The ZX Spectrum was released to the World on 23 April 1982. It followed on from the success of the ZX 80 and the ZX81. All 3 computers were designed by a British guy called Clive Sinclair, later Sir Clive and released by Sinclair Research Ltd. The new Spectrum ("Speccy") was in colour though and it was a massive success story and really opened up home computing for the masses, along with the later Commodore 64. Sir Clive popped up again in 1985, with less success!!
By todays standards, the Speccy was pretty under powered, with 16kb (yes, kilobytes) of RAM, however a 48kb version was also available. A distinguishing feature of the original Speccy was the rubberised keyboard, with the keys set in a membrane. These keyboards were not known for their long life and later on the keyboard was changed.
I had an original ZX Spectrum and in fact bought one again recently on ebay. One thing I forgot is how complicated the keyboard was. Almost impossible to use! The programming language was Sinclair BASIC, which I seemed to be able to understand more aged about 13 than now! It is fair to say that my iPad has completely nullified any knowledge I had in creating content in favour of consuming it! The keyboard had a massive amount of shortcuts for some of the BASIC commands, such as a G in programming mode would produce GOTO on the screen.
One of the things most people remember about these machines was the storage and gaming, which was via cassette tape (yes, cassette...) and the noise that the machine made when uploading or downloading games and programs.
So, the Speccy has just turned 30. It got a lot of major developers into computers, software is still produced for it and recently an updated emulator app with 100 games was released on iPad (with iCade support - yesssss). Google did a very nice thing on 23 April 2012 (St George's Day in the UK).
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