Today I read a news report on the BBC and decided to go out into the garage to commemorate the occasion.
In the stack of boxes out there one box has this visible on the side:
For those of you who’ve watched the news then you probably know that this is the side of the box for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This is, as the picture shows, the 48K version, before I go any further let’s just stop there and think about that, this machine had 48K of memory.
I did think about going the whole hog and plugging it in, but after considering all of the messing about with a television I decided against it, especially as I realised that I no longer had a tape player to allow me to load in any of the programs.
What I settled on was a bit of an unboxing, so here are the pictures:
The ZX Spectrum was my first experience of personal computing so hold a special place in my memory. It’s difficult to explain to a generation that has so much technology embedded in everything that they do how significant this little box is. But this box opened my eyes to a world of software possibilities. It’s the rise of software that has been the defining feature of the 30 years since the release of this box.
There were also some games on tape cassette. I don’t remember all of the games but I do know we spent hours playing pool and jetpack (the one in the glare at the bottom):
Yes this really was a lot of fun:
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Graham Chastney 
Happy days. Thanks for posting Graham. 48K eh? Amazing what they could squeeze into that. I remember one of the games that managed harmonies from the piezo speaker. Oh yes and Jonah Barrington’s Squash, it had speech!
Notice there was no need to say 48Kb as that was about all you could get and I’m not sure if Megabytes had been invented then.
I have just been playing some old games using SpecX emulator and some tape images from World of Spectrum. Super.
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