I had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.

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gxd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.

It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.

Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)

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le-mark 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.

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jz391 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And, of course, with the Speccy you had the Microdrive - an affordable middle ground between tape recorder and a disk drive. I still remember the excitement of not having to record/rewind/play (to verify). Good old times...

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reaperducer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge

It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard.

Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way.

But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.

	▲	gxd 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book. The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.

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silvestrov 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Commodore 64 in 1982 cost US$595 ($2,059 today).

ZX Spectrum in 1982 cost $200 ($692 today) for 16 KB model and had a 48K model for 40% more.

It was the difference between affordable and unaffordable for many people.

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mig39 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I visited this ZX Spectrum museum in this summer: https://loadzx.com/en/

So strange to stumble upon this blast from the 80s in a small town in the middle of Portugal. But I think this reinforces the fact that the Spectrum was to Europe what the C64 was to North America.

Anyway, wonderful memories in there!

	▲	RetroTechie 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The Speccy was very popular in Spain (and I'd assume Portugal too). As well as -probably not coincidence- in South American countries. Arab countries & Europe's Eastern block each have their own computing histories that's very different from the usual US-centric tale.

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tclancy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>there was no hacking around allowed

You fool! That was to encourage latent hackers to emerge into the world.