“Cracked by Bill Gilbert”: Do you remember this time?
The current year 2017 is rich in historical anniversaries. This, of course, is the centenary of the February Revolution and the Great October Revolution. But we won’t talk about them. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the release of the ZX Spectum home computer by the small British company Sinclair Research Ltd, which awakened the specter of the computer revolution in the USSR. And honestly, this phenomenon is worth paying a little attention to.
British engineer Clive Sinclair is considered the “father” of the ZX Spectrum. On the way to the famous computer, Sinclair passed such milestones as the world's first electronic pocket calculator, a compact semiconductor television in the form of a gadget, as well as the harbingers of the Spectrum - the ZX-80 and ZX-81 computers.
The ZX Spectrum was a fairly ambitious project: Clive Sinclair planned to “wash” the competition in the form of the expensive BBC Micro, Dragon-64, pretentious “Commodores”, and throw a “people’s” computer on the market at a price of less than 100 pounds.
The idea was a brilliant success. The hardware implementation of the new machine was carried out by electronics engineer Richard Altwasser, the “firmware” code was written by programmer Steven Vickers, and the body design was created by artist Rick Dickinson.
The result is a computer that is powerful, simple, and very attractive at the same time. Game makers willingly produced programs for the ZX Spectrum, various companies designed a wide variety of peripheral devices for it, and users were no less willing to purchase a new miracle at a very affordable price. In just a year and a half from the launch, more than a million Spectrums were sold.
It was a great time when a small group of desperate geeks could surprise the world with an amazing invention, created in a garage on a small budget and with almost naked enthusiasm.
Thanks to successful projects, Clive Sinclair earned money, fame and even a knighthood from the hands of the august Baba Lisa, receiving the right to put the short but very tasty title “sir” in front of his name.
True, that’s where Sinclair’s luck ended. Sir Clive squandered a lot of money on the failed Sinclair QL project, on some strange electric cars, spent money in inappropriate ways, fell into projectism with the Loki computer and, in the end, was forced to sell the most profitable part of his business to a large British “shark” Alan Sugar , owner of Amstrad. Since 1986, all British versions of the Spectrum, including version 128, +2 and +3, have been produced on the Amstrad basis.
The British even made an attempt to compete with Atari and Commodore with their Spectrums on the US home computer market. The rights to produce cars for America were transferred to Timex, which put a lot of effort into adapting the Spectrum to local standards. Unfortunately, the attempt failed, and the Spectrums did not take root in Yankee country for a number of reasons. But until the end of the 1980s, the triumphant march of Spectrums continued in Europe and even in Latin America, thanks, first of all, to the incredible popularity of these computers in Spain.
Somewhere in 1984-85, Spectrums began to appear behind the Iron Curtain. First of all, in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The spread of Spectrums in Poland was explosive and even prompted the creation of a joint Polish-British venture for the factory production of a clone with the strange name UniPolBrit. In Czechoslovakia, around the same time, the production of its own clone Didaktik Gama began.
The story of the appearance of the ZX Spectrum in Eastern Europe and the USSR is associated with the personality of the British billionaire and media tycoon Robert Maxwell. Maxwell (Chaim Benjamin), a native of the Czechoslovakian part of Transcarpathia, fought the Nazis in the French Foreign Legion and as part of the Czech division of the French army during World War II.
After the fall of France, he moved to Great Britain and joined the British army as a volunteer. Participated in the landing in Normandy. Maxwell's Transcarpathian relatives were almost completely exterminated by the German and Hungarian Nazis.
Apparently, all these events became the reason why the future British media magnate had great sympathy for the USSR and his historical homeland of Czechoslovakia, combining business with pleasure - very profitably trading high-tech with the sanctioned world of socialism. There is a very remarkable episode in Maxwell’s biography: in 1948, he participated in Stalin’s famous special operation - supplying weapons to Israel from Czechoslovakia.
In any case, Robert Maxwell was not without reason considered in the West to be an agent of Soviet influence. So, in 1985, when Clive Sinclair, mired in debt, was ready to do anything to get his creditors off his back, it was Robert Maxwell who offered him financial assistance. Thus, many computers from the warehouse, documentation and tons of various accessories ended up behind the Iron Curtain.
But the most interesting thing is that it was in the Czech Didaktik clones that such important components of the branded Spectrum were used, such as a custom ULA chip.
By the way, for his services, Maxwell negotiated from some Soviet officials the right to the first official release in the West of the mega-popular game Tetris. The first publisher was the British company MirrorSoft, owned by the son of a media magnate. True, the case of the sale of licensing rights to Tetris was not without a scandal, since some other Soviet officials firmly promised to transfer the rights to the first release of Tetris to a famous Hungarian businessman, who at one time promoted the famous Rubik's Cube. In the end, the American company Spectrum Holobyte won, acquiring both the rights and programmer Pajitnov as a consultant, flooding the gaming market of the late 1980s with all sorts of variations of Tetris, but MirrorSoft still managed to release Tetris for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC.
Meanwhile, Soviet engineers and students, sitting on a computer ration on a starvation diet, began to master the artifacts of Western civilization that had fallen into their hands using the method of reverse engineering.
Why ZX Spectrum, since already in the mid-80s the USSR began making some progress towards its own computer construction? In principle, the domestic BK-0010 that appeared on sale was quite good, but with an obvious shortage of software, it cost an inhumane 600 rubles, and to purchase it you had to sign up in a queue. The RK86 offered by Radio magazine to its readers was a “mess made from an axe.” The enthusiast needed not only to find the necessary microcircuits for it, but also to etch the boards, solder them, debug them and enjoy the complete absence of software. Not to mention the fact that the RK86 was nothing in terms of pictures, providing the user with ample opportunities to become sophisticated in symbolic pseudographics.
In this regard, Spectrum was much more attractive. The only irreplaceable imported part for it was the Z80A processor. A custom ULA chip replaced “loose” chips from domestic chips. In addition, the computer had good graphics. The absence of a graphics processor in the Spectrum was replaced by a non-standard organization of screen memory. In terms of three-dimensional graphics, the Spectrum, for example, was dominated by the Commodore-64, which was iconic in the West, which had graphics and sound coprocessors, but had a much less productive central processor than the Z80A.
And the “Spectrum” cost about 2,5 - 3 times cheaper than the “Bakashka”, subject to the purchase of a designer set. The assembled and debugged Spectrum was sold second-hand for 800 - 1000 rubles, depending on the coolness of the assembly.
It is believed that the first to master the ZX Spectrum in reverse were engineers from the ELVIT Design Bureau at the Lviv Polytechnic University, who released the “Lvov” model in 1986. Debatable. At the same time, “Moscow-48” and “Krasnodar-48” appeared, schematically noticeably different from the Lvov model.
However, until 1988-89, few people could afford to build their own home computer. And it wasn't about the money. There were no suitable microcircuits, printed circuit boards, connectors and other parts available for free sale. The first “Spectrums” were generally soldered on circuit boards, where the contacts of the parts were connected by a tangle of connections. It became a little easier under the cooperators, but you still had to buy the designer (board, processor, ROM, microcircuits) underground. In Moscow, for example, you could get hold of components on the sports ground behind the Pioneer store, not far from the Belorussky railway station, “ask Herman.” Moreover, the printed circuit boards were etched at the factory and even had metallized holes, which greatly facilitated soldering.
They say that at the end of 1989, spectrum production in the Union reached such a scale that there were not enough microcircuits even for industrial enterprises to fulfill the plan. The computer genie, through the efforts of Sinclair Research engineers, Robert Maxwell and a group of domestic enthusiasts, was released. Home computer ownership exploded in 1990 and 1991. In the year of the collapse of the Union, there were at least 10 million Spectrum owners in the country, welded together at the knees.
In 1991, The Hobbit was finally born - a joint brainchild of Soviet and British Spectrumists.
Spectrum has become a school to eliminate computer illiteracy in a country with the most educated population in the world. The circuits were being finalized, and the software, which came from the Warsaw computer exchange broken - broken by all sorts of crooked M1 an Idiotic User or Cracked by Bill Gilbert, was carefully restored to a bug-free condition. Soon games and applications written by our craftsmen began to appear on the Spectrum.
Since 1990, in the West, the era of 8-bit machines was already coming to an end, they were replaced by a wonderful generation of 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST, but in our country it was a real golden time. Designers and ready-made computers were rapidly becoming cheaper, which was greatly facilitated by the emergence of radio markets and the economy-class model “Leningrad” - few cases and easy to debug. Analogues of the Z80 produced in the GDR and the USSR have finally appeared on sale. Acquaintances, when meeting, respectfully informed each other: “I have Baltika” - “and I have Pentagon.”
At that time, the Spectrum software library already exceeded 10 thousand games and applications for every taste and color.
The slow-moving domestic electronics industry finally responded to the Spectrum phenomenon in the late 80s, suddenly showing interest and turning its face to the people. The craftsmen produced a number of very interesting computers: “Corvette”, “Orion-128”, “Vector”... Now, if only a couple of years earlier, it remains to be seen whose one would have been taken. And so, the train had already left, and domestic production had to catch up with the market, producing factory clones of the Spectrum, like Byte, Delta and other models.
It became even more fun in the early 90s, when Yamaha music processors went on sale, with which the Spectrum-128K models were standardly equipped. From now on, self-made Spectrums began to sing in three voices.
Gradually, a unique subculture arose around Spectrum in the post-Soviet space: electronic magazines, games, and even ZXNet began to appear. Demo became a separate type of computer art - a synthetic genre that absorbed the talents of a programmer, artist, and musician. Who has the coolest code and effects, the most beautiful picture and the most killer musical theme. In August 1995, the first congress of “Spectrumists” and owners of other popular Enlight'95 platforms was held in St. Petersburg with great triumph. A couple of years later, another party took over the baton from Enlight - the Chaos Constructions festival.
In the second half of the 90s, a phenomenon was recorded when European Spectrum fans bought Russian clones that had some non-standard features that made it possible to expand the graphics and speed capabilities of the regular Speccy.
In conclusion, I would like to say about another important role of the self-made “Spectrum” in the life of our country. The peak of its popularity came with the collapse of the USSR. Life has become difficult, gray and somewhat hopeless. And people were very often helped out by their small, modest, homemade home computer. Some managed to make ends meet by soldering and debugging, while many simply found an outlet in it with their children.
Surely there will be fans who will remember how, when they came home after work, they turned on the Spectrum and immersed themselves in it, just to avoid listening to the sickening news about another bloody victory for democracy.
Thousands of people downloaded the wonderful game ELITE, and, looking at the screen with a wire carrot, with bated breath, felt like pirates, brave traders or hunters at the helm of the Cobra MKIII spaceship.
ZX Spectrum is still more alive than all the living. It has long left the niche of commercial machines, but still remains a hobby computer. Often the Spectrum can be found somewhere in the cozy garage of an old enthusiast, or in a typical man’s den. You can still buy a kit for soldering yourself, or a ready-made computer that bears little resemblance to the first models with a keyboard made from telephone blocks, squeezed into a suitable box.
In Kyiv, before the putsch, one figure even sold at a reasonable price Spectrum sets of his own design on a modern element base for the Skillful Hairy Hands circle. If the soldering was correct, the computer did not require debugging. The entire computer, with the exception of a couple of peripheral chips, was folded into a programmable FPGA matrix.
By the way, retro computers Minimig, MiST, FPGA Arcade and others have been producing and selling in this way for quite some time now, turning 8-bit, 16-bit machines and even slot machines into one chip at the same time.
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