Nostalgic For the ZX Spectrum? Soon You Can Play With a New One 91
An anonymous reader writes "There is a very interesting project underway to recreate the ZX Spectrum and more. The Bluetooth ZX Spectrum has been successfully crowdfunded, and it is due to go on sale in September 2014. If you want to go back to the 1980s — to the wonderful era of 8-bit gaming, you can instead try one of the many ZX Spectrum emulators." I remember being excited at the new Sinclair when my dad brought it home, but my strongest memory now is of what might be the worst keyboard I've ever had the chance to use.
keyboard... (Score:0, Interesting)
The keyboard wasn't that bad. Sort of like many Apple keyboards. Ok, both are really bad.
The ZX Spectrum keyboard was a trendsetter (Score:5, Interesting)
What? The ZX Spectrum keyboard was years ahead of the competition with its square, flat, chiclet keys. It took decades before the PC industry realized its potential instead of emulating old typewriter keys. These days even Apple's Macbook Pro has flat and square keys, a clear tribute to the ZX "Speccy" chiclet keyboard.
On a more serious note, while the ZX Spectrum keyboard wasn't for touch typists, it had its advantages too: all the BASIC commands was printed on or above or below the keys, so it worked as a BASIC "cheat sheet". You only had to press "G" to print the command "GOTO" so it saved key presses and removed typos in the commands and functions etc.
The ZX Spectrum worked very well as an entry level PC with an emphasis on learning BASIC programming. I know several people who made a career in the IT business because of what they learned from programming the ZX Spectrum.
Re:Woooo.... (Score:4, Interesting)
There have been home projects to replicate the spectrum, ula included...
one was called speccybob which replicated the machine in TTL logic, meaning it would be possible to take that design and cram it onto a single chip.
But alas, the person running that project ran into lots of bad luck and had to abort it.