Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

It was how long ago?

I'm not a young man any more.

They say that life is what happens while you're busy making plans and there's an element of truth to that statement. In fact, it seems that you no sooner turn around and decades have passed in what seems like the blink of an eye.

Most of us have different metrics for measuring the passage of time: how many cars/houses you've had, how many kids you have, the colour of your hair, the size of your waistline.

However, the universal metric is the calendar year. The 12 months, 52 weeks or 365 days (366 on a leap year) that mark the earth's orbit around the sun.

As an aside -- it's interesting that time is a measurement that in increments greater than one second, has never been successfully decimalised.

Now, during our journey through life, every now and then we encounter a fact that makes us sit up and realise just how much water has passed under the bridge - while we've been busy making plans. Here is one of those facts that will doubtless make some of us shudder...

The Sinclair ZX80 was launched 30 years ago this month.

Yep, that flimsy, awkward, slow, ornery little plastic plinth, with its irritatingly poor membrane keyboard, tiny-tiny 1KByte of memory and pitifully weak BASIC interpreter is now more than three and a half decades old.

Despite the passage of time, I remember clearly the first time I played with a ZX80.

I was wholly unimpressed with its performance but I marveled at just how clever its designer had been, cramming a significant amount of performance into such a tiny and (for its day) cheap package.

The poor old processor was being utterly thrashed by having to do almost everything including keyboard encoding, video display generation and running the BASIC interpreter and programs.

Despite its numerous weaknesses, it was a marvel (for its time) of squeezing a quart into a pint pot.

Forget that the case was made of paper-thin plastic that buckled and bent if you prodded it with a finger. Forget the fact that the screen flickered and blanked out whenever it was "thinking".

This was a "real" computer that could be bought "off the shelf" and used by anyone who had the patience to key in a BASIC program and who wasn't likely to be sent into an epileptic fit by all the constant strobing of the display as the little silicon wheels churned away inside.

This, was a computer for the masses.

The ZX80 came hot on the heels of other clever products from Clive Sinclair, the eccentric British entrepreneur who was also responsible for making the scientific calculator affordable to the masses.

The ZX80 was soon followed by an upgraded machine (the ZX81) that didn't change too much but also became a "must-have" for many of those who'd already become hooked on this "home computing" thing.

After the successful launch of he Sinclair Spectrum, it looked as if Sir Clive could do no wrong and anything he turned his hand to would become an instant success.

The Spectrum delivered colour graphics and a machine that could walk and chew gum at the same time -- by which I mean that it could not only display rudimentary graphics but it could do so without blanking the screen to calculate pixel positions, etc.

Unfortunately for Sir Clive, it was all downhill from there.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity they say and, with the ill-fated C5 electric pedal-car, Sir Clive appeared to have crossed that line.

What's more, he just hasn't been able to step backwards to regain his former status as an insightful genius. These days he's still plugging away but seems to be betting his (largely dissipated) fortune on a fold-up bicycle and yet another small electric vehicle.

But, as if to prove that he's still as eccentric as ever, he doesn't use a computer and won't even touch email. Hard to believe, of the man who delivered affordable (albeit quirky) computing into the hands of so many.

Did you have a ZX80/81/Spectrum?

Did you have one of Sir Clive's Cambridge Scientific calculators?

What about one of those totally impractical "Black LED" watches?

Has Sir Clive "lost the plot" or is his form of genius just unappreciated in today's world?

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say on this...

PERMALINK to this column

Oh, and don't forget today's sci/tech news headlines

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font