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141-450: Time-Gate (also known as Timegate , 4D Time-Gate or 4D Defender ) is a ZX Spectrum game from Quicksilva , and one of the first 3D combat games. The name is derived from its treatment of time as a dimension , in which one could travel (albeit backwards only). The first press launch in the UK games industry was for this title. Time-Gate had one embarking on a perilous mission to repel

282-507: A "ZX81 with colour". According to Sinclair, the team also wanted to combine the ZX81's separate random-access memory sections for audio and video into a single bank. Chief engineer Richard Altwasser was responsible for the ZX Spectrum's hardware design. His main contribution was the design of the semi-custom uncommitted logic array (ULA) integrated circuit, which integrated, on a single chip,

423-687: A "blaze of publicity" at the Earl's Court Computer Show in London, and the ZX Microfair in Manchester . The ZX Spectrum was launched with two models: a 16KB 'basic' version, and an enhanced 48KB variant. The former model had an undercutting price of £125, significantly lower than its main competitor the BBC Micro , whilst the latter model's price of £175 was comparable to a third of an Apple II computer. Upon release,

564-453: A 34-wire ribbon cable to an 8041 microcontroller on the PCW's mainboard . Most models of PCW were bundled with a 9-pin dot matrix printer mechanism, with the later 9512 and 9512+ models using a daisywheel (with a different cable; the printers were not interchangeable with the dot matrix models). These PCW printers could not, of course, be used on other computers, and the original PCW lacked

705-607: A 3½-inch drive was needed. Graphical user interface devices such as light pens , mice and graphic tablets could be attached to the expansion socket at the back of the monitor. Adding a serial interface connector, which cost about £50, made it possible to attach a modem or non-Amstrad printer. The designs were licensed to the German consumer electronics company Schneider, which slightly modified their appearance and consequently sold them as "Joyce" and "Joyce Plus". The partnership between Amstrad and Schneider had been formed to market

846-424: A Briton taking on the world, Sinclair has become the best-known name in micros." The media latched onto Sinclair's image; his "Uncle Clive" persona is said to have been created by the gossip columnist for Personal Computer World . The press praised Sinclair as a visionary genius, with The Sun lauding him as "the most prodigious inventor since Leonardo da Vinci ". Adamson and Kennedy wrote that Sinclair outgrew

987-613: A PCW to an IBM-compatible PC, some of which also can transfer in the opposite direction, and service companies that will do the job for a fee. While all the 3-inch disks were double-sided, the PCW 8256's 3-inch drive and the PCW 8512's upper one were single-sided, while the 8512's lower one was double-sided and double-density. Hence there were two types of disk: single-density, which could store 180  KB of data per side, equivalent to about 70 pages of text each; and double density, which could store twice as much per side. The double-density drive could read single-density disks, but it

1128-481: A built-in 3-inch floppy disk drive instead of the cassette drive. Initially priced at £249, it later retailed for £199. It was the only Spectrum model capable of running the CP/M operating system without additional hardware. Unlike its predecessors, the ZX Spectrum +3 power supply utilised a DIN connector and featured "Sinclair +3" branding on the case. Significant alterations caused a series of incompatibilities, such as

1269-508: A command in BASIC, many keywords require a single keyboard stroke. Other keywords require a change of keyboard mode by a few keystrokes. The BASIC interpreter is derived from the one used on the ZX81 . A BASIC program for ZX81 can be entered into a ZX Spectrum with minimal modifications. However, Spectrum BASIC introduced numerous additional features, enhancing its usability. The ZX Spectrum character set

1410-511: A computer". After its release, computing in Britain became an activity for the general public rather than the preserve of office workers and hobbyists. The ZX81's commercial success made Sinclair Research one of Britain's leading computer manufacturers, with Sinclair himself reportedly "amused and gratified" by the attention the machine received. Development of the ZX Spectrum began in September 1981,

1551-436: A custom GUI operating system . A wide range of other CP/M office software and several games became available, some commercially produced and some free. Although Amstrad supplied all but the last model as text based systems, graphical user interface peripherals and the supporting software also became available. The last model had its own unique GUI operating system and set of office applications, which were included in

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1692-455: A custom interpreter made it possible to fit all of its functionality into a very small amount of read-only memory (ROM). The development process of the software was marked by disagreements between Nine Tiles and Sinclair Research. Sinclair placed an emphasis on expediting the release of the Spectrum, primarily by minimising alterations in the software from the ZX81, which had in turn been based on

1833-458: A few months after the release of the ZX81. Sinclair resolved to make his own products obsolete before his rivals developed the products that would do so. Parts of designs from the ZX80 and ZX81 were reused to ensure a speedy and cost-effective manufacturing process. The team consisted of 20 engineers housed in a small office at 6 King's Parade , Cambridge. During early production, the machine was known as

1974-457: A full range of colour and sound for a price under $ 200. Although it was more enhanced than its British counterpart, sales proved poor and Timex Sinclair collapsed the following year. A crucial part of the company's marketing strategy was to implement regular price-cutting at strategic intervals to maintain market share . Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy noted that Sinclair's method was driven by securing his leading position through "panicking"

2115-455: A fully hardware-based television raster generator with colour support. This enhancement indirectly provided the new machine with roughly four times the processing power of the ZX81, as the Z80 was relieved of video generation tasks. An initial ULA design flaw occasionally led to incorrect keyboard scanning, which was resolved by adding a small circuit board mounted upside down ("dead cockroach") next to

2256-611: A high of 40 per cent. Sales in the 1984 Christmas season were described as "extremely good". In early 1985 the British press reported the home computer boom to have ended, leaving many companies slashing prices of their hardware to anticipate lower sales. Despite this, celebration of Sinclair's success in the computing market continued at the Which Computer? show in Birmingham , where the five-millionth Sinclair machine (a gold coloured QL)

2397-678: A lacking distribution. Nigel Searle , the newly-appointed chief of Sinclair's computer division, said in June 1982 the company had no plans to stock the new machine in WHSmith , which was at the time Sinclair's only retailer. Searle explained that the mail-order system was in place due to there being no "obvious" retail outlets in the United Kingdom which could sell personal computers, and it made "better sense" financially to continue selling through mail-order. The company's conservative approach to distributing

2538-450: A low cost replacement for typewriters during a flight to the Far East. This design featured a single "box" containing all the components, including a portrait-oriented display, which would be more convenient for displaying documents than the usual landscape orientation. However the portrait display was quickly eliminated because it would have been too expensive, and the printer also became

2679-434: A minor detail, releasing games like Batman , Head Over Heels , and Bounder . The PCW video system was not at all suited to games. In order that it be able to display a full 80-column page plus margins, the display's addressable area was 90 columns and the display had 32 lines. The display was monochrome and bitmapped with a resolution of 720 by 256 pixels. At 1 bit per pixel, this occupied 23 KB of RAM which

2820-672: A non-textured surface were at risk of causing shock, and were asked to be sent back to a warehouse in Cambridgeshire which would supply a replacement within 48 hours. Development of the ZX Spectrum+ began in June 1984, and was released on 15 October that year at £179. It was assembled by AB Electronics in South Wales and Samsung in South Korea. This 48 KB Spectrum introduced a new QL -style case with an injection-moulded keyboard and

2961-410: A number, and these could be saved to a disk. The menu system had two layouts, one for beginners and the other for experienced users. Locoscript supported 150 characters and, if used with the dot matrix printer, could print European letters including Greek and Cyrillic , as well as mathematical and technical symbols. The program allowed the user to work on one document while printing another, so that

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3102-463: A printer, word processor program, the CP/M operating system and associated utilities , and a BASIC interpreter . Software vendors quickly made a wide range of additional applications available, including accounting, spreadsheet and database programs, so that the system was able to support most of the requirements of a home or small business. Shortly afterwards the Tandy 1000 was introduced in

3243-418: A project feasible and went ahead with ordering 100,000 sets of parts so that he could launch at high volume. On 5 March 1981, the ZX81 was launched worldwide to immense success with more than 1.5 million units sold, 60% of which was outside Britain. According to Ben Rosen , by pricing the ZX81 so low, the company had "opened up a completely new market among people who had never previously considered owning

3384-446: A range of facilities comparable to those of MS-DOS , but imposed a significant limitation: it could not address more than 64 KB of RAM. Since CP/M took 3 KB of this, the most that CP/M applications could use was 61 KB. The rest of the RAM was used as a RAM disk (exposed under the drive letter "M:" for "memory"), which was much faster than a floppy disk but lost all its data when

3525-508: A reset button that functions as a switch shorting across the CPU reset capacitor. Electronically, it was identical to the previous 48 KB model. The machine outsold the rubber-key model two to one, however, some retailers reported a failure rate of up to 30%, compared with a more typical 5–6% for the older model. In early 1985, the original Spectrum was officially discontinued, and the ZX Spectrum+

3666-528: A separate unit. To reduce the cost of the printer, Amstrad commissioned an ASIC (custom circuit) from MEJ Electronics, which had developed the hardware for Amstrad's earlier CPC-464 . Two other veterans of the CPC-464's creation played important roles, with Roland Perry managing the PCW project and Locomotive Software producing the Locoscript word processing program and other software. The CP/M operating system

3807-640: A series of considerably more expensive Canon inkjet printers : initially the BJ10e, later the BJ10ex and finally the BJ10sx. The 9256 had 256 KB of RAM and the same dot matrix printer as the 8256 and 8512, as well as the older Locoscript version 1. This was a PCW 9256 with 512 KB of RAM, a parallel printer port, and Locoscript 1.5 instead of Locoscript 1. The PCW 10 was not a success, and few were produced. By this time other systems offered much better print quality, and

3948-654: A significant commercial failure, selling only 17,000 units and losing Sinclair £7 million. It has since been described as "one of the great marketing bombs of postwar British industry". The ASA ordered Sinclair to withdraw advertisements for the C5 after finding that the company's claims about its safety could not be proved or justified. The combined failures of the C5 and QL caused investors to lose confidence in Sinclair's judgement. In May 1985, Sinclair Research announced their intention to raise an additional £10 to £15 million to restructure

4089-556: A significant drop in Sinclair's income from orders in January, as retailers were left with surplus stock. Subsequently, an upgraded model, the ZX Spectrum 128, was released in Spain in September 1985, with development financed by the Spanish distributor Investrónica. The launch of this model in the UK was postponed until January 1986 due to the substantial leftover inventory of the prior model. While

4230-523: A special order designed so that plotting a character eight scan lines high would touch eight contiguous addresses. This meant that the Z80 's concise block copy instructions, such as LDIR , could be used. Unfortunately, it also meant that drawing lines and other shapes could be very complicated. The PcW16 does not share any hardware with the original PCW series, other than the Z80 CPU, and should be considered to be

4371-539: A television speaker. The ZX Spectrum +2 marked Amstrad's entry into the Spectrum market shortly after their acquisition of the Spectrum range and "Sinclair" brand in 1986. This machine featured a brand-new grey case with a spring-loaded keyboard, dual joystick ports, and an integrated cassette recorder known as the "Datacorder," akin to the Amstrad CPC 464 . The ROM was updated so that the screen on boot-up showed an Amstrad copyright message ( ©️ 1986 Amstrad in place of

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4512-505: A then-standard Centronics printer port. Instead, the Z80 bus and video signals were brought to an edge connector socket at the back of the cabinet. Many accessories including parallel and serial ports were produced for this interface. Some of the later models included a built-in parallel port ; these could be bundled with either the dedicated Amstrad printer or a Canon Bubblejet model. The PCWs were not designed to play video games , although some software authors considered this

4653-418: A time, and starting another application made the previous one save all the files it had changed and then close. The bundled word processor was produced by Creative Technology, and could read Locoscript files but saved them in its own format. The package also included a spreadsheet, address book, diary, calculator and file manager. Amstrad never provided other applications, and very little third-party software

4794-639: A time, was governed by the BASIC command 'BEEP', where programmers could manipulate parameters for pitch and duration. Furthermore, the processor remained occupied exclusively with the BASIC BEEPs until their completion, limiting concurrent operations. Despite these constraints, it marked a significant step forward from the ZX81 , which lacked any sound capabilities. Resourceful programmers swiftly devised workarounds; its rudimentary audio functionality compelled developers to explore unconventional methods such as programming

4935-409: Is a Zilog Z80 , an 8-bit microprocessor , with a clock rate of 3.5  MHz . The original model Spectrum has 16 KB of ROM and either 16 kB or 48 kB of RAM. Video output is channelled through an RF modulator , intended for use with contemporary television sets, to provide a simple colour graphic display. Text is displayed using a grid of 32 columns × 24 rows of characters from

5076-523: Is an 8-bit home computer developed and marketed by Sinclair Research . Considered one of the most influential computers ever made, it is also one of the best-selling British computers ever, with over five million units sold. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and around the world in the following years, most notably in Europe, the United States, and Eastern Bloc countries. The machine

5217-535: Is significantly more advanced than the ZX81, with approximately four times faster average speeds. The original ZX Spectrum is remembered for its rubber chiclet keyboard , diminutive size and distinctive rainbow motif. It was originally released on 23 April 1982 with 16 KB of RAM for £125 (equivalent to £557 in 2023) or with 48 KB for £175 (equivalent to £780 in 2023); these prices were reduced to £99 (equivalent to £422 in 2023) and £129 (equivalent to £550 in 2023) respectively in 1983. Owners of

5358-516: The ALT or EXTRA key, along with the ⇧ Shift key if capitals were required. Other special key combinations activated caps lock , num lock and reboot . A wide range of upgrades became available. The PCW 8256's RAM could be expanded to 512 KB for a hardware cost of about £50. An additional internal floppy disk drive for the 8256 would cost about £100, and installation was fairly easy. Alternatively one could add external drives, for example if

5499-442: The MIC port is intended for attachment to other audio devices as a line-in source. The ZX Spectrum integrated various design elements from the ZX81. The keyboard decoding and cassette interfaces were nearly identical, although the latter was programmed for higher-speed loading and saving. The central ULA integrated circuit shares some resemblance with that of the ZX81, but it features

5640-569: The AY-3-8912 chip, MIDI compatibility, an RS-232 serial port, an RGB monitor port, 32 KB of ROM including an improved BASIC editor, and an external keypad. The machine was simultaneously unveiled for the first time and launched in September 1985 at the SIMO '85 trade show in Spain, with a price of 44,250 pesetas . Sinclair later presented the ZX Spectrum 128 at The May Fair Hotel 's Crystal Rooms in London, where he acknowledged that entertainment

5781-571: The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in May of that year. Particularly serious were allegations that Sinclair was cashing cheques months before machines were shipped. By autumn 1984, Sinclair was still publicly forecasting that it would be a "million seller" and that 250,000 units would be sold by the end of the year. QL production was suspended in February 1985, and the price was halved by

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5922-467: The Amstrad CPC range of computers, and broke up when Amstrad launched the PCW9512. The PCW 9512, introduced in 1987 at a price of £499 plus VAT, had a white-on-black screen instead of green-on-black, and the bundled printer was a daisy-wheel model instead of a dot-matrix printer. These models also had a parallel port, allowing non-Amstrad printers to be attached. The 9512 was also supplied with version 2 of

6063-517: The Commodore ;64 , BBC Micro , Dragon 32 , and the Amstrad ;CPC range. Over 24,000 different software products were released for the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum played a pivotal role in the early history of personal computing and video gaming , leaving an enduring legacy that influenced generations. Its introduction led to a boom in companies producing software and hardware ,

6204-474: The Digital Research implementation of Seymour Papert 's LOGO programming language and a graphics program that could produce pie charts and bar charts . Many software vendors supplied versions of their products to run with CP/M Plus , making a wide range of software available for the PCW, often very cheaply: Many free packages could run under CP/M but required careful setting of options to run on

6345-457: The Locoscript word processor program which included spellchecker and mail merge facilities. In all other respects the 9512's facilities were the same as the 8512's. In 1991 the 9512 was replaced by the PCW 9256 and 9512+, both equipped with a single 3½-inch disk drive that could access 720 KB. The 9512+ had 512 KB of RAM, and two printer options, the Amstrad daisy-wheel unit and

6486-624: The University of Cambridge . By this time inexpensive microprocessors had started appearing on the market, which prompted Sinclair to start producing the MK14 , a computer teaching kit which sold well at a very low price. Encouraged by this success, Sinclair renamed his company to Sinclair Research , and started looking to manufacture personal computers. Keeping the cost low was essential for Sinclair to avoid his products from becoming outpriced by American or Japanese equivalents as had happened to several of

6627-465: The ZX Spectrum character set , or from a custom set. The machine features a colour palette of 15 colours, consisting of seven saturated colours at two levels of brightness, along with black. The image resolution is 256×192 pixels, subject to the same colour limitations. To optimise memory usage, colour is stored separately from the pixel bitmap in a low resolution, 32×24 grid overlay, corresponding to

6768-413: The ZX81 . Rick Dickinson designed its distinctive case, rainbow motif, and rubber keyboard . Video output is transmitted to a television set rather than a dedicated monitor , while application software is loaded and saved onto compact audio cassettes . The ZX Spectrum was initially distributed by mail order, but after severe backlogs it was sold through High Street chains in the United Kingdom. It

6909-455: The recession of the early 1990s. In 1993 the PCW still cost under £390 while a PC system with a printer and word processing software cost over £1,000. However, after adjustment for inflation the retail price of a multimedia IBM-compatible PC in 1997 was about 11% more than that of a PCW 8256 in 1985, and many home PCs were cast-offs, sometimes costing as little as £50, from large organisations that had upgraded their systems. The PCW 8256

7050-469: The 16 KB model could purchase an internal 32 KB RAM upgrade, which for early "Issue 1" machines consisted of a daughterboard . Later issue machines required the fitting of 8 dynamic RAM chips and a few TTL chips. Users could mail their 16K Spectrums to Sinclair to be upgraded to 48 KB versions. Later revisions contained 64 KB of memory but were configured such that only 48 KB were usable. External 32 KB RAM packs that mounted in

7191-545: The 3½-inch format so that data could be transferred to other machines. All machines in the series used a Z80 CPU, initially running at 4MHz with higher speeds in later models. RAM varied between 256 or 512 KB depending on models. All models except the last included the Locoscript word processing program, the CP/M Plus operating system , Mallard BASIC and the Logo programming language at no extra cost. The last model (PcW16) used

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7332-602: The Amstrad PCW offered the best value for money. In the US the PCW was launched at a price of $ 799, and its competitors were initially the Magnavox VideoWriter and Smith Corona PWP , two word-processing systems whose prices also included a screen, keyboard and printer. The magazine Popular Science thought that the PCW could not compete as a general-purpose computer, because its use of non-standard 3-inch floppy disk drives and

7473-524: The CPU in Issue 1 ZX Spectrums. The machine's Sinclair BASIC interpreter is stored in 16 KiB ROM, along with essential system routines. The ROM code, responsible for tasks such as floating point calculations and expression parsing , exhibited significant similarities to ZX81, although a few outdated routines remained in the Spectrum ROM. The Spectrum's keyboard is imprinted with BASIC keywords. To input

7614-457: The Commodore 64 also employed colour attributes, it utilised a special multicolour mode and hardware sprites to circumvent attribute clash. Sound output is produced through a built-in beeper capable of generating a single channel with ten octaves. It is controlled by a single EAR bit. By toggling it on and off, simple sounds are generated. This speaker, capable of producing just one note at

7755-587: The NEB had worsened, however, and by 1979 it opted to break up Sinclair Radionics entirely, selling off its television division to Binatone and its calculator division to ESL Bristol. After incurring a £7 million investment loss, Sinclair was given a golden handshake and an estimated £10,000 severance package. He had a former employee, Christopher Curry , establish a "corporate lifeboat" company named Science of Cambridge Ltd, in July 1977, called such as they were located near

7896-534: The PCW "got the technophobes using computers". In the first two years over 700,000 PCWs were sold, gaining Amstrad 60% of the UK home computer market, and 20% of the European personal computer market, second only to IBM's 33.3% share. Having gained credibility as computer supplier, Amstrad launched IBM-compatible PCs, once again focussing on low prices, with its PC1512 surpassing the IBM PC on performance and beating even

8037-467: The PCW series, although a significant number had installer programs that made this task easier. Programs that were already configured for the PCW covered a broad range of requirements including word processors, databases, graphics, personal accounts, programming languages, games, utilities and a full-featured bulletin board system . Many of these were at least as good as similar commercial offerings, but most had poor documentation. All PCW models, including

8178-504: The PCW was a poor choice as a general-purpose computer, because of its slow CPU and incompatibility with MS-DOS systems. This model, whose display labelled it "PcW16", was introduced in 1995 at a price of £299. Despite its name it was totally incompatible with all previous PCW systems. Instead of having two operating environments, Locoscript for word processing and CP/M for other uses, it had its own GUI operating system , known as "Rosanne". This could only run one application at

8319-587: The PcW16 used the 8-bit Zilog Z80 CPU , which first appeared in 1976, while other personal computers used 16-bit CPUs or the more recent 32-bit CPUs. The price included a mouse for use with the GUI, but did not include a printer. In a May 1996 PCW Plus magazine article Dave Langford expressed a series of concerns about the PcW16: the operating system could not run the many CP/M programs available for previous PCW models;

8460-513: The PcW16, used the Zilog Z80 range of CPUs . A 4 MHz Z80A was used in the 8256, 8512, 9512, 9256, 9512+ and PCW10; and a 16 MHz Z80 in the PCW16. The Z80 could only access 64  KB of RAM at a time. Software could work around this by bank switching , accessing different banks of memory at different times but this made programming more complex and slowed the system down. The PCW divided

8601-514: The Sinclair QL was in development, Sinclair also hoped to repeat his success with the Spectrum in the fledgling electric vehicle market, which he saw as ripe for a new approach. On 10 January 1985, Sinclair unveiled the Sinclair C5 , a small one-person battery electric recumbent tricycle . It marked the culmination of Sir Clive's long-running interest in electric vehicles. The C5 turned out to be

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8742-472: The Spanish alphabet and show messages in Spanish. The appearance of the ZX Spectrum 128 is similar to the ZX Spectrum+, with the exception of a large external heatsink for the internal 7805 voltage regulator added to the right hand end of the case, replacing the internal heatsink in previous versions. This external heatsink led to the system's nickname, "The Toast Rack ". New features included 128 KB RAM with RAM disc commands, three-channel audio via

8883-422: The Spectrum's rubber keyboard was simplified from several hundred components to a conventional moving keyboard down to "four to five" moving parts using a new technology. The keyboard was still undergoing changes as late as February 1982; some sketches included a roundel-on-square key design which was later featured on the later Spectrum+ model. Dickinson recalled in 2007 that "everything was cost driven" and that

9024-588: The Squarm invaders who have conquered Earth, by fighting through hordes of same, thus finding and locating the time-gates (hence the name) and using the gates to travel back through time to an earlier era, where one fought through more Squarm to find another gate. Eventually, if one hadn't been killed by the enemy, one got back to the year before the Squarm invaded, located their home planet, and locked onto it with one's meson RAM (48K), thereby destroying it and retroactively preventing its inhabitants from ever having invaded in

9165-567: The Taiwanese clones on price. Amstrad became the dominant British personal computer company, buying all the designs, marketing rights and product stocks of Sinclair Research Ltd 's computer division in April 1986, while Apricot later sold its manufacturing assets to Mitsubishi and became a software company. In the PCW's heyday the magazines 8000 Plus (later called PCW Plus ) and PCW Today were published specifically for PCW users. In addition to

9306-497: The UK with the MS-DOS operating system and a similar suite of business applications and became the only other IBM-compatible personal computer system available for less than £1,000 in Britain. At the time the cheapest complete systems from Apricot Computers cost under £2,000 and the cheapest IBM PC system cost £2,400. Although competitors' systems generally had more sophisticated features, including colour monitors , Whitehead thought

9447-411: The UK, and said that the reliability of the PCW's hardware and software and the range of independently produced add-on software for its word processing program were factors in its continued popularity. Laing says the PCW line's downfall was that " proper PCs became affordable". IBM, Compaq and other vendors of more expensive computers had reduced prices drastically in an attempt to increase demand during

9588-451: The Z80 memory map into four 16 KB banks. In CP/M , the memory used for the display was switched out while programs were running, giving more than 60 KB of usable RAM. While the Joyce architecture was designed with configurations of 128 KB and 256 KB of RAM in mind, no PCW was ever sold with 128 KB of RAM. Each PCW's CP/M application could not use more than 64 KB so

9729-440: The ZX Spectrum 128, allowing users to switch between 48K BASIC programming with keywords and 128K BASIC programming, where all words, both keywords and others, needed to be typed out in full (though keywords were still stored internally as one character each). Despite these changes, the layout remained identical to that of the 128. The ZX Spectrum +3 , which was launched in 1987, bore a resemblance to its predecessor but introduced

9870-523: The ZX80's software. The software architecture of the ZX80, however, had been tailored for a severely constrained memory system, and in Nine Tiles' opinion was unsuitable for the enhanced processing demands of the ZX Spectrum. Sinclair favoured solving this with expansion modules on the existing framework like with the ZX81, which Nine Tiles disagreed with. Ultimately, both designs were developed, but Vickers and Nine Tiles were unable to finish their version before

10011-500: The ZX81 Colour or the ZX82 to highlight the machine's colour display, which differed from the black and white of its predecessors. The addendum "Spectrum" was added later on, to emphasise its 15-colour palette. Aside from a new crystal oscillator and extra chips to add additional kilobytes of memory, the ZX Spectrum was intended to be, as quoted by Sinclair's marketing manager, essentially

10152-399: The beeper to emit multiple pitches. Later software became available that allowed for two-channel sound playback. The machine includes an expansion bus edge connector and 3.5 mm audio in/out ports, facilitating the connection of a cassette recorder for loading and saving programs and data. The EAR port has a higher output than the MIC and is recommended for headphones, while

10293-444: The bundled graphics program and for some games. The floppy disk drives on these models were in the unusual 3-inch "compact floppy" format, which was selected as it had a simpler electrical interface than 3½-inch drives. In the range's early days supplies of 3-inch floppies occasionally ran out, but by 1988 the PCW's popularity encouraged suppliers to compete for this market. There are several techniques for transferring data from

10434-414: The case was to be more angular and wedge-like, in similar vein to an upgraded ZX81 model. Dickinson later settled on a flatter design with a raised rear section and rounded sides in order to depict the machine as "more advanced" as opposed to a mere upgrade. In drawing up potential logos, Dickinson proposed a series of different logotypes which all featured rainbow slashes across the keyboard. The design of

10575-422: The character cells. In practical terms, this means that all pixels within an 8x8 character block share one foreground colour and one background colour. Altwasser received a patent for this design. An "attribute" consists of a foreground and a background colour, a brightness level (normal or bright) and a flashing "flag" which, when set, causes the two colours to swap at regular intervals. This scheme leads to what

10716-472: The code is loaded from the floppy. To make the printer cheap enough to be included with every PCW, Amstrad placed the majority of its drive electronics inside the PCW cabinet. The printer case contained only electromechanical components and high-current driver electronics; its power was supplied via a coaxial power connector socket on the monitor casing, and rather than using a traditional parallel interface , pin and motor signals were connected directly by

10857-538: The company sold their entire computer product range, along with the "Sinclair" brand name, to Alan Sugar 's Amstrad for £5 million. The takeover sent ripples through the London Stock Exchange , but Amstrad's shares soon recovered, with one stock broker affirming that " the City appears to have taken the news in its stride". Amstrad's acquisition of the brand name saw the release of three ZX Spectrum models throughout

10998-408: The company's Dryburgh factory. Prior to the manufacture of the ZX81, however, Timex had little experience in assembling electronics and had not originally been an obvious choice of manufacturing subcontractor. It was a well-established manufacturer of mechanical watches but was facing a crisis at the beginning of the 1980s; profits had dwindled to virtually zero as the market for watches stagnated in

11139-411: The company. Clive Sinclair became a focal point during the ZX Spectrum's marketing campaign by putting a human face onto the business. Sinclair Research was portrayed in the media as a "plucky" British challenger taking on the technical and marketing might of giant American and Japanese corporations. As David O'Reilly noted in 1986, "by astute use of public relations, particularly playing up his image of

11280-468: The competition. While most companies at the time reduced prices of their products while their market share was dwindling, Sinclair Research discounted theirs shortly after sales had peaked, throwing the competition into "utter disarray". Sinclair Research made a profit of £14 million in 1983, compared to £8.5 million the previous year. Turnover doubled from £27.2 million to £54.5 million, which equated to roughly £1 million for each person employed directly by

11421-450: The data transfer speed, the team significantly decreased the length of tones that represent binary data. To increase the reliability, a leading period of constant tone was introduced, which allowed the cassette recorder's automatic gain control to settle itself down, eliminating hisses on the tape. A Schmitt trigger was added inside the ULA to reduce noise of the received signal. Originally,

11562-434: The disk ran out of space, when the software would permanently delete files to make room for new ones. Layout facilities included setting and using tab stops , production of page headers and footers, with automated page numbering; typographical effects including proportional spacing, a range of font sizes, and bold, italic and underline effects. The cut, copy and paste facility provided 10 paste buffers, each designated by

11703-482: The effects of which are still seen. It was among the first home computers aimed at a mainstream audience, with some crediting it as responsible for launching the British information technology industry. The Spectrum is one of the best-selling British computers of all time, retaining the title of Britain's top-selling computer until the Amstrad PCW surpassed it in the 1990s. It was discontinued in 1992. The ZX Spectrum

11844-428: The end of that month. Supply did not return to normal until the 1982 Christmas season, however. Production of the machine rapidly increased with the arrival of the more inexpensive Issue 2 motherboard , a redesign of the main circuit board which addressed hardware manufacturing defects that affected production of the first model. Sales of the ZX Spectrum reached 200,000 in its first nine months, rising to 300,000 for

11985-608: The end of the year. It ultimately flopped, with 139,454 units being manufactured. The ZX Spectrum+, a rebranded ZX Spectrum with identical technical specifications except for the QL-like keyboard, was introduced in October 1984 and made available in WHSmith's stores the day after its launch. Retailers stocked the device in high quantities, anticipating robust Christmas sales. Nevertheless, the product did not perform as well as projected, leading to

12126-485: The essential hardware functions. Altwasser designed a graphics mode that required less than 7 kilobytes of memory and implemented it on the ULA. Vickers wrote most of the ROM code. Lengthy discussions between Altwasser and Sinclair engineers resulted in a broad agreement that the ZX Spectrum must have high-resolution graphics, 16 kilobytes of memory, an improved cassette interface , and an impressive colour palette. To achieve this,

12267-527: The face of competition from the digital and quartz watches . Recognising the trend, Timex's director, Fred Olsen , determined that the company would diversify into other areas and signed a contract with Sinclair. The ZX Spectrum was officially revealed before journalists by Sinclair at the Churchill Hotel in Marylebone , London, on 23 April 1982. Later that week, the machine was officially presented in

12408-504: The first place. Time-Gate , due to its intense use of machine-code-driven sound, placed more stress on the Spectrum's sound capabilities than previous games, and thereby inadvertently revealed a design flaw in early machines, whereby the Time-Gate sound effects would crash those machines. This resulted in some people buying the game to stress-test their Spectrums. ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum ( UK : / z ɛ d ɛ k s / )

12549-437: The flash RAM was too small for a large collection of programs, but programs could not be run from the floppy disk, which was designed for backing up files; and a second-hand IBM PC with Locoscript Pro looked like a more sensible upgrade path for users of earlier PCWs. Few PcW16s were sold. This section covers the PCW 8xxx, 9xxx and 10 series; software for the PcW16 is described above. The word processing software Locoscript

12690-525: The heart of the PCW provided access to part of the 1k ROM within the Intel 8041 microcontroller used to drive the printer. The Z80 would copy 256 bytes via the ASIC into RAM, providing sufficient instructions to load the first sector from a floppy. The ROM-based code cannot display text, being too small to support character generation; instead, it displays a bright screen which is progressively filled by black stripes as

12831-442: The initials and the product was launched as the "Personal Computer Word-processor", abbreviated to "PCW". The advertising campaign featured trucks unloading typewriters to form huge scrap heaps, with the slogan "It's more than a word processor for less than most typewriters". In Britain the system was initially sold exclusively through Dixons , whose chairman shared Sugar's dream that computers would cease to be exclusive products for

12972-428: The keyboard surprised many users due to its use of rubber keys, described as offering the feel of "dead flesh". Sinclair himself remarked that the keyboard's rubber mould was "unusual", but consumers were undeterred. Despite very high demand, Sinclair Research was "notoriously late" in delivering the ZX Spectrum. Their practice of offering mail-order sales before units were ready ensured a constant cash flow, but meant

13113-498: The last, the monitor 's casing included the CPU , RAM , floppy disk drives and power supply for all of the systems' components. All except the last included a printer in the price. Early models used 3-inch floppy disks, while those sold from 1991 onwards used 3½-inch floppies, which became the industry standard around the time the PCW series was launched. A variety of inexpensive products and services were launched to copy 3-inch floppies to

13254-433: The late 1980s, each with varying improvements. By 1990, Sinclair Research consisted of Sinclair and two other employees down from 130 employees at its peak in 1985. The ZX Spectrum was officially discontinued in 1992, after ten years on the market. Sinclair Research thereafter continued to exist as a one-man company, marketing Sir Clive Sinclair's inventions until his death in September 2021. The central processing unit

13395-443: The launch of the Spectrum and it was not used. The distinctive case and colourful design of the ZX Spectrum was the creation of Rick Dickinson , a young British industrial designer who had been hired by Sinclair to design the ZX81. Dickinson was tasked to design a sleeker and more "marketable" appearance to the new machine, whilst ensuring all 192 BASIC functions could fit onto 40 physical keys. Early sketches from August 1981 showed

13536-500: The machine into 48K mode, keeping the current BASIC program intact (although there is no command to switch back to 128K mode). To enable BASIC programmers to access the additional memory, a RAM disk was created where files could be stored in the additional 80 KB of RAM. The new commands took the place of two existing user-defined-character spaces causing compatibility problems with certain BASIC programs. Unlike its predecessors, it has no internal speaker, and can only produce sound from

13677-465: The machine was criticised, with disillusioned customers telephoning and writing letters. Demand sky-rocketed beyond Sinclair's planned 20,000 monthly unit output to a backlog of 30,000 orders by July 1982. Due to a scheduled holiday at the Timex factory that summer, the backlog had risen to 40,000 units. Sinclair issued a public apology in September that year, and promised that the backlog would be cleared by

13818-542: The machine was powered off. On the other hand, the standalone Locoscript word processor program was able to use 154 KB as normal memory, and the rest as a RAM disk. Mallard BASIC , like LocoScript, was a Locomotive Software product, but ran under CP/M. This version of BASIC lacked built-in graphics facilities, but included JetSAM, an implementation of ISAM that supported multiple indexes per file, so that programs could access records directly by specifying values of key fields. The CP/M software bundle also included

13959-467: The minimalist, Bauhaus approach to the Spectrum gave it an elegant yet "[non] revolutionary" form. The drawing board on which Dickinson designed the ZX Spectrum is now on display in the Science Museum in London. The need for an improved cassette interface was apparent from the number of complaints received from ZX81 users, who encountered problems when trying to save and load programs. To increase

14100-414: The new memory would be available as eight pages of 16 KB at the top of the address space. The same technique was used to page between the new 16 KB editor ROM and the original 16 KB BASIC ROM at the bottom of the address space. The new sound chip and MIDI out abilities were exposed to the BASIC programming language with the command PLAY and a new command SPECTRUM was added to switch

14241-448: The organisation. Given the loss of confidence in the company, securing the funds proved to be a challenging task. In June 1985, business magnate Robert Maxwell disclosed a takeover bid for Sinclair Research through Hollis Brothers, a subsidiary of his Pergamon Press . However, the deal was terminated in August 1985. The future of Sinclair Research remained uncertain until 7 April 1986, when

14382-424: The previous ©️ 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd ) However, it was largely identical to the ZX Spectrum 128 in most technical aspects. The machine retailed for £149. The new keyboard did not feature the BASIC keyword markings seen on earlier Spectrums, except for the keywords LOAD , CODE , and RUN , which were useful for loading software. Instead, the +2 introduced a menu system, almost identical to that of

14523-459: The previous Sinclair Radionics products. On 29 January 1980, the ZX80 home computer was launched to immediate popularity; notable for being one of the first computers available in the United Kingdom for less than £100. The company conducted no market research whatsoever prior to the launch of the ZX80; according to Sinclair, he "simply had a hunch" that the public was sufficiently interested to make such

14664-600: The price. However, none of the software for previous PCW models could run on this system. In 1984, Tandy Corporation executive Steve Leininger, designer of the TRS-80 Model I , admitted that "as an industry we haven't found any compelling reason to buy a computer for the home" other than for word processing . Amstrad 's founder Alan Sugar realised that most computers in the United Kingdom were used for word processing at home, and allegedly sketched an outline design for

14805-405: The rather old CP/M operating system would restrict the range of software available from expanding beyond the spreadsheet , typing tutor and cheque book balancing programs already on sale. However, the magazine predicted that the PCW's large screen and easy-to-use word processing software would make it a formidable competitor for dedicated word processors in the home and business markets. The system

14946-475: The rear expansion slot were available from third parties. Both machines had 16 KB of onboard ROM. An "Issue 1" ZX Spectrum can be distinguished from Issue 2 or 3 models by the colour of the keys – light grey for Issue 1, blue-grey for later machines. Although the official service manual states that approximately 26,000 of these original boards were manufactured, subsequent serial number analysis shows that only 16,000 were produced, almost all of which fell in

15087-420: The relative slowness of the basic printer seldom caused difficulties. Locoscript did not run under the control of a standard operating system but booted directly from a floppy disk. Users had to reboot if they wanted to switch between Locoscript and a CP/M application, unless they used a utility called "Flipper", which could allocate separate areas of RAM to Locoscript and CP/M. Locoscript version 1, which

15228-412: The removal of several lines on the expansion bus edge connector. This resulted in complications for various peripheries. Additionally, changes in memory timing led to certain RAM banks being contended, causing failures in high-speed colour-changing effects. The keypad scanning routines from the ROM were also eliminated, rendering some older 48K and 128K games incompatible with the machine. The ZX Interface 1

15369-459: The role of microcomputer manufacturer and "accepted the mantle of pioneering boffin leading Britain into a technological utopia". Sinclair's contribution to the technology sector resulted in him being knighted upon the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher in the Queen's 1983 Birthday Honours List . The United Kingdom was largely immunised from the effects of the video game crash of 1983 , due to

15510-514: The saturation of home computers such as the ZX Spectrum. The microcomputer market continued to grow and game development was unhindered despite the turbulence in the American markets. Indeed, computer games remained the dominant sector of the British home video game market up until they were surpassed by Sega and Nintendo consoles in 1991. By the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies in Britain selling video games on cassette, compared to 95

15651-540: The serial number range 001-000001 to 001-016000. An online tool now exists to allow users to ascertain the likely issue number of their ZX Spectrum by inputting the serial number. These models experienced numerous changes to its motherboard design throughout its life; mainly to improve manufacturing efficiencies, but also to correct bugs from previous boards. Another issue was with the Spectrum's power supply. In March 1983, Sinclair issued an urgent recall warning for all owners of models bought after 1 January 1983. Plugs with

15792-455: The system took up slightly less than 7 kilobytes of memory, leaving an additional 9 kilobytes to write programs — a figure that pleased the team. Much of the firmware was written by computer scientist Steve Vickers from Nine Tiles, who compiled all control routines to produce the Sinclair BASIC interpreter, a custom variant of the general purpose BASIC programming language. Making

15933-472: The system used the rest of the RAM for a RAM drive . On the other hand, the standalone Locoscript word processor program was reported as using up to 154 KB as normal memory and the rest as a RAM disk. Unusually, the Z80 CPU in the PCW 8256, 8512, 9512, 9256 and 9512+ had no directly connected ROM , which most computers used to start the boot process . Instead, at startup, the ASIC (customised circuit) at

16074-488: The team aimed for data transfer speed of 1000 baud , but succeeded in getting it to work at a considerably faster 1500 baud. Unlike the ZX81, the Spectrum was able to maintain its display during loading and saving operations, and programmers took advantage of this to show a splash screen whilst loading took place in the background. As with the ZX81, the ZX Spectrum was manufactured in Dundee , Scotland, by Timex Corporation at

16215-409: The team had to divorce the central processing unit (CPU) away from the main display to enable it to work at full efficiency – a method which contrasted with the ZX81's integrated CPU. The inclusion of colour to the display proved a major obstacle to the engineers. A Teletext -like approach was briefly considered, in which each line of text would have colour-change codes inserted into it. However, this

16356-441: The technologically adept and would become consumer products. In 1986, John Whitehead described the Amstrad PCW as "the bargain of the decade", and technology writer Gordon Laing said in 2007, "It represented fantastic value at a time when an IBM compatible or a Mac would cost a comparative fortune." At its United Kingdom launch in September 1985, the basic PCW model was priced at £399 plus value added tax , which included

16497-441: The units and the connectors for the printer and keyboard. The monitor displayed green characters on a black background. It measured 12 inches (30 cm) diagonally, and showed 32 lines of 90 characters each. The designers preferred this to the usual personal computer display of 25 80-character lines, as the larger size would be more convenient for displaying a whole letter. The monitor could also display graphics well enough for

16638-401: The usual product reviews and technical advice, they featured other content such as articles by science fiction writer and software developer Dave Langford on his experiences of using the PCW. By 1989, 1.5 million units had been sold. When the PCW line was retired in 1998, 8 million machines had been sold. The Daily Telegraph estimated in 2000 that 100,000 were still in use in

16779-419: The whole of the first year. By August 1983 total sales in Britain and Europe had exceeded 500,000, with the millionth Spectrum manufactured on 9 December 1983. By this point, an average of 50,000 units were being purchased each month. In July 1983, the ZX Spectrum was launched in the United States as the more enhanced Timex Sinclair 2068 . Advertisements described it as offering 72 kilobytes of memory, having

16920-555: The world's first pocket calculator , the Sinclair Executive . By the mid 1970s, Sinclair Radionics was producing handheld electronic calculators, miniature televisions, and the ill-fated digital Black Watch wristwatch. Due to financial losses, Sinclair sought investors from the National Enterprise Board (NEB), who had bought a 43% interest in the company and streamlined his product line. Sinclair's relationship with

17061-402: The year before. An estimated 10,000 to 50,000 people, mostly young men, were developing games out of their homes based on advertisements in popular magazines. The growth of video games during this period has been compared to the punk subculture , fuelled by young people making money from their games. By the mid 1980s, Sinclair Research's share of the British home computer market had climbed to

17202-565: Was added at the last minute. During development the PCW 8256 / 8512 project was code-named "Joyce" after Sugar's secretary. For the launch the product name "Zircon" was jointly suggested by MEJ Electronics and Locomotive Software, as both companies had been spun off from Data Recall , which had produced a word processing system called " Diamond " in the 1970s. Sugar, preferring a more descriptive name, suggested "WPC" standing for "Word Processing Computer", but Perry pointed out that this invited jokes about Women Police Constables. Sugar reshuffled

17343-551: Was also rendered incompatible due to disparities in ROM and expansion connectors, making it impossible to connect and use the Microdrive units. Production of the +3 was discontinued in December 1990, reportedly in response to Amstrad's relaunch of their CPC range, with an estimated 15% of ZX Spectrums sold being +3 models at the time. The +2B model, the only other model still in production at this point, continued to be manufactured, as it

17484-408: Was believed not to be in direct competition with other computers in Amstrad's product range. Amstrad PCW The series consists of PCW 8256 and PCW 8512 (introduced in 1985), PCW 9512 (introduced in 1987), PCW 9256 (introduced in 1991), PCW 10 and PcW16 (introduced in 1995). These models are described in detail on the " Models and features " section. In all models, including

17625-420: Was bundled with the PCW 8256 and 8512, had no spell checker or mail merge facilities. Version 2, which was bundled with the PCW 9512, included a spellchecker and could provide mail merge by interfacing to other products from Locomotive Software , such as LocoMail and LocoFile. Locoscript 2 also expanded the character set to 400. The PCW included a version of CP/M known as " CP/M Plus ". This provided

17766-411: Was conceived and designed by engineers at Sinclair Research, founded by English entrepreneur and inventor Clive Sinclair , who was well known for his eccentricity and pioneering ethic. On 25 July 1961, three years after passing his A-levels , he founded Sinclair Radionics Ltd as a vehicle to advertise his inventions and buy components. In 1972, Sinclair had competed with Texas Instruments to produce

17907-473: Was designed by English entrepreneur and inventor Sir Clive Sinclair and his small team in Cambridge , and was manufactured in Dundee , Scotland by Timex Corporation . It was made to be small, simple, and most importantly inexpensive, with as few components as possible. The addendum "Spectrum" was chosen to highlight the machine's colour display, which differed from the black-and-white display of its predecessor,

18048-494: Was dubbed "colour clash" or attribute clash , where a desired colour of a specific pixel could not be selected, but only the colour attributes of an 8x8 block. This became a distinctive feature of the Spectrum, requiring programs, especially games, to be designed with this limitation in mind. In contrast, other machines available at the same time, such as the Amstrad CPC or the Commodore 64 , did not suffer from this limitation. While

18189-428: Was expanded compared to that of the ZX81, which lacked lowercase letters. Spectrum BASIC incorporated extra keywords for better graphics and sound functionality, and support for multi-statement lines was added. The built-in ROM tape modulation software routines for cassette data storage enable data transfers at an average speed of 171 bits per second (bit/s), with a theoretical peak speed of 256 bit/s. The tape modulation

18330-532: Was far too large for the Z80 CPU to scroll in software without ripple and tearing of the display. Instead, the PCW implemented a Roller RAM consisting of a 512-byte area of RAM that held the address of each line of display data. The screen could now be scrolled either by changing the Roller RAM contents or by writing to an I/O port that set the starting point in Roller RAM for the screen data. This allowed for very rapid scrolling. The video system also fetched data in

18471-556: Was inadvisable to write to them using this drive. Users of single-sided drives had to flip the disks over to use the full capacity. The dot matrix printer had a sheet feed for short documents and a tractor attachment for long reports on continuous stationery . This unit could print 90 characters per second at draft quality and 20 characters per second at higher quality, and could also produce graphics. However it had only 9 printing pins and even its higher quality did not match that of 24-pin printers. The dot matrix printer

18612-509: Was included in the price of the hardware. The manual provided both a reference and a tutorial that could enable users to start work within 20 minutes, and some users found the tutorial provided as much information as they ever needed. The program enabled users to divide documents into groups, display the groups on a disk and then the documents in the selected group, and set up a template for each group. The " limbo file" facility enabled users to recover accidentally deleted documents until

18753-588: Was issued as a prize. The ZX Spectrum's successor, the Sinclair QL , was officially announced on 12 January 1984, shortly before the Apple Macintosh went on sale. Contrasting with its predecessors, the QL was aimed at more serious, professional home users. It suffered from several design flaws; fully operational QLs were not available until the late summer, and complaints against Sinclair concerning delays were upheld by

18894-402: Was launched in September 1985, and had 256  KB of RAM and one floppy disk drive. Launched a few months later, the PCW 8512 had 512 KB of RAM and two floppy disk drives. Both systems consisted of three units: a printer; a keyboard ; and a monochrome CRT monitor whose casing included the processor, memory, motherboard , one or two floppy disk drives, the power supply for all

19035-499: Was not very robust as its chassis was made entirely of plastic. Users who needed to support higher print volumes or to produce graphics could buy a daisy-wheel printer or graph plotter from Amstrad. The daisy-wheel printer could not produce graphics. The keyboard had 82 keys, some of which were designed for word processing, especially with the bundled Locoscript software – for example to cut, copy, and paste . Non-English characters such as Greek could be typed by holding down

19176-449: Was reduced in price to £129. In 1985, Sinclair developed the ZX Spectrum 128 (codenamed Derby ) in conjunction with their Spanish distributor Investrónica (a subsidiary of El Corte Inglés department store group). Investrónica had helped adapt the ZX Spectrum+ to the Spanish market after their government introduced a special tax on all computers with 64 KB RAM or less, and a law which obliged all computers sold in Spain to support

19317-564: Was released in the US as the Timex Sinclair 2068 in 1983, and in some parts of Europe as the Timex Computer 2048 . Ultimately the Spectrum was released as seven different models, ranging from the entry level with 16  KB RAM released in 1982 to the ZX ;Spectrum +3 with 128 KB RAM and built-in floppy disk drive in 1987. Throughout its life, the machine primarily competed with

19458-470: Was ruled out, as it was deemed unsuitable for high-resolution graphs or diagrams that involved multiple colour changes. Altwasser devised the idea of allocating a colour attribute to each character position on the screen. This ultimately used eight bits of memory for each character position; three bits to provide any one of eight foreground colours and three bits for the eight background colours , one bit for extra brightness and one bit for flashing. Overall,

19599-414: Was sold in the US via major stores, business equipment shops and electronics retailers. The PCW redefined the idea of "best value" in computers by concentrating on reducing the price, which totally disrupted the personal computer market. The low price encouraged home users to trade up from simpler systems like the ZX Spectrum , whose sales had passed their peak. According to Personal Computer World ,

19740-421: Was the most common use of home computers. Due to the large number of unsold Spectrum+ models, Sinclair decided not to start it selling in the United Kingdom until January 1986 at a price of £179. The Zilog Z80 processor used in the Spectrum has a 16-bit address bus, which means only 64 KB of memory can be directly addressed. To facilitate the extra 80 KB of RAM the designers used bank switching so

19881-487: Was written for the machine. The display unit, which also contained the processor, motherboard and RAM, was the standard 640×480 pixels in size and worked in VGA mode. The PcW16 included a standard 1.4  MB floppy drive. While competitors included hard disk drives with capacities of a few hundred MB to a few GB , the PcW16 used a 1 MB flash memory to store the programs and user files. Like previous PCW models,

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