ZX Spectrum turned 27 years old: how it was
On April 23, 1982, one of the first widely available home PCs from Sinclair Research appeared in the world ... Information was collected bit by bit. There was a confusion between the words Sinclair and Spectrum, and an unimaginable number of modifications, as many as four pieces:
Spectrum 64
Spectrum 128
Spectrum 128 D
Spectrum 128 DS
At that time there was no concept of PC and its components at all; nobody was used to the enormous choice of components that we have on the market today. Each letter in the title saw its own, unique magic. Schoolchildren faced a difficult choice: what to buy - Dandy or Spectrum? And there was also a dream - Sega MegaDrayv.
I chose the Spectrum and its most expensive modification - 128 DS. In the store, we found out what this means: 128 kilobytes of RAM, a sound synthesizer (S) and a disk drive (D). The computer itself was a white box with a keyboard, and next to it was a large chest — a five-inch floppy disk drive.
')
I can not put into words that waiting for the master, who was supposed to come and connect the computer to the TV. We waited for him all day, and even more painfully waited until he soldered to the TV the necessary schemes for connecting the Spectrum. And so it happened. The wizard showed how to go to the disk system and type RUN to boot, wished us luck and left.
The first six months, I continuously played. I bought an unimaginable amount of 5-inch floppy disks with games. The well-known KEY computer center, now representing the largest network in the city, was then a small cramped shop in the city center. Crowding in the queues for the games was unbearable. In order to somehow improve the campaigns for games, I bought a collection of "600 best games for the Spectrum." Six volumes with descriptions of games and tips on passing. It became easier - you come to the store, you stand in a queue, choose the necessary disks from the catalog and ask them from the seller.
Separately, there was a story with cassette games: an ordinary cassette recorder was connected to the Spectrum, information encoded with a normal sound was read from the cassettes. At the hearing, it was perceived badly, each game was loaded for 10-15 minutes. Tired quickly, so I plugged it in as a means of playing sound. Then the cassette player in this regard, replaced the amplifier with concert speakers. The sound, I must say, in the Spectrum was the envy of many modern games :-)
And finally, I was bored with the games, and I opened the little book that came with the computer called “Programming in the BASIC language”. We can say that it radically changed my future life. At Spectrum BASIC, I wrote an incredible number of programs, ranging from screensavers to mathematical tools for school homework in physics and geometry. I became interested in programming in the same way I used to play games. Then I came across IsDOS - a product of our company Iskrasoft, which made carpets and software. The most amazing duet that I knew then. IsDOS was a real OS for Spectrum and almost completely imitated Norton Commander from large “real” PCs.
Then for me the era of programming in assembler. Asm was easy for me, since on the Spectrum it was simple and absolutely all available instructions could be easily remembered. After a couple of weeks of studying, I wrote my first game on asma - these were two-dimensional space “shooters” in which it was necessary to dodge friendly ships and shoot enemies.
Two years after the acquisition, my Spectrum headed for a well-deserved vacation, and a supernew and fabulously expensive 486th IBM PC 133 MHz came to replace it.
Spectrum 64
Spectrum 128
Spectrum 128 D
Spectrum 128 DS
At that time there was no concept of PC and its components at all; nobody was used to the enormous choice of components that we have on the market today. Each letter in the title saw its own, unique magic. Schoolchildren faced a difficult choice: what to buy - Dandy or Spectrum? And there was also a dream - Sega MegaDrayv.
I chose the Spectrum and its most expensive modification - 128 DS. In the store, we found out what this means: 128 kilobytes of RAM, a sound synthesizer (S) and a disk drive (D). The computer itself was a white box with a keyboard, and next to it was a large chest — a five-inch floppy disk drive.
')
I can not put into words that waiting for the master, who was supposed to come and connect the computer to the TV. We waited for him all day, and even more painfully waited until he soldered to the TV the necessary schemes for connecting the Spectrum. And so it happened. The wizard showed how to go to the disk system and type RUN to boot, wished us luck and left.
The first six months, I continuously played. I bought an unimaginable amount of 5-inch floppy disks with games. The well-known KEY computer center, now representing the largest network in the city, was then a small cramped shop in the city center. Crowding in the queues for the games was unbearable. In order to somehow improve the campaigns for games, I bought a collection of "600 best games for the Spectrum." Six volumes with descriptions of games and tips on passing. It became easier - you come to the store, you stand in a queue, choose the necessary disks from the catalog and ask them from the seller.
Separately, there was a story with cassette games: an ordinary cassette recorder was connected to the Spectrum, information encoded with a normal sound was read from the cassettes. At the hearing, it was perceived badly, each game was loaded for 10-15 minutes. Tired quickly, so I plugged it in as a means of playing sound. Then the cassette player in this regard, replaced the amplifier with concert speakers. The sound, I must say, in the Spectrum was the envy of many modern games :-)
And finally, I was bored with the games, and I opened the little book that came with the computer called “Programming in the BASIC language”. We can say that it radically changed my future life. At Spectrum BASIC, I wrote an incredible number of programs, ranging from screensavers to mathematical tools for school homework in physics and geometry. I became interested in programming in the same way I used to play games. Then I came across IsDOS - a product of our company Iskrasoft, which made carpets and software. The most amazing duet that I knew then. IsDOS was a real OS for Spectrum and almost completely imitated Norton Commander from large “real” PCs.
Then for me the era of programming in assembler. Asm was easy for me, since on the Spectrum it was simple and absolutely all available instructions could be easily remembered. After a couple of weeks of studying, I wrote my first game on asma - these were two-dimensional space “shooters” in which it was necessary to dodge friendly ships and shoot enemies.
Two years after the acquisition, my Spectrum headed for a well-deserved vacation, and a supernew and fabulously expensive 486th IBM PC 133 MHz came to replace it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/58299/
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