The Spectrum was truly an amazing machine for its time. Sure, it had its limitations; and that display (256x192, one bit per pixel with colour information on a character-cell-by-cell basis) gave the impression that colour was added mostly as an afterthought. (Colour or high resolution - pick one.)
But so what? You've got to remember the price tag, under £200. Nobody else could make a computer with all those features at that price. The only thing that could touch it was the BBC model B -- and that cost several times the price. As a demonstration of what was possible, the Spectrum was a truly great piece of kit.
Computers are cheap *nowadays* because they're making so many of them and they're all the same. In 1982, there were many different and incompatible designs vying for attention. There were other machines with colour displays, but they often had only character-mapped graphics, and were let down by poor implementations of BASIC (most were slow, some were integer-only and it was often difficult to make full use of the hardware. There's a reason why people don't get misty-eyed about the Video Technology VZ-200, the Sord M5 or the Mattel Aquarius).
The Spectrum had a comprehensive, fairly fast BASIC interpreter, a manual written by a native English speaker, a bitmapped display (of sorts) and a primitive beeper that still managed to produce musical-ish notes. You could dive straight in and begin writing simple games and applications in BASIC or machine code -- in the early days, magazines even had program listings for you to type in, and these would invariably be modified and extended. Because that's what people do when they have the Source Code! And also, Sinclair had the foresight to make sure there would be some software available at the initial launch. Not everyone was going to write their own straight away.
There was something about the Spectrum that's noticeably absent from modern machines -- a feeling that we were doing something that was new and different and special. Cramming a program into as few bytes as possible, plugging a home-made board into the I/O port, discovering a fancy display hack -- you just don't get that feeling today; not with Windows, not even with Linux and all its programming tools that come for free as standard, and the Mac is a bit of a walled garden.
Register
Great machine
The Spectrum was truly an amazing machine for its time. Sure, it had its limitations; and that display (256x192, one bit per pixel with colour information on a character-cell-by-cell basis) gave the impression that colour was added mostly as an afterthought. (Colour or high resolution - pick one.)
But so what? You've got to remember the price tag, under £200. Nobody else could make a computer with all those features at that price. The only thing that could touch it was the BBC model B -- and that cost several times the price. As a demonstration of what was possible, the Spectrum was a truly great piece of kit.
Computers are cheap *nowadays* because they're making so many of them and they're all the same. In 1982, there were many different and incompatible designs vying for attention. There were other machines with colour displays, but they often had only character-mapped graphics, and were let down by poor implementations of BASIC (most were slow, some were integer-only and it was often difficult to make full use of the hardware. There's a reason why people don't get misty-eyed about the Video Technology VZ-200, the Sord M5 or the Mattel Aquarius).
The Spectrum had a comprehensive, fairly fast BASIC interpreter, a manual written by a native English speaker, a bitmapped display (of sorts) and a primitive beeper that still managed to produce musical-ish notes. You could dive straight in and begin writing simple games and applications in BASIC or machine code -- in the early days, magazines even had program listings for you to type in, and these would invariably be modified and extended. Because that's what people do when they have the Source Code! And also, Sinclair had the foresight to make sure there would be some software available at the initial launch. Not everyone was going to write their own straight away.
There was something about the Spectrum that's noticeably absent from modern machines -- a feeling that we were doing something that was new and different and special. Cramming a program into as few bytes as possible, plugging a home-made board into the I/O port, discovering a fancy display hack -- you just don't get that feeling today; not with Windows, not even with Linux and all its programming tools that come for free as standard, and the Mac is a bit of a walled garden.