"Color, sound and
high resolution graphics, for just 35.000 escudos? It could only be the new ZX Spectrum from Sinclair, such a revolutionary domestic computer that the name that it was awaited, ZX82, it was not sufficiently good.
Spectrum just measured 233x144x30 mm, it weighed 520 grams and, unlike its predecessors, it possessed keys that could be pushed - or, saying better, could be squashed. Today it can make to remind a secretary calculator but, in its time, it could be described as extremely elegant or, at least, truly
elastic!
The previous ZX81 could be expanded for 16 KB, but Spectrum came with that amount of origin memory. With more 15.000 escudos were acquired the wide model of 48 KB. Unhappily, most of the users of the models of first generation had to try two or three machines until they find one that worked completely; nevertheless, the users began to really feel that microcomputing was accessible.
The graphics with 176x256 pixels was reasonably of high resolution for the time, but only if it could attribute them colors in blocks with to very smaller resolution of 24x32 characters.
The sound capacity had the appropriate name of BEEP, because it was practically everything that did, taking advantage of the opportunity intelligently to imbed the computer while some of these strange sounds were produced... A lot of people still remember the inspired system of data input through the keyboard, presented initially in the ZX8O and in the ZX81, in that an only pressure in a key could make to appear whole words or symbols.
The programming of the personal computer processor Z80A to 3,5 MHz had never been so entertaining. The programs were loaded for cassette or through the very promised and not very real microdrive system. It was also available a thermal printer.
ZX Spectrum discharged, really, as a machine for games, creating an enormous market of entertainment that still today flourishes in the PC platform. Most of its proprietors were not assumed programmers, that found in BASIC a form accessible to explore the charms of its machine."
Personal Computer World nr.138 June 1998
