25 Facts About Sinclair Spectrum

Sinclair Spectrum was among the first home computers in the United Kingdom aimed at a mainstream audience, similar in significance to the Commodore 64 in the US or the MO5 in France.

The introduction of the ZX Sinclair Spectrum led to a boom in companies producing software and hardware for the machine, the effects of which are still seen.

The ZX Sinclair Spectrum character set was expanded from that of the ZX81, which did not feature lower-case letters.

Sinclair Spectrum BASIC included extra keywords for the more advanced display and sound, and supported multi-statement lines.

The cassette interface was much more advanced, saving and loading around five times faster than the ZX81, and unlike the ZX81, the Sinclair Spectrum could maintain the TV display during tape storage and retrieval operations.

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The Sinclair Spectrum reused a number of design elements of the ZX81: The ROM code for things such as floating point calculations and expression parsing were very similar .

Original ZX Sinclair Spectrum is remembered for its rubber chiclet keyboard, diminutive size and distinctive rainbow motif.

An "Issue 1" ZX Sinclair Spectrum can be distinguished from later models by the colour of the keys – light grey for Issue 1, blue-grey for later machines.

Sinclair Spectrum models featured audio line in and out, in the form of an "ear" and "mic" socket.

Original ZX Sinclair Spectrum model experienced numerous changes to its motherboard design; mainly to improve manufacturing efficiencies, but to correct bugs from previous boards.

In March 1983, Sinclair Spectrum issued an "URGENT" recall warning for all owners of models bought after 1 January 1983.

In early 1985, the original Sinclair Spectrum was officially discontinued and the ZX Sinclair Spectrum+ was reduced in price to £129.

In 1985, Sinclair developed the ZX Spectrum 128 in conjunction with their Spanish distributor Investronica .

Appearance of the ZX Sinclair Spectrum 128 was similar to the ZX Sinclair Spectrum+, with the exception of a large external heatsink for the internal 7805 voltage regulator added to the right hand end of the case, replacing the internal heatsink in previous versions.

ZX Sinclair Spectrum 128 had no internal speaker, unlike its predecessors.

ZX Spectrum +2 was Amstrad's first Spectrum, coming shortly after their purchase of the Spectrum range and "Sinclair" brand in 1986.

ZX Sinclair Spectrum +2 power supply was a grey version of the ZX Sinclair Spectrum+ and 128 power supply.

ZX Sinclair Spectrum +2A was a variant of the Sinclair Spectrum +3, released in 1987, and housed inside a black case.

ZX Sinclair Spectrum +3, released in 1987, looked similar to the +2A but featured a built-in 3-inch floppy disk drive instead of the tape drive, and was in a black case.

Sinclair Spectrum used a crowdfunding campaign to fund the Recreated ZX Spectrum, which would be compatible with games the company had already released on iTunes and Google Play.

ZX Sinclair Spectrum Next is an expanded and updated version of the ZX Sinclair Spectrum computer implemented with FPGA technology funded by a Kickstarter campaign in April 2017, with the board-only computer delivered to backers later that year.

Sinclair Spectrum released the ZX Interface 2 which added two joystick ports and a ROM cartridge port.

From August 1982, the ZX Sinclair Spectrum came bundled with a software starter pack in the form of a cassette tape entitled Horizons: Software Starter Pack, which included 8 programs: Thro' the Wall, Bubblesort, Evolution, Life, Draw, Monte Carlo, Character Generator, Beating of Waves .

The Sinclair Spectrum was intended to work with a normal domestic cassette recorder.

Sinclair Spectrum is affectionately known as the Speccy by elements of its fan following.

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