In measuring ZX - History of the English Spectrum (Part 1).

<b>In measuring ZX</b> - History of the English Spectrum (Part 1).

                           . · · · · • In measuring zx

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part 1


1979: the market already has several personal computers.
for a year in sales will go the legendary car commodore.
marketed homemade apple and tandy. true home
they can be called a stretch to argue. the cost of the same 
commodore 700 British pounds sterling, people are not very

in a hurry to spread the same amount for a device designed and
whose benefit do not understand. newspaper financial times
then predicted the emergence of home computers for the price
less than 100 pounds through 5 years. all crying, but in the 
future Happiness is not believed. However, in January 1980 at 
an exhibition in Wembley the general public was introduced 
computer zx80. his main advantage is a very low price - £ 99.95

and rather small size. heart of this computer was
Processor z80a, which is supplied by nippon electric, RAM
had a size of 4k. other innovations can be attributed
keyboard with qwerty layout is now a familiar and integrated
language interpreter basic. computer was presented and
developed by a small firm sinclair research ltd from Cambridge.
founder, owner and main driver of this company
was Clive Sinclair. Sinclair appeared in the business in 1961, 
then He founded his first company "sinclair radionics" and 
started manufactures and sells amplifiers. in the same year, 
when Gagarin said: "Lets go! .."


in the 70 years of receiving state subsidies, the firm
reoriented to the production of calculators and watches. in
1973 Sinclair buys abelsdeal, but when in 1977
year for sinclair radionics come hard times, he
leaving the company. the role of emergency airfield for 
Sinclair played previously acquired company abelsdeal, after 
renaming called "sinclair instruments". just as Sinclair

develops the strategy of the company, its
looms as a Ian Williamson. Jahn keen
electronics, and with the idea of creating a home computer,
that cost would be cheaper hundred pounds (the English are very 
pedantic and think in a symbolic figure). Yang began to develop 
a computer available at this time on the market radiocomponents.

in the course of this work, he has amassed a lot of ideas and 
solutions. smart yang understood that due to lack of capital, 
it will neither continue work on creating their own computers, 
much less unleash some business for their production. so it

suggested that Sinclair and his companion Chris Curran buy from 
him all the achievements for 5000 pounds. idea production

home computers offered by Williamson, was immediately
picked up, Sinclair decides once again to rename his company
(This time in sinclair research) and invests in the development 
of home computer, all their savings. Thanks to the

from Williamson's information in the shortest time has been 
created Computer mk-51. However, the word "computer" is a device

name was still impossible, rather it was like an extended
version of the calculator. MK-51 went on sale in the version for
self-assembly, and in the UK found a lot of
amateurs, who wished to buy even such imperfect in
all respects the device.

the first, albeit minor, but still showed the success of
Sinclair that he is on the right road. Further work
to create a home computer led to the fact that through
some two years, Sinclair has represented in his new Wembley
development.

orders for computer zx80 started to arrive directly at
exhibition. In the central office came as applications and 
checks, do not expect such a rush for staff (who were only

12 people) quickly ceased to deal with the supply and
Customers get their already paid for computers with large
delay. zx80 was also represented at the exhibition sonsumer
elecronics show, held and passing is still in
Las Vegas. and again, as at Wembley, Sinclair gets a lot of
positive feedback. sincler research company in the U.S.
market undertook to provide a Nigel Searle. a few
days after the show, he opened an office in Boston, who 
immediately began to receive requests from numerous U.S.

customers.

At the same time on our side of the Atlantic specialists from 
the company Sinclair finished work on an improved version

zx80. come to replace him zx81 computer has become even more
available, its price was only 69.95 pounds.
managed to reduce the price through the use of a new chip from
Italian company ferranti, which greatly
reduce the element base.

by the end of January 1982 in the U.S. have been sold 15,000 
computers. worldwide the figure was 300,000. this success was 
due to many factors, for example, played a role competently

policy on education - thanks to
substantial discounts on this computer able to purchase more
Two thousand schools. Sinclair also managed to conclude an 
agreement with Japan's largest corporation mitsui, received 
exclusive rights for zx81 in Japan.


the following model of the computer that runs under the code 
name zx82, the market decided to release under the more 
euphonious name "Zx-spectrum". occurred April 23, 1982, 
immediately after how Brezhnev congratulated the Soviet people 
with the next day Lenin's birth. zx-spectrum was available in 
two versions - with 16 KB and 48 KB RAM. from their 
predecessors zx-spectrum characterized by the ability to 
display eight-schedule, computers have a special sound 
processor and sensor keyboard, the ROM was sutured improved 
version of the language of basic. 

it was the finest hour for the company Sinclair. his new 
brainchild sold in 30 countries, one of Britain took up to

fifteen thousand computers a week. appeared at the Spectrum
large army of fans, hundreds of companies have begun
to produce for him the software began to emerge
The first books and magazines devoted entirely to the computer.
The word "spectrum" has since been a household word.

repeat the success was not possible. The following development 
- computer zx84 (the market is displayed under the brand ql) - 
was positioned as a computer for business. enhanced 
capabilities have led to significant increase in prices. 
Sinclair has thus lost that fertile niche of low-cost 
computers, which brought him company's success. she had to 
enter into competition with such giants as ibm pc-with its 
platform, as well as apple, proposing to hold a macintosh. Due 
to technical and organizational difficulties of this struggle 
was immediately lost outright. Sinclair laid the last hope for 
"spectrum 128". sale, which began in February 86 th (the 
surgery was not yet declared, but has hung in the rotten air), 
have shown that these hopes were realized. the company was on 
the verge bankruptcy. its cost has decreased from 128 million 
pounds Sterling to five. Sinclair had no choice but to sell

his creation of amstrad. Sinclair wanted to continue,
there was even information about his work on a kind of super
spectrum-ohm having 1 MB of RAM and running at a frequency of 7 
mhz. on the time it was a very solid performance. for unknown

reasons, Sinclair has failed to provide even the pilot
sample. failures were pursued and a new owner - the company
amstrad. two models released amstrad cpc464 (1986) and
amstrad spectrum +3 (1987) have been developed on the basis of
last sinklerovskogo computer - spectrum 128. however, in
market, these machines were greeted very coldly. the main reason
what were the technical problems that were present in both
computers and call them unstable. failure and
permanent losses in 1988 forced the company amstrad
abandon any works on all computer models
Spectrum.

However, the history of the Spectrum this is far from over.

the second birth he was in the USSR. in Europe and America
the golden years of the Spectrum has been associated with 
industry continued to work only on inertia, and although they 
continued to go magazines, programs and games, but there has 
been a significant outflow users on other platforms. In the 
USSR all just began. in the late 80's in the magazine "Radio," 
which came out half million copies began to appear on the 
computer's circuitry, similar zx-spectrum'u. a few years later, 
the clones Spectrum has already done all those who could. they 
were single and - Radio amateurs who collected his first 
computer, Guided by the magazine, and thousands of cooperatives 
(the surgery was announced), and even state-owned enterprises, 
which previously worked on defense industry. significant 
reduction in military orders, and so called conversion forced 
them to refocus their Production on the issue of home 
computers. any statistics about how many came to light 
"Leningrad" "Hobbit," "experts", of course not, and therefore 
can be only assume that these figures are measured in tens of 
thousands. 

the first models of the Soviet Spectrum were performed mainly in
a tape-version (ie as a carrier of information
used audio tapes) and had 48k of RAM.
but very quickly the standard for domestic Spectrum
becoming a computer "Pentagon", equipped with 128 KB of RAM
and five inch floppy drive, and running
OS tr-dos. the number of users of this
cucumber grown tremendous pace around the Spectrum became
shape an entire industry. began to appear and the first
legendary among spektrumschikov personality - such as
Vyacheslav mednonogov, which is considered the creator of one 
of the most zx-known games - UFO. the enemy is unknown. " but 
the miracle did not happen, and in 1994-1995 (coups suppressed 
forget) Spectrum passed the peak of its popularity and the 
former Soviet Union. great number of people, as it was in its 
time and in the west, it became go to pc. around the same time 
began to appear and the first pc-Spectrum emulator. one of the 
first such emulators in Russia was written by Nicholas Shalaeva 
in 1995 for the firm, "Solon", which has published, in 
particular, the book "500 games for the Spectrum. "after the 
first version of the author does not stopped work on the 
emulator and continued to improve its work, adding more new 
features. eventually original Spectrum becoming smaller and 
different Emulators - all the more. now present the Spectrum

work only a few, even the most die-hard fans-run
your favorite Spectrum games and programs on conventional
pentium'ah. except for various emulators in the network can be 
found much more information on Spectrum, but this - already in 
the the second part of the article.