Time marches on relentlessly. I remember this computer as the candy behind the glass — in ads in Western tech magazines. I wrote about this before, in an earlier round of memories: I remember being genuinely excited around 1983–1984, because here was a computer that was actually affordable. 99 GBP was a huge sum of money in communist Poland at the time, but it was several times cheaper than other computers on the market.
And I think that's the right way to look at this machine today — it set out to pull off a pricing revolution, to become the first home computer in history to break below the magic 100 GBP mark.
It was the first Sinclair computer to ship in a black case — its predecessor, the ZX80, had a white one.
The Sinclair ZX81 had every flaw you could possibly pin on a computer, and yet it carved out a clear place for itself in computing history. It was a computer almost anyone could afford. It gave countless programmers their first taste of owning a computer at all. Among other things, the ZX81 as a product is part of why, in 1983, Clive Sinclair got to add "Sir" to his name, knighted by the Queen of England.
It made no sound, displayed only black-and-white graphics, and — without a fairly expensive RAM expansion at the time — offered only a 64×48px semi-graphics mode and a 32×24 character text mode. A little-known ad from Sinclair's own 1983 campaign sums it up perfectly.
It had a terrible keyboard, very little RAM (1KB), a ROM full of bugs, and video output only as an RF signal to a TV set.
Take a look at its motherboard (issue one) — hand-drawn traces on the board — pure poetry from that era of computer prototypes.
And yet look at what people built as expansions for it:
the first AY sound generator add-ons appeared in 1982 on the ZX81, not the ZX Spectrum, which would go on to make that chip famous across the world of 8-bit computers the famous ZX Printer controllers that let you hook up things like a disk drive the ZX Pand interface, which — besides adding SD-card mass storage — also expands RAM up to 32K the Chroma interface, which lets you enjoy color the way the ZX Spectrum did, plus a few extras
As a computer to actually program on, the ZX81 is a real challenge — and we're really talking about its limitations here more than its capabilities.
I'll admit I couldn't resist a composite-video mod, a new keyboard membrane, and both of the interfaces mentioned above — it turns into quite the sandwich, or more like a train being pulled behind poor old Zeddy (as its fans affectionately call it).
Last year I put together two small demoscene productions — both as a way to exercise my brain during the pandemic, one of them for Speccy.pl Party 2020.1.
Zeddy, a legend from the early 80s. The computer that pulled off a pricing revolution in home computers.
Happy 40th Birthday, Mr Zeddy.
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