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| My two ZX80s have no serial numbers. The one on
the left has seen better days but the other works
perfectly. |
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| The Sinclair ZX80 was launched in 1980 as a cheap
introduction to home computing. It was available
in kit form or ready assembled for a slightly higher
price. The initial 1KB of memory and the flat keyboard
helped keep the price low. |
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| The full QWERTY keyboard and the built-in BASIC
programming language made the computer usable by
anyone, not just hobbyists with a knowledge of hexadecimal
and machine code assembly. At the rear are sockets
for a cassette tape recorder to save and load programs,
black and white output to an ordinary television
and the power connection. |
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| At the back there is also an edge connector. This
allows additional memory and peripherals such as
a printer and joystick adaptor to be attached. The
computer is inclined to get very warm, what looks
like ventilation on the top is purely decorative. |
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| The keyboard was unusual as, instead of typing
in BASIC instructions, keywords were generated by
a single touch. So if the first keypress was F then
the word FOR appeared on the screen. Pressing F
again would produce the letter F as the computer
recognises that a command is followed by a variable. |
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| Pressing on SHIFT and L now produces = and if
you follow that with 1 followed by SHIFT and 4 then
5, on pressing NEWLINE you have the instruction
FOR F=1 TO 5. After a while this seems quite natural. |
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| Each instruction must be on a separate line and
only capital letters are available. It is not possible
to type in the keywords. The delete key is labelled
RUBOUT and the enter or return key is labelled NEW
LINE. |
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| Some 50,000 ZX80s were sold. At the time, it was
thought there was virtually no market for home computers. |
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