When I was young I remember going to my cousins house in Auckland.
He was a couple of years older than me and had jus got a Spectrum ZX 81 (at least I think it was a ZX81) for christmas.
I thought this thing was the coolest thing I had seen.
You could play games, write some code and it used a tape (cassette) drive. The even cooler thing was the tape drive was a standard cassette player so you could play music on it as well.
Well things haven’t really chnaged as I still keep finding othher people with cool technologies and toys, so I thought I might as well blub about them here.
Of course you will then ask why ZX84.com not ZX81.com, well after 25 odd years I couldn;t really remember the number after the ZX and of course I also just went ahead and brought the domain name rather than do any research, but then for those that know me they won’t be suprised by this.
Sinclair’s latest computer does for the professional market just what the ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum have done for the home micro market.
When those early machines were released, they caused a furore in the computer industry by offering capabilities comparable with those of existing machines, but at vastly lower prices. This was usually achieved by packaging the components in a rather ingenious way - often replacing the conventional circuitry used in most micros with custom-designed ULAs. An uncommitted logic array is very expensive to design and put into production, but over a long production run using a ULA to take over the functions of conventional components makes the computer much cheaper as well as smaller and lighter.
Sinclair’s newest machine, the ZX83/ZX84 (the name depends on who you talk to within Sinclair Research) does all this and more. Until now, the packaging com-promises have made ZX computers rather unpleasant to use in some respects - the keyboards in particular have always come in for severe criticism from the computer press and end-users alike - and these limitations have always held the computers back from the more serious applications which their internal components could handle.
The ZX84 may well be cheap - under £400 for the basic version - but its external attributes are far from nasty. And if you think that £400 is a lot of money to pay for a computer, then that’s only because it is natural to assume that the ZX84 replaces the Spectrum in the same way that the Spectrum replaced the ZX80 and the ZX81 supplanted the ZX80. This is not the case.
For the first time, Sinclair is moving into what has hitherto been regarded as the ’small business’ market. The computer is far more powerful than anything remotely near its price range, leaving even relative newcomers like the IBM PC Jr (see page 34) in the shade.
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