ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum is a personal home computer released by Sinclair in the UK in 1982. It competed against the Commodore 64, the BBC Micro, and later on, the Amstrad CPC. It was referred to during development as the ZX81 Colour and ZX82, and attempted to highlight the system's color display against its black and white predecessor, the ZX81.

Originally, the ZX Spectrum computers were manufactured by Sinclair Research until 1986, when the company was bought up by Amstrad, the makers of its competitor, the Amstrad CPC, who manufactured the system up until the 1990s.

Eight different models were released, ranging from the entry level model with 16 KB RAM released in 1982 to the ZX Spectrum +3 with 128 KB RAM and a built in floppy disk drive in 1987.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) A HUGE library of software available, consisting of over 24,000 titles.
 * 2) Many adventure games.
 * 3) Several peripherals were released, ranging from the Currah μSpeech hardware speech synthesizer that gave some games speech, to the RAM Turbo Interface, which allowed players to plug joysticks into the computer via the Kempston Joystick input connector and play games from special cartridges, which loaded much faster than cassette tapes.
 * 4) The ZX Spectrum was one of the cheapest home computers available at the time, and was very popular for gaming. Among the many programmers for Spectrum games were Matthew Smith, Jeff Minter and many more.
 * 5) Like with the Amstrad CPC, the later Spectrum models came with either a built-in cassette recorder (+2 model) or a built-in floppy drive (+3 model), unlike its competitors and the earlier Spectrum models, which required buying those separately.
 * 6) Software ranges from programming language implementations, databases, word processors and spreadsheets to drawing tools and even 3D modelling.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The hardware limitations and limited use of color made most Spectrum software prone to attribute clash.
 * 2) Primitive and ear bleeding sound quality on pre-128k Spectrum models, though this has been fixed with a sound chip added in the 128k models of the Spectrum, including Amstrad's +2 and +3 models.
 * 3) The chiclet-styled keyboard on the earliest models of the Spectrum is not very good to use. While the ZX Spectrum+ model improved the keyboard, it's still not very comfortable to type on, and it isn't until the Amstrad-made Spectrums when the keyboard became more comfortable to use.

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