Did any of the older members have a ZX Spectrum 48k?

I used to buy magazines to just for the game codes,spend all day typing it in and it was always rubbish lol and couldn't save it to play again with writing it 😞a reply to: Cobaltic1978

Us spectrum kids would mock the commodore kids haha😂 And they did the same a reply to: errorcode

originally posted by: darknewt
I used to buy magazines to just for the game codes,spend all day typing it in and it was always rubbish lol and couldn't save it to play again with writing it 😞a reply to: Cobaltic1978

They were complete crap!!

a reply to: nonspecific

No, but I had a MicroBee that I built up from a kit. It used a Z80 CPU.

I think it ran CPM and had a BASIC like interpreter. I met Matthew Star (who wrote a lot of the CPM code in assembler) once at a "meet". Long time ago now.

I originally saved files on audio cassette but upgraded RAM so I could use a floppy (5 1/4").

Them were the days.

originally posted by: Cobaltic1978
a reply to: Tulpa

BBC computers?

I remember my school having them, of course no one knew how to teach instructions on their use.

They were wasted.

Bad school then since computers then were not exactly tricky to use. Most schools I knew of had networked BBC's years before the internet it was called econet.

I had a BBC B which had identical clones of many arcade games of the time, I even wrote a game for it that was published by Virgin Games Ltd.
The legacy of the BBC computer is much larger than people realise, quick breakdown :

* Acorn computers who made the BBC wanted a new processor for a new computer thus was born the 26Bit Acorn Risc Machine.
* This Risc CPU didn't need a fan!
* The Archimedes computer was built around it.
* The second O/S was RiscOS released in 1987 which you can still get today for the Raspberry Pi. It had multi tasking including video years before Microsoft and Apple. In fact back then Windows was single tasking version 2.1 it took Microsoft 8 years to catch up with Windows 95!
* The CPU was extended to 32Bit and Apple took an interest which led to: The Apple Newton!
* In 1994 Acorn produced a Tablet computer called the Newspad with a colour touch screen, yep folks 1994! Eat your heart out Jobs.
* One of the most successful games developed specifically for the Archimedes was.......ELITE and we all know how that progressed.
* Acorn split off the CPU business to become : ARM Computers, and today the ARM chip is everywhere especially phones.
* ARM CPU's still don't need a fan!

So from tiny Acorns.....

Ah, yes, those were the days...

My older brother was the computer pioneer in our family. First he bought a ZX 81. It only had 1kb of memory and you had to stick a big cube on it to get 48kb. When that memory cube broke off he bought a ZX Spectrum and gave the ZX 81 to me.

Could not do much with it with just 1kb. So I let it pick some numbers randomly or let words run over the screen. When my brother changed to the first "PC" - 286 from Tandy - he gave me his Spectrum.

What a progress in computer science! I bought some cheap games on cassettes and was amazed by the colours and the speed!

Now where did the progress lead us to? Programs with hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes, loading down from cloud services for hours and days. The cassetes were not so bad after all...

a reply to: darknewt

They were my favourite games too. But it's was jet set willy If I remember correctly. I can almost hear the music now

a reply to: stormcell
I hear u brother...
Still have 2 800's, 1 400, 810 drives, 1040st etc etc...
RF shielding that would survive an EMP attack....
After a nuclear holocaust, only things left would be mutant cockroaches playing star raiders on an Atari 400/800

a reply to: nonspecific

Had a 48K and later upgraded to a 128K+2.

I did have a go on a spectrum emulator a while back and downloaded pretty much my entire back catalogue of games in a few seconds. When I think of the total time I must have spent waiting to load games back in the day, I do miss the load screens.

I liked to mix it up


a reply to: darknewt