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Sinclair ZX80 Dead

Sinclair ZX80
KindMachine
Introduced1980
Discontinued1981
StatusDead
ManufacturerSinclair Research
ClassHome computer
PlatformZ80, 1K RAM
Sourceen.wikipedia.org ↗

£99.95 in kit form — the first computer a British teenager could afford. 1 KB of RAM, a membrane keyboard, and a generation's worth of ingenuity born of scarcity.

Created by Sinclair Research

Sinclair's ZX80 (February 1980) — £99.95 as kit, £119.95 assembled — was the first computer a British kid could buy with paper-round money. Four chips, 1K RAM, BASIC in a 4K ROM, membrane keyboard, display generated by the CPU.

It sold ~100,000 units and taught a generation that scarcity forces ingenuity — the 'ZX80 flicker' (screen blank during computation) was solved by software, not hardware.

Sources

  1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80