The Sinclair ZX80 was a home computer brought to market in 1980 by Sinclair Research of Cambridge, England. It was notable for being the first computer available in the United Kingdom for under a hundred pounds (a pricetag of £99.95, to be exact). It was available in kit form, where purchasers had to assemble and solder it together, and as a ready-built version at a slightly higher cost for those without the skill or inclination to build their own unit. The ZX80 was very popular straight away, and there was for some time a waiting list of several months for either version of the machine.

The machine, designed by Jim Westwood, was based around the NEC μPD780C-1 CPU (a Zilog Z80 clone) @ 1.77 MHz, and equipped with 1 KB of static RAM (expandable to 4KB using a separate 3Kb memory pack), and 4 KB ROM containing the Sinclair BASIC programming language, editor, and "OS". BASIC commands were not entered by spelling them out; instead, the commands were selected rather like they would be on a scientific calculator — each "key" had several different functions activated by use of several modifier (shift) keys.

Display was over a RF connection to a household television, and simple offline program storage was possible using a cassette recorder. The video display generator of the ZX80 used very minimalist hardware plus a combination of software to generate a video signal. As a result of this approach the ZX80 could only generate a picture when it was idle, i.e. waiting for a key to be pressed. When running a BASIC program, or even when pressing as key for any input, the display would, therefore, black out momentarily to support the function. This made moving graphics difficult since the programm had to introduce a pause for input to display the next change in graphical output. The later ZX81 improved on this somewhat because it could run in a 'slow' mode while creating a video signal, or in a 'fast' mode without generating a video signal (typically used for lengthy calculations).

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