Santa brought my house a Spectrum 48k Lo Profile when I was a kid with a cool KnightRider style keyboard.

Over the years I haven’t seen it talked about much if at all, so I always assumed it was a fairly niche model. After hearing about Sir Clive, I looked it up to find out how many sold and was surprised to learn that it never actually existed as a standalone device.

My dad must have bought the add-on kit, and an 81, and quietly upgraded it and just never told us kids. I’m gonna call him when I’m done typing this.

All I ever wanted to do on it was transcribe the programs from my magazines and try to learn how to make something of my own someday. I’m not sure what I’d be doing now if he had just brought home an Atari, but I almost certainly wouldn’t be in tech.

Cheers, Clive. I hope I see you down the road when the last of my cyan and red bars have run out.

For anyone interested:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/anachrocomputer/2671208818

There was some magical feeling back then that I think is hard to capture now. The manuals were really good for teaching you - I learned sine and cosine from the diagrams in the manual years before we covered them in maths. The memory layout and system variables were documented, as were all the Z80 opcodes. The first time I used LDIR to transfer data to screen from off screen memory was magical.

You really could master the whole machine and I feel that the limitations actually helped. I would spend summers writing large assembly language programs. Before I had an assembler (HiSoft DevPac) I would hand assemble programs by writing them out on paper and then figuring out the opcodes and calculate the jump relative offsets.

You too?

I didn't fully understand them, and thought they had more to do with circles than triangles, but yeah that circle drawing code in the Spectrum manual was my first exposure to sin and cos.

Sin/Cos were just the gateway drug. To do interesting stuff on the computer, I ended up learning matrix algebra (for rotating things on screen) and even simple calculus (filling out areas) years before they were mentioned at school. When school math caught up, my math grades shot thru the roof - while remaining a below-avg student on everything except math and science.

I used to literally bring the spectrum programming manual with me to all our vacations - using it to hand "assemble" assembly programs into machine code (I had never heard of an assembler - and I won't have had any way to get my hands on one even if I had known about them) so that I could type them in when we got back home.

My dad took the day off work to take me to the PC show at Earls Court in I think 1988. I spent my hard earned paper round money on the assembler and it massively improved my productivity.

I figured out how to do multiplies and divides on the Z80 while doing my paper round. In retrospect it was just long division but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time!

There were lots of other little math tricks that having a slow processor taught you. If you tried to draw circles by calculating sine and cosine it was too slow. Instead you rotated each point by a fixed angle and then used reflections to use that to plot eight points at a time.

All this stuff is still super useful. I drop down to look at the disassembly of x64 code all the time. Large code bases don’t scare me. You have source code! I had to disassemble games and ROMs to figure out how they worked - printing out fragments and then annotating them. The disassembler took 5KB of space so you’d have to load it in at different addresses to get at all the code.

But that is exactly right!

When you booted a ZX-80, 81, Spectrum, a VIC-20, a PET, or an Apple II+, you went straight into a BASIC interpreter (or REPL, for the initiated). You could enter a program, or issue commands at will. We rarely think about this, but the first UI you see in those machines is a programming language.

And we did program a lot with those machines.

With a CP/M machine or a DOS PC (there were about 2 people in the world with PCs without floppies ;-) ), you boot into an OS. It's not a programming environment, but one designed for starting applications someone else wrote. While most had a BASIC interpreter you could run, it was a standalone program and not THE language of the machine. And experimenting COULD harm the computer - you could delete files from your DOS boot disk, as many of us discovered the hard way.

I think if you booted in this mode, BASIC had no access to the floppy drive at all so you couldn't save your work (or we kids didn't know how). Better to boot from a floppy, then after it finished booting, swap the floppy for another one to save the silly BASIC games we were writing.

Later on, we saw models with two floppy drives, so you could leave the floppy containing DOS and BASIC in drive A: and save your work onto the disk in drive B: Eventually, PCs began to come with hard drives and these naturally became drive C: So if you've ever wondered why Windows typically refers to the hard drive containing the OS as drive C: it's because drives A: and B: were the floppy drives.

That's true. The PCs had a BASIC in ROM and a cassette port. That was dropped starting with the XT, which gave the puzzling "NO ROM BASIC" message in 80-column text when the hard disk was not bootable.

I was just talking about my own experience, but since you ask (and I’m certain this will bore but you did ask):

I got into tech due to having access to that computer, at that time, in an environment that otherwise wouldn’t have been amenable to learning about it at all.

In my case - our family Spectrum was later replaced by a SNES and after that a PS1. After the 48k, I didn’t have access to a PC at home for another decade, and wouldn’t have seen the point of saving enough to get it if not for having the Spectrum.

If I had gotten an Atari to begin with I wouldn’t have had those experiences. I guess something else inspired you along the way - for me it was this.

Especially because the Atari was very unpopular in Europe. The C64 was king. That also made it more expensive which was why I got the 800XL.

But it also meant much less software around which is how I started programming.

I totally forgot how Europe was not really one thing but totally different countries back then. Not to mention the eastern countries.

I remember when the guys that kidnapped Heineken fled to Paris and they couldn't be extradited back because there was no extradition agreement yet between France and the Netherlands.... :X Such different times.

It depends on your definition of "Europe" ;-) The 8/16-bit Atari was (and still is, in some circles) extremely popular in Germany, Poland, and former Czechoslovakia.

But the C64 was 600 guilders at the time and the Atari was 'dumped' on the market at one point for 200 so it was an easy choice :)

as an enthusiastic eight year old, i was perhaps not as good at soldering as i would have liked. good thing i was lucky enough to have the st to start with.

All the best music software was on Atari I think due to the excellent timing and MIDI support: Cubase, Emagic Notator/Logic (now only by Apple)

Though I guess both of those started on C64 but then migrated to Atari

The mainstream 8-bit machine with the best graphics was probably the Amstrad CPC. Here's a comparison with the Spectrum for example : https://imgur.com/a/D7Ocd

When it comes to arcade-style gameplay though, the C64 was often ahead because of its hardware accelerated sprites (and a legendary sound chip that was ahead of its time)

FYI since I've seen this mistake a few times in this discussion: Sir Clive or Sir Clive Sinclair. "Sir" and "Dame" are attached to the given name, never the surname. I don't know why it's different from other titles, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to explain, just states the rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir

This was especially the case for commoners, or non aristocrats, who only had first names, and had to be uniquely identified by their professions, the names of their fathers or a well known relative. If Bob the Builder got a knighthood for exceptional diligence in building siege engines for the noble and perennial cause of annoying the French, then the only real name the title could be attached to would have been "Bob."

The reason it is different for other titles is that those titles belonged to the landed aristocracy, and were generally titles to the fiefdoms of that territory, so titles like Lord Acton, Lord Dunsany, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, referred to actual places. If a higher title is awarded to a commoner who does not possess a hereditary fiefdom, then a fiefdom will be invented for them such as when William Thompson became Lord Kelvin.

The explanation given is that the princesshood attached to her, personally. I suspect it is the same with a knighthood. And the "dr" comes before the "mrs", as it is more prestigious.

But, as with many things, don't think TOO hard about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Christina,_Mrs._Magnu...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Emoluments_Clause

And while Britain allows dual citizenship, most countries do not. So in most cases you need to rescind your other citizenship in order to be come an actual knight.

Thank you Psion's Horizons cassette for teaching me about computer architecture. Thank you Toni Baker for teaching me Z80 assembly so I could program x86 with no problem.

But, thank you Sir Clive, above all, for making such an affordable and approachable computer. What I learned on the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum is still with me.

The one I first get my hands on as a kid was built by my elder brother, an electronics engineer. I was so fascinated, I remember secretly sneaking into his house when he was at work to play the games.

He taught me electronics and encouraged me to understand the schematics and build one for myself. And I eventually did, but I got something wrong, and it worked unstable. I never got patience to find the cause and get it right.

But I definitely got charmed by electronics and programming because of this. Thank you, Sir Sinclair. And thank you, my brother.

Farewell, Sir Clive, and thank you for some of my best memories.

What an empathetic, caring, tactful way to teach tech to kids. The whole instruction is like that, a really well composed message. No hypes or overpowering, just guiding children to quiet explorations.

It definitively the gateway drug that hook me into computer.

Bought $6 book on how to program Sinclair computer and copy the Basic Code from the book into that computer and record that program into audio cassette tape and output to analog TV.

Now I working daily with systems that have 128 cores, 256 threads, 256-768MB of L3 cache memory, 1TB DDR+ 8xGPUs each with 32GB of HBM.

I still think I got more "High/Rush" from the sinclair 1000 37 years ago than the latest 128C/256T CPU. Now is a job, back than it was an adventure, exploration to whole new world!

This immediately set us on a quest to find ways to prove him wrong - the basis of hacker thinking. Not that we did find anything with our limited knowledge but it was a nice thought exercise (our best bet was to create a program that constantly switches between graphics mode and text mode. The monitor would make a clicking sound when this happened, so we figured if we do this enough times we'll probably burn some circuit, but we never tried it).

Edit: Oops it wasn't the 64 but the PET: https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-killer-poke-for-the-commodore-p...

Also, everyone here will know the phenomenon of bricking. You can damage hardware with software. Luckily it's very rare.

But it was exactly the same thing yeah.. Jiggling the relay super fast would fuse it. One of my friends had this happen to his MSX 1, I think there was some early 'malware' in a copied game or something. But at least a relay replacement is not difficult or expensive.

Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Model B and so on!

It was glorious!

It was so exciting as a kid!

Going to each of them and writing 3 lines of basic to print my name infinitely!

A truely golden age of discovery!

   10 PRINT "Boots is rubbish, shop at Dixons.";
   20 GOTO 10

a mischeivious program of

  10 pause (big number)
  20 beep
  30 goto 20

the faces of the customers thinking they've broke the computer is still etched in my mind

    *FX 200,3
    
    10 *MOTOR 1
    20 *MOTOR 0
    30 GOTO 10

This seems quite likely to have been inspired by some of the intro documentation for the Apple ][, apparently written by Jef Raskin. Short comment about it from a few years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077364

I've long suspected that Star Trek trained people to be fearful of pressing the wrong key, as it would always send a huge electric shock through the hapless keyboardist and send him flying across the bridge.

I've said before on HN that fear of what may happen stops many people from experimenting with computers, coupled with locking everything down and hiding the non-consumer-friendly aspects out of site.

Starting with a blinking cursor, the worst you could do was format a floppy disk with your work on it - or blow a fuse because you were tinkering with the internals.

I used nearly this exact phrase the other day with someone who appeared fearful of a dashboard tool and once they realised they could basically do no harm whatsoever it freed them up to experiment and learn.

http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/zxspectrum/docs/Comple...

https://www.amazon.com/ZX-Spectrum-Ula-Microcomputer-Compute...

Godspeed, Sir Clive. Your projects were all bonkers in the best possible way.

Especially in those days it was a unique sentiment. Most devices came with long instruction manuals which people would actually read, and even schematics. Until the home computer came, only educated professionals were allowed to go near computers. I think Steven Levy called them the IBM high priests in his book "Hackers". It's old but a good read.

Now nobody reads the couple of pages that come with their new phone. Good.

It's why things like the RPi and the Micro-bit are so cool for education, you can experiment with them and if it all goes wrong just reset them and carry on.

However I'm also concious that I and my kids are lucky to be able to absorb any financial/time cost from them breaking something. Not everyone can.

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

It was easily the most popular home computer in the UK at that time, though I imagine a large number of people started with the BBC - via the school integration.

I still have my manuals, and recently paid for a print of the keyboard to hang on my wall. (I almost bought a dead 48K model, and framed it, but getting a poster/print was slightly cheaper.)

But these days, we have smartphones with a hundred times more computing power, but it fails to trigger any creative curiosity into kids these days.

Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any co-relation with how many ways the device could interact with the operator vs the level of creative curiosity it triggers?

I remember how I destroyed my first PC on the first day by flipping a switch on the PSU before turning it on. Good times.

Anyway got a spark and the magic smoke, and bought a new PSU from a guy at school for $15.

But your soul dies slowly as you have to reload your program from tape cassette. I remember learning machine code on my Spectrum and having to reload the assembler several times an hour.

The quality of the documentation with these early computers was also truly exceptional. I learned basic in a weekend.

And in the back it had a ascii table with all the Z80 instruction codes - so once you had basic down you could try assembly!