One of the most popular micro computers in the 80's, the Spectrum was born in April 1982 with a proud Sir Clive Sinclair as the father. It featured high-resolution graphics, 8 colours (could be made to do 16 colours) and sound. It also looked totally different from every other computer out at the time, with a sleek black finish and tiny rubber keys - each capable of more than one function.

It wasn't all perfect though. The high-resolution graphics were slow, and the colours invariably suffered from colour clash (colours were limited to 8 x 8 pixel squares, looking very blocky).

The sound chip was capable of only 1 voice with 10 octaves using the Basic BEEP command. Using this froze the processor though and clever programming eventually saw the Spectrum capable of digitised sounds, speech and even 4-channel music (for an example see Agent X II).

Since it's launch in 1982, a mass of peripherals were made, featuring add-ons such as printers, scanners, speech units, joystick ports, microdrive tape units (reduced loading times to a few seconds) and multifaces that could pause the processor and enable you to save screenshots and whole games that were in memory.

SPECIFICATIONS

CPU Zilog Z80A
SPEED 3.5 Mhz
RAM 16k or 48k
ROM 16k (Contains operating system and BASIC)
SOUND 1 voice with 10 octaves
GRAPHICS 256 x 192 resolution
COLOURS 8 (16 using differing levels of brightness)
DIMENSIONS 23 x 14, 4 x 3 cm
WEIGHT 550g
I/O PORTS Expansion port at rear, RF video out, ear/mic
PSU External, 9v DC, 1.4A
PRICE 16K - £99, 48K - £125

Thousands of games were made, well over 15,000 titles. Popular publishers of the games were US Gold, Ocean, Ultimate, Imagine, Firebird and in the budget range Codemasters (who are still in business) and Mastertronic.