A technical introduction to the ZX Spectrum hardware. A lot of research went into verifying the information presented here. Please add a note below in the unlikely (I hope) event of noticing a mistake.
Fantastic video! This is a kind of video I was watching for years to watch, and I noticed it now only by chance. I have looked for this information on several hardware sites, bunch of books and off course WOS. But here is all information presented in detailed and easily understood manner - I was glued to screen while watching and learning! Thank you so much for creating this video!
Just show's you doesn't it!! We knew nothing as kid's when using any of these computer's..it was just of the time and a wow to all of us...but the Spectrum made by Sinclair was a very complicated peice of kit..as.outlined in this video...going through revision after revision in order to make it better.... I for one,now apprieciate what these people did.The ZX Spectrum is responsible,in large part,for the gaming industry,if not across the world but was responsible for the growth of the gaming industry in the UK. ...And Tim Follin *may have just "sampled" his amazing "5-channel simulation" music on the Spectrum 48k...something I had suspected at the time,given that,playing music into the Spectrum''s "Ear" socket would be output to the Spectrum's "Beeper" speaker which sounded very similar to Tim Follin's work on Agent X and Chronos..etc.. Now I know that the Spectrum had an analogue to digital converter....this make's sense now. Having said that...I could be wrong :-)
Wow, this was a very detailed, clear and interesting description! Got some "pearls" I didn't know about (e.g. faulty memory chips, splitted bus, low memory slowness, etc, etc)... Thank you!
That phantom key presses effect could ruin your work if you want to write a letter because if you press CSF at the same time, it will register Z to be pressed, and yeah, you should indeed never ever pull off an expansion module while the system is on as it could cause shortsge o,o,o. No wonder some people did hate the spectrum because of these syndromes. But if you are becareful in what you’re doing, it should run fine i guess.
It would be interesting to see a compared examination of the hardware of the spectrum and the C64 side by side. Not that there is any doubt that the commodore is vastly superior, of course.. :) How Sinclair ever thought a rubber keypad was acceptable as a keyboard is beyond belief. Very poor choice not matter what the budget for the machine was. Almost as dumb as releasing a QL without a GUI even though the Mac had already come out.
Clive Sinclair wanted to shove as many Spectrum into households as possible, so he had to cut the costs everywhere. I owned a Spectrum, my first computer, I thought night and day about programming but when I had the C64, it was a whole new world for me (but I didn't really program on the C64)
