The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was released in 1982 as the third in Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX series of computer. A significant upgrade from the earlier zx80 and zx81, the ZX Spectrum featured colour and sound (albeit with some constraints) at a price point significantly lower than equivalent rivals. This helped the Spectrum to dominate the UK home computing scene of the early 80s, despite the numerous commercial and quality issues suffered by Sinclair Research - which in conjunction with the Sinclair C5 debacle, led to the ZX Spectrum being sold off to arch-rival company Amstrad.

With the last machine rolling off the production lines in December 1990, there were a number of upgrades and changes in the nine years of production (e.g. better keyboards, reduced chip-count, extra memory, a dedicated soundchip), but the core functionality remained essentially unchanged, and you could generally load a 1992 game into a 1982 Spectrum without any problems. Some 5 million units rolled off the lines in the UK alone, while official variants and (unlicenced) Eastern European clones may well quadruple this total - with some of the clones still in production!

The Spectrum ceased to be commercially viable in 1993: the last commercial game was released in July and the final issue of the last surviving UK magazine was published in September. However, during that time - over a decade - thousands of games, applications and demos were released. Even today, software is still being produced and released, thanks to the Spectrum's strong international communities - this has been helped by the growth of the "retro" scene, and some new games have even seen a physical release on a traditional C15 cassette...

I recieved a Spectrum for Christmas 1987, and was fortunate enough to have a relative with a vast collection of games, which I gleefully ploughed through for several years. Sadly, it then fell out of favour as the household acquired other systems - such as a Commodore 128, an Amiga 600, a Megadrive and even a Pentium-powered PC running at an amazing 100Mhz. However, the discovery of emulators at university helped to rekindle the flame, and I've been slowly drawn back into the 8-bit era ever since.

Click the links to learn more about the technological miracles packed within that little black box...