Sinclair And Clones Computer Show

Anonymous Coward writes "The Sinclair ZX Spectrum seems to be alive and well with 'Your Sinclair' magazine being relaunched at WH Smiths newsagents, and according to this, there is a Spectrum and clones computer show in Norwich, England, (the other Sinclair formats and clones include the QL, SAM Coupe, Timex/Sinclair, ZX81, Z88 etc). It looks like it could be fun. I must get my Spectrum out and play some games."

Silent PC

[nurb432]

Well, you can get that today with an ARM based unit..

Extreme low power, and they run really cool... Just check out your PDA if you doubt that...

Why no 'simple' computers like this today?

[payndz]

Forget even the Z80 and 6502/10 computers of the Eighties - 68x00 chips must be going for pennies by now. (Hell, the 6502 is still being made!)

Why isn't there a 'starter' computer system around any more? I went from self-taught Sinclair and C64 BASIC to minor levels of assembler on both systems before life shifted me away from computers for a while, until I came back to C++ on a Mac more than a decade later - and I think learning assembler properly would have made C++ a snap!

But the way systems are now, there doesn't seem to be anything to get people into programming easily. Anyone could piss about in BASIC for a couple of hours and get things moving about the screen that actually respond to their inputs, but in C++ on a GUI-based machine?

For that matter, why isn't there a BASIC interpreter built into modern machines? I mean, jeez, how fast would *that* run? 64-bits at 4Gh compared to 8-bits at 1Mh? For a program I could write myself in an afternoon for a particular job, I'd quite happily sacrifice GUI elements and go back to 'Enter value here_' options.

Kind of makes me wonder if you could take the gameplay refinements we take for granted today and apply them to an old machine. I'd love to see a (top-down, obviously) C64 version of Crazy Taxi! Or going the other way, how about a totally real-time version of The Sentinel powered by a G5 or 4Ghz Pentium?

TS1000 and ZX81 memories

[scottgfx]

I remember being 10 or 11 years old in the early `80's and seeing an ad for the ZX81 in the back of a Popular Science mag. I really wanted one of those things as I had not yet used a computer or owned one. A few years later, after I had been using an Atari 800, bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 from a kid at school who didn't want it. Even after using the Atari, I thought the TS-1000 was cool. Now, over 20 years later, I'm talking to a 18 year old kid at work. He has a TS-1000 from a yard sale and doesn't know a thing about it. Even more sad, he's not even tried to use it. There is a whole generation or more that only knows Windows and have no idea what is underneath. Yeah, the kid is a geek and knows HTML, but is afraid of the stuff underneath. How sad!