Relive ZX BASIC days
Nearly 40 years ago an astonishing new computer appeared on the scene. What was so noteworthy about it was its price of £99.95, making in the first computer to sell in the UK for less than £100. That computer was the Sinclair ZX80. Today, £100 might not sound too remarkable when we consider that the Raspberry Pi 4 costs £34, and when we also bear in mind that prices in 1980 were the equivalent of four times that amount today because of inflation – but in that era it was truly ground-breaking.
Computers such as the Commodore PET and the Apple II cost £775 and £1,200 respectively, and even these were cheap compared to the lowest-priced computers from just a few years earlier: minicomputers like the DEC PDP/8 which would have set you back ten times as much. Public reaction was profound. At long last, would-be computer enthusiasts could get their hands on some hardware, and no fewer than 100,000 of them did just that.
It might not have mattered to those early computer users, but it’ll come as no surprise to learn that the ZX80’s specification was somewhat modest in comparison to other personal computers of the early ’80s, let alone a modern-day computer. The processor was an 8-bit Zilog Z80 clocked at 3.25MHz, it had 1KB of RAM – yes, really, just 0.000001GB – and it had 4KB of EPROM non-volatile memory – the 1980s equivalent of flash memory – that contained the system software.
Perhaps one of the most astonishing omissions, though, was an operating system. The bottom line is that there really was no operating) and books – that brings us full circle with this guide to the BASIC programming language.
