Z80 bits and bobs

First contact with a ZX80 with a paltry 1KB of RAM. And to think
that these days one has to endure tens of MB to visit some
clickbait infested page on the www.

Ramblings aside, the ZX80 was a curiosity. The ZX81 had 16KB and 
gave you more freedom. Expansion packs extended it to 48KB, even
64KB but the infamous RAM wobble [1] meant you were never sure that
your type-ins [2] would survive the next key press.
Hours of work lost in a crash/reset.

Unless it was a biorythm type-in, in which case your time was already
wasted to begin with.

The original Sinclair ZX Spectrum had 16KB, but it was with the 48KB
later models that things really took off.
In the US there were some clones manufactured by Timex, the TS2048
and TS2068, manufactured in Europe under license as TC2048 and the
TC2068. They weren't fully compatible with the ZX Spectrum and the 
TC2068 had a emulation ROM cartridge precisely to address some of
these issues.

Most only cared about one command: LOAD "", followed by playing the
tape on the datacorder, but the real fun was to be found in the 
type-ins. Your regular newspapers had weekend editions offering 
BASIC listings, and slowly you had BASIC interspected with some Z80
assembly via decimal opcodes in DATA lines fed to a POKE loop.

Microhobby [3], the weekly magazine, had its own rudimentary editor
that allowed you to enter 20 bytes of hex opcodes and line checksums.
If you think typography errors in BASIC listings were bad, let me
tell you that typos in the hex line checksums were an entirely new
type of woes.

The Spectrum 128K was released, then Amstrad took over Sinclair,
releasing the 128K +2 with an integrated datacorder. Finally a
keyboard that provided a decent typing experience.
The +3 was released later with bundled floppy 3inch disks: the same
used in their CPCs.
That was the end of the line for the Sinclair ZX. The Atari ST,
Commodore Amiga were already dominating the market. The writing was
on the wall.
Or was it?


[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_pack
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program
[3]: https://archive.org/details/microhobby-magazine