Slashdot has a post reminding us that April 23 was the 25th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. For a while in the early 1980s the ZX Spectrum was the top selling PC in the UK and in several other countries.
If we think back to how basic and primitive the ZX Spectrum was we get some idea how fast things are changing.
The ZX Spectum had (comparisons with a modern Dell in brackets):
Processor, Z80, 3.5 MHz (Dell 3+ GHz, usually dual processor, thousand times faster)
Ram, 16Kb (Dell 1Gb, million times more)
Graphics, 32 columns by 24 rows, using 15 colours (Dell 1200x800 or much better, millions of colours)
The ZX Spectrum dated back to a time before Microsoft Windows, CDs, DVDs, the World Wide Web, Microsoft Office, and most modern programming techniques. People who came to computers in the ‘old days’ are always likely to view them through a mechanistic prism which recalls how primitive they are. But, people who are under 16, who can’t remember a time before the Web, are likely to view them in very different ways.
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