This was originally posted 15 years ago. Opinions, facts and reality may have changed.
According to The Telegraph, there are plans to relaunch the ZX Spectrum – rubber keyboard and all – in time for its 30th birthday next year.
For geeks of a certain ‘vintage’, the ZX Spectrum was one of our first introductions to the world of modern computing: it wasn’t the size of a small wardrobe, it connected to the portable TV in your bedroom, it had a wide variety of (relatively-inexpensive) games available for it and – if you were truly ambitious – you could even program it to do “stuff”.
Though admittedly, for most people, the programming rarely got further than:
10 Print Hello World
20 Goto 10
Run
Which would fill your screen with the words “Hello World” until you told it to stop.
I was never a Speccy owner, I had to go round to my mate John’s house to experience the sheer joy of Daley Thompson’s Decathalon, Jet Set Willy, JetPac and Chuckie Egg. My Dad finally-relented and splashed out on a ZX81 for me (the ZX Spectrum’s technical father and already woefully out of date by the time I got it) but the 1k of memory I had to play with was dwarfed by the 48k of the Spectrum with its colour display and – gasp – sound!
(The ZX81 was eventually-replaced with an Acorn Electron {because Dad thought it was more educational than a Spectrum} but that’s another story for my therapist and I to discuss).
Will I buy a Spectrum when it’s released? Oh, I think we all know the answer to that one don’t we!
I’m looking forward to attempting to explain to the kids that, yes, this is the kind of computer us “old people” used to own, yes the graphics on your iPod touch are infinitely better and, yes, we really did have to wait 10 minutes for the games to load (whilst listening to something akin to an out-take from Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music“).
And then they’ll be sent to their rooms to allow the old folk to wallow in nostalgia, admittedly on a larger, flatter television than last time, playing Manic Miner into the wee small hours.