The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research. Based on a Zilog Z80 A CPU running at 3.50 MHz, the Spectrum came with either 16 KB or 48 KB of RAM. The hardware designer was Richard Altwasser of Sinclair Research and the software was written by Steve Vickers on contract from Nine Tiles Ltd, the authors of Sinclair BASIC. Sinclair's industrial designer Rick Dickinson was responsible for the machine's outward appearance. Originally dubbed the ZX82, the machine was later renamed the "Spectrum" by Sinclair to highlight the machine's colour display, compared to the black-and-white of its predecessors, the ZX80 and ZX81.

Description

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Video output was to a TV, for a simple colour graphic display. The rubber keyboard (on top of a membrane, similar to calculator keys) was marked with Sinclair BASIC keywords, so that, for example, pressing "G" when in programming mode would insert the BASIC command GO TO. Experienced programmers were thus able to create BASIC programs much faster than on other computers at the time. Programs and data were stored using a normal cassette recorder.

The Spectrum's video display, although rudimentary by today's standards, was perfect at the time for display on portable TV sets, and did not present much of a barrier to game development. Text could be displayed using 32 columns × 24 rows of characters from the Spectrum Character Set, with a choice of 8 colours in either normal or bright mode, which gave 15 shades (black was the same in both modes). The image resolution was 256×192 with the same colour limitations. The Spectrum had an interesting method of handling colour; the colour attributes were held in a 32×24 grid, separate from the text or graphical data, but was still limited to only two colours in any given character cell. This led to what was called colour clash or attribute clash with some bizarre effects in arcade style games. This problem became a distinctive feature of the Spectrum and an in-joke among Spectrum users, as well as a point of derision by advocates of other systems. Other machines available around the same time, for example the Amstrad CPC, did not suffer from this problem. The Commodore 64 used colour attributes, but hardware sprites and scrolling were used to avoid attribute clash.

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