A Spectrum

Hot on the heels of the ZX81 was the ZX Spectrum – so named because it was now capable of better colour support than its predecessors the ZX80 and ZX81.

The Spectrum was one of the mighty ‘My first computer’ triumvirate of C64, Amstrad and Spectrum that hit the height of their popularity in the 80s. While technically inferior to both the Amstrad CPC range and the Commodore 64, the Spectrum still enjoyed huge success and a massive catalogue of games, including some homebrew games that are still being developed in 2009.
The Spectrum was released in 1982 an initially sported 16KB of RAM, which had become as much as 128KB by the time the final version, the +3 was released in 1987.  Output was by an RF modulator to allow the use of a regular TV as the display (which brought the cost down, compared to the Amstrad CPC which had a proprietary monitor) and input was initially by cassette tape, though floppy drives could be connected and the +3 had the same 3″ drive as the Amstrad CPC 6128 and 664.

The Spectrum held colour as an array, meaning that particular areas of the screen had a particular colour assigned to it. This conserved memory but lead to single colour sprites and colour clashes in arcade style games. Despite this limitation around 18,000 titles (not all of them games) were released for the computer and its hardware limitation meant that designers had to be creative with their programming, leading to games that are very playable.

Thanks to modern emulators available on Windows, Linux and Mac OS, which can recreate the Spectrum hardware in software, there is still a very active homebrew scene which still produces new games, some 28 years after the original launch.