60 Fun Facts About ZX Spectrum

On what date in 1982 was the ZX Spectrum first released in Britain?

The ZX Spectrum was launched on 23 April 1982, barely a year after the ZX81, in 16 KB and 48 KB versions.

Roughly how many ZX Spectrums were sold in total?

It was Britain's top-selling computer until the Amstrad PCW overtook it in the 1990s.

The Spectrum was manufactured in Dundee by which company, better known for watches?

Timex director Fred Olsen wanted to diversify beyond mechanical watches.

Which industrial designer created the Spectrum's case, rainbow motif and rubber keyboard?

Rick Dickinson, Sinclair's in-house industrial designer, also styled the ZX80 and ZX81; his ZX81 design won a Design Council award in 1981.

The name 'Spectrum' was chosen to emphasise what?

Its colour display set it apart from the black-and-white ZX81; during development the machine was called the ZX81 Colour or ZX82.

How was software loaded into a standard Spectrum?

From compact audio cassettes, with video sent to a television set rather than a dedicated monitor.

What was the launch price of the 16 KB Spectrum?

The 16 KB Spectrum launched at £125 and the 48 KB at £175, undercutting the £335 BBC Micro Model B.

The Spectrum's rubber keys were famously said to feel like what?

A reviewer's jibe that the rubber keys felt like 'dead flesh' stuck to the machine; Sinclair answered the complaint with the hard plastic keyboard of the 1984 Spectrum+.

Which processor, running at 3.5 MHz, powered the ZX Spectrum?

The Zilog Z80A ran at 3.5 MHz; its 16-bit address bus could reach only 64 KB directly, which is why the Spectrum 128 needed bank switching.

Which single chip integrating the ZX Spectrum's essential hardware did Richard Altwasser design?

The uncommitted logic array also handled a graphics mode that used under 7 KB of memory.

Because colour was stored per 8x8 cell, the Spectrum suffered from what graphical limitation?

Attribute clash arose because each 8x8 cell could hold only two colours, ink and paper, so a moving sprite recoloured the background it crossed; the Amstrad CPC's per-pixel colour avoided it.

Besides colour bits, each ZX Spectrum attribute byte held one bit for brightness and one for what?

That gave the machine its 15-colour palette.

Who wrote most of the Spectrum's ROM code and Sinclair BASIC, working for Nine Tiles?

Steve Vickers of Nine Tiles wrote the 16 KB ROM, extending the ZX81 BASIC he had also written; he and Richard Altwasser then left to found Jupiter Cantab and build the Jupiter Ace.

What was distinctive about how BASIC keywords were typed on the Spectrum?

Each keyword was entered with a single keystroke: pressing P in command mode produced PRINT, with shifted modes adding more, so nearly 200 functions fitted on 40 rubber keys.

What data rate did the Spectrum's cassette interface achieve, beating the target of 1000?

Unlike the ZX81, it could keep the display up while loading, so games could show a loading screen.

The original Spectrum's sound came from what?

A single-channel beeper, and the BEEP command tied up the processor until the note finished.

How was the Spectrum initially sold, leading to a backlog of 40,000 orders by summer 1982?

The Spectrum was sold by mail order only at first, with Sinclair promising 28-day delivery it could not meet; a public apology followed in September 1982 and supply normalised by Christmas.

Under what name was an enhanced Spectrum sold in the United States from 1983?

The Timex Sinclair 2068 added a sound chip, a cartridge port and extra screen modes, but it sold poorly and Timex left the computer market in 1984.

Which magazine's gossip columnist is credited with creating the 'Uncle Clive' persona for Sinclair?

The Sun called him the most prodigious inventor since Leonardo da Vinci.

Clive Sinclair was knighted in the 1983 Birthday Honours on the recommendation of which prime minister?

Margaret Thatcher, keen to champion British high-tech enterprise, recommended the knighthood; Sinclair Research reported a £14 million profit on £54 million turnover that year.

The Spectrum's intended successor, announced in January 1984, was which flop?

The Sinclair QL, a 68008-based business machine, shipped late and buggy; only about 139,000 units were made before Amstrad dropped it in 1986.

The ZX Spectrum 128 launched in September 1985 in which country, financed by local distributor Investrónica?

Spain got it first, partly thanks to a Spanish tax on computers with 64 KB or less; the UK launch waited until January 1986.

Which chip gave the Spectrum 128 three-channel sound and MIDI compatibility?

The General Instrument AY-3-8912 gave three square-wave channels plus noise and drove the MIDI output; the 128 also had 32 KB of ROM and an RS-232 port but no internal speaker.

In April 1986 Sinclair sold its computer range and brand name to Alan Sugar's Amstrad for how much?

Amstrad paid £5 million on 7 April 1986 for the Spectrum range, the QL stock and the Sinclair name, then released the +2, +3 and +2A models.

Amstrad's ZX Spectrum +2 came with what built in?

The grey +2 had a built-in cassette recorder, branded Datacorder, echoing the Amstrad CPC 464, plus two joystick ports and a proper keyboard.

The 1987 ZX Spectrum +3 replaced the cassette deck with a floppy drive of what size?

The +3 used Amstrad's 3-inch disks, the same format as the CPC 6128 and PCW; it was incompatible with the Interface 1, so Microdrives could not be used.

In which year was the ZX Spectrum officially discontinued?

Amstrad ended production in 1992, ten years after launch, by which time over 24,000 software titles had been released for the Spectrum.

The ZX Microdrive, launched in July 1983, stored data on what?

Each Microdrive cartridge held a continuous loop of magnetic tape storing at least 85 KB; the drive cost £49.95 and cartridges £4.95, and it needed the Interface 1 to connect.

The Kempston joystick interface reported joystick state at which Z80 I/O address, read in BASIC with IN?

Port 31 returned the five joystick bits, read in BASIC with IN 31; the Kempston interface let Atari-standard sticks plug into the Spectrum's rear edge connector.

Fans affectionately call the ZX Spectrum by what nickname?

The Speccy's rivals were the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Dragon 32 and Amstrad CPC.

Which brothers founded Ultimate Play the Game in 1982 and later Rare?

Tim and Chris Stamper set up Ultimate in Ashby-de-la-Zouch in 1982 and founded Rare in 1985; Ultimate's hits included Jetpac, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore.

What was Knight Lore's isometric image-masking technique called?

Filmation drew rooms as masked isometric 3D; Ultimate said Knight Lore was finished before Sabre Wulf and held back a year so it would not kill that game's sales.

In Knight Lore, Sabreman has forty days to brew a cure for what?

Sabreman, cursed to turn into a werewolf each night, must gather the ingredients for the wizard Melkhior within forty days; it was the third Sabreman game.

Manic Miner's in-game music is a piece by which composer?

Edvard Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' plays in the caverns, while Johann Strauss II's 'The Blue Danube' runs on the title screen.

Manic Miner was written after Bug-Byte's despatch manager asked for something like which arcade hit?

It began with sixteen screens; Smith found a way to squeeze in four more.

In Jet Set Willy, who will only let Willy go to bed once he has tidied up after the party?

It was the UK's best-selling game of 1984, despite bugs that initially made it impossible to finish.

Which musical song was dropped from early Jet Set Willy after its publishers demanded £36,000?

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was used on the menu instead.

Melbourne House's 1982 The Hobbit understood a subset of English called what?

Inglish was handled by a parser very advanced for its time; every copy came with the book, by arrangement with its publishers.

Elite, by David Braben and Ian Bell, was first released in 1984 for which computer?

The BBC Micro version, published by Acornsoft in September 1984, came first; players start at Lave with 100 credits and a Cobra Mark III.

Chuckie Egg was written in 1983 by Nigel Alderton at roughly what age?

Nigel Alderton, a schoolboy of 16 or 17, wrote Chuckie Egg and took his Spectrum code to A&F Software, founded by Doug Anderson and Mike Fitzgerald.

In Skool Daze, schoolboy Eric must steal what from the staff-room safe?

Eric must swap his report card out of the staff-room safe after working out the combination from the teachers; classmates include Boy Wander, Angelface and Einstein.

Hungry Horace, the first Horace game of 1982, was a clone of which arcade hit?

Hungry Horace copied Pac-Man's maze-and-guards formula; its sequel Horace Goes Skiing bolted a Frogger-style road crossing onto the ski run.

Kevin Toms's 1982 Football Manager was written entirely in which language?

Kevin Toms wrote Football Manager in BASIC on a Video Genie, a TRS-80 clone, and published it through his own Addictive Games from 1982.

Dizzy, hero of the Oliver Twins' series for Codemasters, is what?

An egg, an anthropomorphic one named for the way he tumbles about, rescuing the Yolkfolk from the wizard Zaks.

Codemasters was founded in October 1986 by which brothers?

Richard and David Darling, with their father Jim, founded Codemasters in Warwickshire in October 1986; EA bought the Southam-based company in 2021 for $1.2 billion.

Crash, the Spectrum magazine famed for Oliver Frey's covers, was launched from which Shropshire town?

Newsfield, formed by Roger Kean, Oliver Frey and Franco Frey, published Crash from Ludlow from February 1984, later adding Zzap!64 there.

When Future plc bought Your Sinclair in 1990, the magazine joked Future had meant to buy which electric vehicle?

The title had started life in January 1984 as Your Spectrum.

The Sinclair C5 electric tricycle, unveiled in January 1985, had a top speed of what?

The C5's 15 mph top speed matched the UK limit for licence-free electric vehicles; Hoover assembled it at Merthyr Tydfil on a Lotus-designed chassis, and only about 5,000 of 14,000 built were sold.

Which world-first product did Clive Sinclair produce in 1972?

The Sinclair Executive of 1972 was the world's first slimline pocket calculator, thin enough for a shirt pocket; it was followed by the ill-fated Black Watch.

The 1980 ZX80 was notable for being one of the first British computers sold for less than what?

The ZX80 sold for £99.95 assembled or £79.95 as a kit, the first British computer under £100, and found about 50,000 buyers.

In the 2009 BBC drama Micro Men, who played Clive Sinclair opposite Martin Freeman's Chris Curry?

Alexander Armstrong played a combustible Clive Sinclair opposite Martin Freeman's Chris Curry; real-life BBC Micro designer Sophie Wilson cameos as a pub landlady.

A Bandersnatch alternate ending plays data-tape audio that, loaded into a Spectrum emulator, produces what?

Loading the audio produces a QR code that links to a Tuckersoft website hosting a playable Spectrum version of the film's game Nohzdyve.

Where in London did Clive Sinclair unveil the ZX Spectrum to journalists on 23 April 1982?

The launch took place at the Churchill Hotel in Portman Square, Marylebone; later that week the machine was shown in a 'blaze of publicity' at the Earl's Court Computer Show.

The Spectrum's predecessor, the ZX81, sold more than how many units worldwide?

The ZX81 sold more than 1.5 million units worldwide, about 60% of them outside Britain, and its £69.95 price opened up a mass market.

The 1984 ZX Spectrum+ was assembled by AB Electronics in South Wales and which Korean firm?

Samsung built some Spectrum+ units in Korea alongside AB Electronics in Wales; released at £179.95, it kept the original's innards but gained a QL-style case and keyboard.

What was the codename of the ZX Spectrum 128 during its development in 1985?

Codenamed Derby, the 128 was developed with Spanish distributor Investrónica and first shown at the SIMO '85 trade fair in Madrid in September 1985.

Which Spectrum-compatible 8-bit computer did Miles Gordon Technology launch in December 1989?

The SAM Coupé ran a 6 MHz Z80B with 256 KB of RAM and could emulate the 48K Spectrum, but MGT went into receivership within a year of its December 1989 launch.

Which communist country had some 100,000 Spectrums by 1988, making it the top home computer there?

Czechoslovakia had an estimated 100,000 Spectrums by 1988 despite only brief official distribution and no advertising; local clones such as the Didaktik Gama followed.

What share of the British home computer market did Sinclair Research hold at its mid-1980s peak?

Christmas 1984 sales were 'extremely good', but the C5 and QL flops soon drained investor confidence.

The LOAD ZX Spectrum museum, devoted to Sinclair computers, opened in 2020 in which country?

Timex of Portugal had built its own Spectrum variants, including the Timex Computer 2048.