Re: Apple II plus clone?

[Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Alex Freed <alex_news@alexfreed.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> In England you mainly had the rubbish from Sinclair (which also made it to
>>>> America under the Timex name I think) - ZX80, ZX81, and Spectrum.
> 
> My understanding is that while ZX80 was clearly a more of a toy rather
> than a computer the claim to fame was the price. I think it was the first
> under $100 computer. Or was it under 100 pounds?  From the technical
> point of view the design was quite innovative using the absolute minimum
> of hardware to do the job.

It was under $100--and worth every penny of it. ;-)

Unfortunately, the trade offs to lower cost (BOM ~ $30?) were very
detrimental to usability. The "keyboard" has already been mentioned, but
the "innovative" use of the Z80 to generate the video left very little
processor time for running programs. And if you plugged the extra 16K RAM
module onto the back of it, it was just a short time until connector noise
(caused by case flexure while keyboarding) wiped out your work. 

If you wanted to try computing in the worst way, the Timex-Sinclair
machines were the way to do it. ;-)

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon