. Those rubber keys made it a lot cheaper than many other models. The result was widespread adoption, and a huge selection of available software, magazines and clubs catering to the spectrum community.
No – we didn’t own one. I’m still sore about that ;)