Memories of the Sinclair ZX81

Back in 1981 tech entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair released the Sinclair ZX81, described as the first affordable personal computer, I owned one so thought it might be rather fun to share my memories and experiences of it…..

You could play games, this however required spending a ridiculously long time typing in a massively long program out of a magazine such as Your Sinclair or Sinclair User and usually no matter how carefully you typed everything in, upon typing ‘Run’ you would then get the message ‘Error at line xxx’, you would then have to go right back to that line where you’d discover you’d typed in a comma instead of a full stop.  Also what games that were available were unbelievably basic and only in black and white.

The keyboard was a flat membrane affair making speed typing impossible as you really had to press each key for it to register, for extra power a 16K (!) RAM pack was available which incredibly stuck to the back of the machine with velcro, the major issue with this was that if the dog happened to bump into the table leg you’d lose everything you’d typed such was the instability of it.

Frankly the ZX81 was a good idea very poorly executed and I look back upon it in 2022 as a bit of a nightmare and a joke, thank goodness home computing and gaming have come on in leaps and bounds since then!