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127-528: The ZX Spectrum ( UK : / z ɛ d ɛ k s / ) is an 8-bit home computer developed and marketed by Sinclair Research . Considered one of the most influential computers ever made, it is also one of the best-selling British computers ever, with over five million units sold. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and around the world in the following years, most notably in Europe,

254-576: A West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Common Brittonic —the insular variety of Continental Celtic , which was influenced by the Roman occupation. This group of languages ( Welsh , Cornish , Cumbric ) cohabited alongside English into

381-706: A "blaze of publicity" at the Earl's Court Computer Show in London, and the ZX Microfair in Manchester . The ZX Spectrum was launched with two models: a 16KB 'basic' version, and an enhanced 48KB variant. The former model had an undercutting price of £125, significantly lower than its main competitor the BBC Micro , whilst the latter model's price of £175 was comparable to a third of an Apple II computer. Upon release,

508-422: A Briton taking on the world, Sinclair has become the best-known name in micros." The media latched onto Sinclair's image; his "Uncle Clive" persona is said to have been created by the gossip columnist for Personal Computer World . The press praised Sinclair as a visionary genius, with The Sun lauding him as "the most prodigious inventor since Leonardo da Vinci ". Adamson and Kennedy wrote that Sinclair outgrew

635-559: A century as Received Pronunciation (RP). However, due to language evolution and changing social trends, some linguists argue that RP is losing prestige or has been replaced by another accent, one that the linguist Geoff Lindsey for instance calls Standard Southern British English. Others suggest that more regionally-oriented standard accents are emerging in England. Even in Scotland and Northern Ireland, RP exerts little influence in

762-579: A computer". After its release, computing in Britain became an activity for the general public rather than the preserve of office workers and hobbyists. The ZX81's commercial success made Sinclair Research one of Britain's leading computer manufacturers, with Sinclair himself reportedly "amused and gratified" by the attention the machine received. Development of the ZX Spectrum began in September 1981,

889-512: A few months after the release of the ZX81. Sinclair resolved to make his own products obsolete before his rivals developed the products that would do so. Parts of designs from the ZX80 and ZX81 were reused to ensure a speedy and cost-effective manufacturing process. The team consisted of 20 engineers housed in a small office at 6 King's Parade , Cambridge. During early production, the machine was known as

1016-697: A few outdated routines remained in the Spectrum ROM. The Spectrum's keyboard is imprinted with BASIC keywords. To input a command in BASIC, many keywords require a single keyboard stroke. Other keywords require a change of keyboard mode by a few keystrokes. The BASIC interpreter is derived from the one used on the ZX81 . A BASIC program for ZX81 can be entered into a ZX Spectrum with minimal modifications. However, Spectrum BASIC introduced numerous additional features, enhancing its usability. The ZX Spectrum character set

1143-586: A foreground and a background colour, a brightness level (normal or bright) and a flashing "flag" which, when set, causes the two colours to swap at regular intervals. This scheme leads to what was dubbed "colour clash" or attribute clash , where a desired colour of a specific pixel could not be selected, but only the colour attributes of an 8x8 block. This became a distinctive feature of the Spectrum, requiring programs, especially games, to be designed with this limitation in mind. In contrast, other machines available at

1270-453: A full range of colour and sound for a price under $ 200. Although it was more enhanced than its British counterpart, sales proved poor and Timex Sinclair collapsed the following year. A crucial part of the company's marketing strategy was to implement regular price-cutting at strategic intervals to maintain market share . Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy noted that Sinclair's method was driven by securing his leading position through "panicking"

1397-507: A graphics mode that required less than 7 kilobytes of memory and implemented it on the ULA. Vickers wrote most of the ROM code. Lengthy discussions between Altwasser and Sinclair engineers resulted in a broad agreement that the ZX Spectrum must have high-resolution graphics, 16 kilobytes of memory, an improved cassette interface , and an impressive colour palette. To achieve this, the team had to divorce

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1524-508: A greater movement, normally [əʊ], [əʉ] or [əɨ]. Dropping a morphological grammatical number , in collective nouns , is stronger in British English than North American English. This is to treat them as plural when once grammatically singular, a perceived natural number prevails, especially when applying to institutional nouns and groups of people. The noun 'police', for example, undergoes this treatment: Police are investigating

1651-536: A high likelihood of being fired and since a company requiring an outsider to come in at such a high level may be in a precarious financial position. Their use has caused some investors concern since they do not specify that the executive has to perform well. In some high-profile instances, executives cashed in their stock options, while under their stewardship their companies lost millions of dollars and thousands of workers were laid off . Golden handshakes may create perverse incentives for top executives to facilitate

1778-599: A high of 40 per cent. Sales in the 1984 Christmas season were described as "extremely good". In early 1985 the British press reported the home computer boom to have ended, leaving many companies slashing prices of their hardware to anticipate lower sales. Despite this, celebration of Sinclair's success in the computing market continued at the Which Computer? show in Birmingham , where the five-millionth ZX Spectrum

1905-627: A lacking distribution. Nigel Searle , the newly-appointed chief of Sinclair's computer division, said in June 1982 the company had no plans to stock the new machine in WHSmith , which was at the time Sinclair's only retailer. Searle explained that the mail-order system was in place due to there being no "obvious" retail outlets in the United Kingdom which could sell personal computers, and it made "better sense" financially to continue selling through mail-order. The company's conservative approach to distributing

2032-406: A lesser class or social status and often discounted or considered of a low intelligence. Another contribution to the standardisation of British English was the introduction of the printing press to England in the mid-15th century. In doing so, William Caxton enabled a common language and spelling to be dispersed among the entirety of England at a much faster rate. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of

2159-690: A non-textured surface were at risk of causing shock, and were asked to be sent back to a warehouse in Cambridgeshire which would supply a replacement within 48 hours. Development of the ZX Spectrum+ began in June 1984, and was released on 15 October that year at £179. It was assembled by AB Electronics in South Wales and Samsung in South Korea. This 48 KB Spectrum introduced a new QL -style case with an injection-moulded keyboard and

2286-606: A process called T-glottalisation . National media, being based in London, have seen the glottal stop spreading more widely than it once was in word endings, not being heard as "no [ʔ] " and bottle of water being heard as "bo [ʔ] le of wa [ʔ] er". It is still stigmatised when used at the beginning and central positions, such as later , while often has all but regained /t/ . Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p , as in pa [ʔ] er and k as in ba [ʔ] er. In most areas of England and Wales, outside

2413-415: A project feasible and went ahead with ordering 100,000 sets of parts so that he could launch at high volume. On 5 March 1981, the ZX81 was launched worldwide to immense success with more than 1.5 million units sold, 60% of which was outside Britain. According to Ben Rosen , by pricing the ZX81 so low, the company had "opened up a completely new market among people who had never previously considered owning

2540-520: A regional accent or dialect. However, about 2% of Britons speak with an accent called Received Pronunciation (also called "the King's English", "Oxford English" and " BBC English" ), that is essentially region-less. It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. In

2667-515: A reset button that functions as a switch shorting across the CPU reset capacitor. Electronically, it was identical to the previous 48 KB model. The machine outsold the rubber-key model two to one, however, some retailers reported a failure rate of up to 30%, compared with a more typical 5–6% for the older model. In early 1985, the original Spectrum was officially discontinued, and the ZX Spectrum+

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2794-472: A severely constrained memory system, and in Nine Tiles' opinion was unsuitable for the enhanced processing demands of the ZX Spectrum. Sinclair favoured solving this with expansion modules on the existing framework like with the ZX81, which Nine Tiles disagreed with. Ultimately, both designs were developed, but Vickers and Nine Tiles were unable to finish their version before the launch of the Spectrum and it

2921-660: A significant commercial failure, selling only 17,000 units and losing Sinclair £7 million. It has since been described as "one of the great marketing bombs of postwar British industry". The ASA ordered Sinclair to withdraw advertisements for the C5 after finding that the company's claims about its safety could not be proved or justified. The combined failures of the C5 and QL caused investors to lose confidence in Sinclair's judgement. In May 1985, Sinclair Research announced their intention to raise an additional £10 to £15 million to restructure

3048-616: A significant drop in Sinclair's income from orders in January, as retailers were left with surplus stock. Subsequently, an upgraded model, the ZX Spectrum 128, was released in Spain in September 1985, with development financed by the Spanish distributor Investrónica. The launch of this model in the UK was postponed until January 1986 due to the substantial leftover inventory of the prior model. While

3175-464: A television speaker. The ZX Spectrum +2 marked Amstrad's entry into the Spectrum market shortly after their acquisition of the Spectrum range and "Sinclair" brand in 1986. This machine featured a brand-new grey case with a spring-loaded keyboard, dual joystick ports, and an integrated cassette recorder known as the "Datacorder," akin to the Amstrad CPC 464 . However, it was largely identical to

3302-648: A time, was governed by the BASIC command 'BEEP', where programmers could manipulate parameters for pitch and duration. Furthermore, the processor remained occupied exclusively with the BASIC BEEPs until their completion, limiting concurrent operations. Despite these constraints, it marked a significant step forward from the ZX81 , which lacked any sound capabilities. Resourceful programmers swiftly devised workarounds; its rudimentary audio functionality compelled developers to explore unconventional methods such as programming

3429-419: A very small amount of read-only memory (ROM). The development process of the software was marked by disagreements between Nine Tiles and Sinclair Research. Sinclair placed an emphasis on expediting the release of the Spectrum, primarily by minimising alterations in the software from the ZX81, which had in turn been based on the ZX80's software. The software architecture of the ZX80, however, had been tailored for

3556-421: Is 256×192 pixels, subject to the same colour limitations. To optimise memory usage, colour is stored separately from the pixel bitmap in a low resolution, 32×24 grid overlay, corresponding to the character cells. In practical terms, this means that all pixels within an 8x8 character block share one foreground colour and one background colour. Altwasser received a patent for this design. An "attribute" consists of

3683-540: Is again due to information asymmetries, since it is more common for top executives to do everything they can to window dress their company's earnings forecasts). A reduced share price makes a company an easier takeover target. When the company gets bought out (or taken private) - at a dramatically lower price - the takeover artist gains a windfall from the former top executive's actions to surreptitiously reduce share price. This can represent tens of billions of dollars (questionably) transferred from previous shareholders to

3810-725: Is also due to London-centric influences. Examples of R-dropping are car and sugar , where the R is not pronounced. British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are usually preserved, and in several areas also /oː/ and /eː/, as in go and say (unlike other varieties of English, that change them to [oʊ] and [eɪ] respectively). Some areas go as far as not diphthongising medieval /iː/ and /uː/, that give rise to modern /aɪ/ and /aʊ/; that is, for example, in

3937-414: Is based on British English, but has more influence from American English , often grouped together due to their close proximity. British English, for example, is the closest English to Indian English, but Indian English has extra vocabulary and some English words are assigned different meanings. Golden handshake The term originated in Britain in the mid-1960s. It was coined by the city editor of

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4064-494: Is channelled through an RF modulator , intended for use with contemporary television sets, to provide a simple colour graphic display. Text is displayed using a grid of 32 columns × 24 rows of characters from the ZX Spectrum character set , or from a custom set. The machine features a colour palette of 15 colours, consisting of seven saturated colours at two levels of brightness, along with black. The image resolution

4191-795: Is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times newspaper, the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press . The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules , and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style . Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style for published American English ,

4318-490: Is intended for attachment to other audio devices as a line-in source. The ZX Spectrum integrated various design elements from the ZX81. The keyboard decoding and cassette interfaces were nearly identical, although the latter was programmed for higher-speed loading and saving. The central ULA integrated circuit shares some resemblance with that of the ZX81, but it features a fully hardware-based television raster generator with colour support. This enhancement indirectly provided

4445-532: Is significantly more advanced than the ZX81, with approximately four times faster average speeds. The original ZX Spectrum is remembered for its rubber chiclet keyboard , diminutive size and distinctive rainbow motif. It was originally released on 23 April 1982 with 16 KB of RAM for £125 (equivalent to £557 in 2023) or with 48 KB for £175 (equivalent to £780 in 2023); these prices were reduced to £99 (equivalent to £422 in 2023) and £129 (equivalent to £550 in 2023) respectively in 1983. Owners of

4572-547: The Chambers Dictionary , and the Collins Dictionary record actual usage rather than attempting to prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other varieties of English, and neologisms are frequent. For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the ninth century, the form of language spoken in London and

4699-577: The AY-3-8912 chip, MIDI compatibility, an RS-232 serial port, an RGB monitor port, 32 KB of ROM including an improved BASIC editor, and an external keypad. The machine was simultaneously unveiled for the first time and launched in September 1985 at the SIMO '85 trade show in Spain, with a price of 44,250 pesetas . Sinclair later presented the ZX Spectrum 128 at The May Fair Hotel 's Crystal Rooms in London, where he acknowledged that entertainment

4826-591: The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in May of that year. Particularly serious were allegations that Sinclair was cashing cheques months before machines were shipped. By autumn 1984, Sinclair was still publicly forecasting that it would be a "million seller" and that 250,000 units would be sold by the end of the year. QL production was suspended in February 1985, and the price was halved by

4953-529: The Commodore ;64 , BBC Micro , Dragon 32 , and the Amstrad ;CPC range. Over 24,000 different software products were released for the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum played a pivotal role in the early history of personal computing and video gaming , leaving an enduring legacy that influenced generations. Its introduction led to a boom in companies producing software and hardware ,

5080-561: The Daily Express , Frederick Ellis. It later gained currency in New Zealand in the late 1990s over the controversial departures of various state sector executives. "Golden handshakes" are typically offered only to high-ranking executives by major corporations and may entail a value measured in millions of dollars. Golden handshakes are given to offset the risk inherent in taking the new job, since high-ranking executives have

5207-603: The East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education in Britain. The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect levelling and a thought of social superiority. Speaking in the Standard dialect created class distinctions; those who did not speak the standard English would be considered of

ZX Spectrum - Misplaced Pages Continue

5334-576: The English language in England , or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English , Welsh English , and Northern Irish English . Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with]

5461-493: The Royal Spanish Academy with Spanish. Standard British English differs notably in certain vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation features from standard American English and certain other standard English varieties around the world. British and American spelling also differ in minor ways. The accent, or pronunciation system, of standard British English, based in southeastern England, has been known for over

5588-490: The Scots language or Scottish Gaelic ). Each group includes a range of dialects, some markedly different from others. The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. Around the middle of the 15th century, there were points where within the 5 major dialects there were almost 500 ways to spell the word though . Following its last major survey of English Dialects (1949–1950),

5715-632: The University of Cambridge . By this time inexpensive microprocessors had started appearing on the market, which prompted Sinclair to start producing the MK14 , a computer teaching kit which sold well at a very low price. Encouraged by this success, Sinclair renamed his company to Sinclair Research , and started looking to manufacture personal computers. Keeping the cost low was essential for Sinclair to avoid his products from becoming outpriced by American or Japanese equivalents as had happened to several of

5842-515: The University of Leeds has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects. The team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC , in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout

5969-562: The West Country and other near-by counties of the UK, the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as non-rhoticity . In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word beginning with a vowel. This is called the intrusive R . It could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently. This

6096-405: The central processing unit (CPU) away from the main display to enable it to work at full efficiency – a method which contrasted with the ZX81's integrated CPU. The inclusion of colour to the display proved a major obstacle to the engineers. A Teletext -like approach was briefly considered, in which each line of text would have colour-change codes inserted into it. However, this was ruled out, as it

6223-414: The principal-agent / perverse incentive issues involved with golden handshakes and golden parachutes . Similar issues occur when a publicly held asset or non-profit organization undergoes privatization . Top executives often reap tremendous monetary benefits when a government owned or non-profit entity is sold to private hands. Just as in the example above, they can facilitate this process by making

6350-668: The "Sinclair" brand name, to Alan Sugar 's Amstrad for £5 million. The takeover sent ripples through the London Stock Exchange , but Amstrad's shares soon recovered, with one stock broker affirming that " the City appears to have taken the news in its stride". Amstrad's acquisition of the brand name saw the release of three ZX Spectrum models throughout the late 1980s, each with varying improvements. By 1990, Sinclair Research consisted of Sinclair and two other employees down from 130 employees at its peak in 1985. The ZX Spectrum

6477-468: The 16 KB model could purchase an internal 32 KB RAM upgrade, which for early "Issue 1" machines consisted of a daughterboard . Later issue machines required the fitting of 8 dynamic RAM chips and a few TTL chips. Users could mail their 16K Spectrums to Sinclair to be upgraded to 48 KB versions. Later revisions contained 64 KB of memory but were configured such that only 48 KB were usable. External 32 KB RAM packs that mounted in

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6604-629: The 21st century. RP, while long established as the standard English accent around the globe due to the spread of the British Empire , is distinct from the standard English pronunciation in some parts of the world; most prominently, RP notably contrasts with standard North American accents. In the 21st century, dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary , the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ,

6731-836: The English Language (1755) was a large step in the English-language spelling reform , where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling. By the early 20th century, British authors had produced numerous books intended as guides to English grammar and usage, a few of which achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers . Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication

6858-666: The Germanic schwein ) is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork (like the French porc ) is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans. Another example is the Anglo-Saxon cu meaning cow, and the French bœuf meaning beef. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English;

6985-590: The NEB had worsened, however, and by 1979 it opted to break up Sinclair Radionics entirely, selling off its television division to Binatone and its calculator division to ESL Bristol. After incurring a £7 million investment loss, Sinclair was given a golden handshake and an estimated £10,000 severance package. He had a former employee, Christopher Curry , establish a "corporate lifeboat" company named Science of Cambridge Ltd, in July 1977, called such as they were located near

7112-922: The Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English that writers can turn to in the absence of specific guidance from their publishing house. British English is the basis of, and very similar to, Commonwealth English . Commonwealth English is English as spoken and written in the Commonwealth countries , though often with some local variation. This includes English spoken in Australia , Malta , New Zealand , Nigeria , and South Africa . It also includes South Asian English used in South Asia, in English varieties in Southeast Asia , and in parts of Africa. Canadian English

7239-564: The ROM were also eliminated, rendering some older 48K and 128K games incompatible with the machine. The ZX Interface 1 was also rendered incompatible due to disparities in ROM and expansion connectors, making it impossible to connect and use the Microdrive units. Production of the +3 was discontinued in December 1990, reportedly in response to Amstrad's relaunch of their CPC range, with an estimated 15% of ZX Spectrums sold being +3 models at

7366-525: The Sinclair QL was in development, Sinclair also hoped to repeat his success with the Spectrum in the fledgling electric vehicle market, which he saw as ripe for a new approach. On 10 January 1985, Sinclair unveiled the Sinclair C5 , a small one-person battery electric recumbent tricycle . It marked the culmination of Sir Clive's long-running interest in electric vehicles. The C5 turned out to be

7493-712: The South East, there are significantly different accents; the Cockney accent spoken by some East Londoners is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation (RP). Cockney rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand, although the extent of its use is often somewhat exaggerated. Londoners speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors. Estuary English has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. Immigrants to

7620-470: The Spanish alphabet and show messages in Spanish. The appearance of the ZX Spectrum 128 is similar to the ZX Spectrum+, with the exception of a large external heatsink for the internal 7805 voltage regulator added to the right hand end of the case, replacing the internal heatsink in previous versions. This external heatsink led to the system's nickname, "The Toast Rack ". New features included 128 KB RAM with RAM disc commands, three-channel audio via

7747-420: The Spectrum's rubber keyboard was simplified from several hundred components to a conventional moving keyboard down to "four to five" moving parts using a new technology. The keyboard was still undergoing changes as late as February 1982; some sketches included a roundel-on-square key design which was later featured on the later Spectrum+ model. Dickinson recalled in 2007 that "everything was cost driven" and that

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7874-463: The UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country and particularly to London. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 125 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's schoolchildren. Notably Multicultural London English , a sociolect that emerged in the late 20th century spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London . Since

8001-458: The United Kingdom , as well as within the countries themselves. The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England (which is itself broadly grouped into Southern English , West Country , East and West Midlands English and Northern English ), Northern Irish English (in Northern Ireland), Welsh English (not to be confused with the Welsh language ), and Scottish English (not to be confused with

8128-425: The United Kingdom. It was released in the US as the Timex Sinclair 2068 in 1983, and in some parts of Europe as the Timex Computer 2048 . Ultimately the Spectrum was released as seven different models, ranging from the entry level with 16  KB RAM released in 1982 to the ZX Spectrum +3 with 128 KB RAM and built-in floppy disk drive in 1987. Throughout its life, the machine primarily competed with

8255-436: The United States, and Eastern Bloc countries. The machine was designed by English entrepreneur and inventor Sir Clive Sinclair and his small team in Cambridge , and was manufactured in Dundee , Scotland by Timex Corporation . It was made to be small, simple, and most importantly inexpensive, with as few components as possible. The addendum "Spectrum" was chosen to highlight the machine's colour display, which differed from

8382-402: The West Scottish accent. Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect. Once regarded as a Cockney feature, in a number of forms of spoken British English, /t/ has become commonly realised as a glottal stop [ʔ] when it is in the intervocalic position, in

8509-470: The ZX Spectrum +3 power supply utilised a DIN connector and featured "Sinclair +3" branding on the case. Significant alterations caused a series of incompatibilities, such as the removal of several lines on the expansion bus edge connector. This resulted in complications for various peripheries. Additionally, changes in memory timing led to certain RAM banks being contended, causing failures in high-speed colour-changing effects. The keypad scanning routines from

8636-624: The ZX Spectrum 128 in most technical aspects. The machine retailed for £149. The new keyboard did not feature the BASIC keyword markings seen on earlier Spectrums, except for the keywords LOAD , CODE , and RUN , which were useful for loading software. Instead, the +2 introduced a menu system, almost identical to that of the ZX Spectrum 128, allowing users to switch between 48K BASIC programming with keywords and 128K BASIC programming, where all words, both keywords and others, needed to be typed out in full (though keywords were still stored internally as one character each). Despite these changes,

8763-442: The ZX81 Colour or the ZX82 to highlight the machine's colour display, which differed from the black and white of its predecessors. The addendum "Spectrum" was added later on, to emphasise its 15-colour palette. Aside from a new crystal oscillator and extra chips to add additional kilobytes of memory, the ZX Spectrum was intended to be, as quoted by Sinclair's marketing manager, essentially a "ZX81 with colour". According to Sinclair,

8890-410: The adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English . The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to

9017-426: The award of the grant in 2007, Leeds University stated: that they were "very pleased"—and indeed, "well chuffed"—at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the Black Country , or if he was a Scouser he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a "canny load of chink". Most people in Britain speak with

9144-461: The beeper to emit multiple pitches. Later software became available that allowed for two-channel sound playback. The machine includes an expansion bus edge connector and 3.5 mm audio in/out ports, facilitating the connection of a cassette recorder for loading and saving programs and data. The EAR port has a higher output than the MIC and is recommended for headphones, while the MIC port

9271-438: The black-and-white display of its predecessor, the ZX81 . Rick Dickinson designed its distinctive case, rainbow motif, and rubber keyboard . Video output is transmitted to a television set rather than a dedicated monitor , while application software is loaded and saved onto compact audio cassettes . The ZX Spectrum was initially distributed by mail order, but after severe backlogs it was sold through High Street chains in

9398-413: The case was to be more angular and wedge-like, in similar vein to an upgraded ZX81 model. Dickinson later settled on a flatter design with a raised rear section and rounded sides in order to depict the machine as "more advanced" as opposed to a mere upgrade. In drawing up potential logos, Dickinson proposed a series of different logotypes which all featured rainbow slashes across the keyboard. The design of

9525-406: The company's Dryburgh factory. Prior to the manufacture of the ZX81, however, Timex had little experience in assembling electronics and had not originally been an obvious choice of manufacturing subcontractor. It was a well-established manufacturer of mechanical watches but was facing a crisis at the beginning of the 1980s; profits had dwindled to virtually zero as the market for watches stagnated in

9652-410: The company. Clive Sinclair became a focal point during the ZX Spectrum's marketing campaign by putting a human face onto the business. Sinclair Research was portrayed in the media as a "plucky" British challenger taking on the technical and marketing might of giant American and Japanese corporations. As David O'Reilly noted in 1986, "by astute use of public relations, particularly playing up his image of

9779-467: The competition. While most companies at the time reduced prices of their products while their market share was dwindling, Sinclair Research discounted theirs shortly after sales had peaked, throwing the competition into "utter disarray". Sinclair Research made a profit of £14 million in 1983, compared to £8.5 million the previous year. Turnover doubled from £27.2 million to £54.5 million, which equated to roughly £1 million for each person employed directly by

9906-567: The country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio". When discussing

10033-401: The data transfer speed, the team significantly decreased the length of tones that represent binary data. To increase the reliability, a leading period of constant tone was introduced, which allowed the cassette recorder's automatic gain control to settle itself down, eliminating hisses on the tape. A Schmitt trigger was added inside the ULA to reduce noise of the received signal. Originally,

10160-485: The effects of which are still seen. It was among the first home computers aimed at a mainstream audience, with some crediting it as responsible for launching the British information technology industry. The Spectrum is one of the best-selling British computers of all time, retaining the title of Britain's top-selling computer until the Amstrad PCW surpassed it in the 1990s. It was discontinued in 1992. The ZX Spectrum

10287-424: The end of that month. Supply did not return to normal until the 1982 Christmas season, however. Production of the machine rapidly increased with the arrival of the more inexpensive Issue 2 motherboard , a redesign of the main circuit board which addressed hardware manufacturing defects that affected production of the first model. Sales of the ZX Spectrum reached 200,000 in its first nine months, rising to 300,000 for

10414-621: The end of the year. It ultimately flopped, with 139,454 units being manufactured. The ZX Spectrum+, a rebranded ZX Spectrum with identical technical specifications except for the QL-like keyboard, was introduced in October 1984 and made available in WHSmith's stores the day after its launch. Retailers stocked the device in high quantities, anticipating robust Christmas sales. Nevertheless, the product did not perform as well as projected, leading to

10541-400: The entity appear to be in financial crisis – this reduces the sale price (to the profit of the purchaser), and makes non-profits and governments more likely to sell. Ironically, it can also contribute to a public perception that private entities are more efficiently run, thus again reinforcing the political will to sell off public assets. Again, due to asymmetric information , policy makers and

10668-537: The face of competition from the digital and quartz watches . Recognising the trend, Timex's director, Fred Olsen , determined that the company would diversify into other areas and signed a contract with Sinclair. The ZX Spectrum was officially revealed before journalists by Sinclair at the Churchill Hotel in Marylebone , London, on 23 April 1982. Later that week, the machine was officially presented in

10795-458: The idea of two different morphemes, one that causes the double negation, and one that is used for the point or the verb. Standard English in the United Kingdom, as in other English-speaking nations, is widely enforced in schools and by social norms for formal contexts but not by any singular authority; for instance, there is no institution equivalent to the Académie française with French or

10922-425: The keyboard surprised many users due to its use of rubber keys, described as offering the feel of "dead flesh". Sinclair himself remarked that the keyboard's rubber mould was "unusual", but consumers were undeterred. Despite very high demand, Sinclair Research was "notoriously late" in delivering the ZX Spectrum. Their practice of offering mail-order sales before units were ready ensured a constant cash flow, but meant

11049-523: The last southern Midlands accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath or grass (i.e. barth or grarss ). Conversely crass or plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby , five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite which, unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by

11176-518: The later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary . Dialects and accents vary amongst the four countries of

11303-459: The layout remained identical to that of the 128. The ZX Spectrum +3 , which was launched in 1987, bore a resemblance to its predecessor but introduced a built-in 3-inch floppy disk drive instead of the cassette drive. Initially priced at £249, it later retailed for £199. It was the only Spectrum model capable of running the CP/M operating system without additional hardware. Unlike its predecessors,

11430-499: The machine into 48K mode, keeping the current BASIC program intact (although there is no command to switch back to 128K mode). To enable BASIC programmers to access the additional memory, a RAM disk was created where files could be stored in the additional 80 KB of RAM. The new commands took the place of two existing user-defined-character spaces causing compatibility problems with certain BASIC programs. Unlike its predecessors, it has no internal speaker, and can only produce sound from

11557-465: The machine was criticised, with disillusioned customers telephoning and writing letters. Demand sky-rocketed beyond Sinclair's planned 20,000 monthly unit output to a backlog of 30,000 orders by July 1982. Due to a scheduled holiday at the Timex factory that summer, the backlog had risen to 40,000 units. Sinclair issued a public apology in September that year, and promised that the backlog would be cleared by

11684-457: The mass internal migration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and given its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands and East Anglian . It is

11811-470: The minimalist, Bauhaus approach to the Spectrum gave it an elegant yet "[non] revolutionary" form. The drawing board on which Dickinson designed the ZX Spectrum is now on display in the Science Museum in London. The need for an improved cassette interface was apparent from the number of complaints received from ZX81 users, who encountered problems when trying to save and load programs. To increase

11938-463: The modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages , influence on English was notably limited . However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting

12065-700: The new machine with roughly four times the processing power of the ZX81, as the Z80 was relieved of video generation tasks. An initial ULA design flaw occasionally led to incorrect keyboard scanning, which was resolved by adding a small circuit board mounted upside down ("dead cockroach") next to the CPU in Issue 1 ZX Spectrums. The machine's Sinclair BASIC interpreter is stored in 16 KiB ROM, along with essential system routines. The ROM code, responsible for tasks such as floating point calculations and expression parsing , exhibited significant similarities to ZX81, although

12192-413: The new memory would be available as eight pages of 16 KB at the top of the address space. The same technique was used to page between the new 16 KB editor ROM and the original 16 KB BASIC ROM at the bottom of the address space. The new sound chip and MIDI out abilities were exposed to the BASIC programming language with the command PLAY and a new command SPECTRUM was added to switch

12319-515: The organisation. Given the loss of confidence in the company, securing the funds proved to be a challenging task. In June 1985, business magnate Robert Maxwell disclosed a takeover bid for Sinclair Research through Hollis Brothers, a subsidiary of his Pergamon Press . However, the deal was terminated in August 1985. The future of Sinclair Research remained uncertain until 7 April 1986, when the company sold their entire computer product range, along with

12446-460: The previous Sinclair Radionics products. On 29 January 1980, the ZX80 home computer was launched to immediate popularity; notable for being one of the first computers available in the United Kingdom for less than £100. The company conducted no market research whatsoever prior to the launch of the ZX80; according to Sinclair, he "simply had a hunch" that the public was sufficiently interested to make such

12573-472: The rear expansion slot were available from third parties. Both machines had 16 KB of onboard ROM. An "Issue 1" ZX Spectrum can be distinguished from Issue 2 or 3 models by the colour of the keys – light grey for Issue 1, blue-grey for later machines. Although the official service manual states that approximately 26,000 of these original boards were manufactured, subsequent serial number analysis shows that only 16,000 were produced, almost all of which fell in

12700-459: The role of microcomputer manufacturer and "accepted the mantle of pioneering boffin leading Britain into a technological utopia". Sinclair's contribution to the technology sector resulted in him being knighted upon the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher in the Queen's 1983 Birthday Honours List . The United Kingdom was largely immunised from the effects of the video game crash of 1983 , due to

12827-613: The sale of the company they are managing by artificially reducing its stock price. It is fairly easy for a top executive to reduce the price of their company's stock due to information asymmetry . The executive can accelerate accounting of expected expenses, delay accounting of expected revenue, engage in off balance sheet transactions to make the company's profitability appear temporarily poorer, or simply promote and report severely conservative (e.g. pessimistic) estimates of future earnings. Such seemingly adverse earnings news will be likely to (at least temporarily) reduce share price. (This

12954-622: The same time, such as the Amstrad CPC or the Commodore 64 , did not suffer from this limitation. While the Commodore 64 also employed colour attributes, it utilised a special multicolour mode and hardware sprites to circumvent attribute clash. Sound output is produced through a built-in beeper capable of generating a single channel with ten octaves. It is controlled by a single EAR bit. By toggling it on and off, simple sounds are generated. This speaker, capable of producing just one note at

13081-515: The saturation of home computers such as the ZX Spectrum. The microcomputer market continued to grow and game development was unhindered despite the turbulence in the American markets. Indeed, computer games remained the dominant sector of the British home video game market up until they were surpassed by Sega and Nintendo consoles in 1991. By the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies in Britain selling video games on cassette, compared to 95

13208-537: The serial number range 001-000001 to 001-016000. An online tool now exists to allow users to ascertain the likely issue number of their ZX Spectrum by inputting the serial number. These models experienced numerous changes to its motherboard design throughout its life; mainly to improve manufacturing efficiencies, but also to correct bugs from previous boards. Another issue was with the Spectrum's power supply. In March 1983, Sinclair issued an urgent recall warning for all owners of models bought after 1 January 1983. Plugs with

13335-401: The spoken language. Globally, countries that are former British colonies or members of the Commonwealth tend to follow British English, as is the case for English used by European Union institutions. In China, both British English and American English are taught. The UK government actively teaches and promotes English around the world and operates in over 200 countries . English is

13462-535: The system took up slightly less than 7 kilobytes of memory, leaving an additional 9 kilobytes to write programs — a figure that pleased the team. Much of the firmware was written by computer scientist Steve Vickers from Nine Tiles, who compiled all control routines to produce the Sinclair BASIC interpreter, a custom variant of the general purpose BASIC programming language. Making a custom interpreter made it possible to fit all of its functionality into

13589-422: The takeover artist. The former top executive is then rewarded with a golden handshake for presiding over the firesale that can sometimes be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for one or two years of work. (This is nevertheless an excellent bargain for the takeover artist, who will tend to benefit from developing a reputation of being very generous to parting top executives). This is just one example of some of

13716-491: The team aimed for data transfer speed of 1000 baud , but succeeded in getting it to work at a considerably faster 1500 baud. Unlike the ZX81, the Spectrum was able to maintain its display during loading and saving operations, and programmers took advantage of this to show a splash screen whilst loading took place in the background. As with the ZX81, the ZX Spectrum was manufactured in Dundee , Scotland, by Timex Corporation at

13843-412: The team also wanted to combine the ZX81's separate random-access memory sections for audio and video into a single bank. Chief engineer Richard Altwasser was responsible for the ZX Spectrum's hardware design. His main contribution was the design of the semi-custom uncommitted logic array (ULA) integrated circuit, which integrated, on a single chip, the essential hardware functions. Altwasser designed

13970-603: The theft of work tools worth £500 from a van at the Sprucefield park and ride car park in Lisburn. A football team can be treated likewise: Arsenal have lost just one of 20 home Premier League matches against Manchester City. This tendency can be observed in texts produced already in the 19th century. For example, Jane Austen , a British author, writes in Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice , published in 1813: All

14097-584: The time. The +2B model, the only other model still in production at this point, continued to be manufactured, as it was believed not to be in direct competition with other computers in Amstrad's product range. British English British English (abbreviations: BrE , en-GB , and BE ) is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . More narrowly, it can refer specifically to

14224-403: The traditional accent of Newcastle upon Tyne , 'out' will sound as 'oot', and in parts of Scotland and North-West England, 'my' will be pronounced as 'me'. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are diphthongised to [ɪi] and [ʊu] respectively (or, more technically, [ʏʉ], with a raised tongue), so that ee and oo in feed and food are pronounced with a movement. The diphthong [oʊ] is also pronounced with

14351-750: The varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon , eventually came to dominate. The original Old English was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman . These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it

14478-479: The whole of the first year. By August 1983 total sales in Britain and Europe had exceeded 500,000, with the millionth Spectrum manufactured on 9 December 1983. By this point, an average of 50,000 units were being purchased each month. In July 1983, the ZX Spectrum was launched in the United States as the more enhanced Timex Sinclair 2068 . Advertisements described it as offering 72 kilobytes of memory, having

14605-402: The word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity". Variations exist in formal (both written and spoken) English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire , whereas

14732-568: The world are good and agreeable in your eyes. However, in Chapter 16, the grammatical number is used. The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence. Some dialects of British English use negative concords, also known as double negatives . Rather than changing a word or using a positive, words like nobody, not, nothing, and never would be used in the same sentence. While this does not occur in Standard English, it does occur in non-standard dialects. The double negation follows

14859-572: The world's first pocket calculator , the Sinclair Executive . By the mid 1970s, Sinclair Radionics was producing handheld electronic calculators, miniature televisions, and the ill-fated digital Black Watch wristwatch. Due to financial losses, Sinclair sought investors from the National Enterprise Board (NEB), who had bought a 43% interest in the company and streamlined his product line. Sinclair's relationship with

14986-400: The year before. An estimated 10,000 to 50,000 people, mostly young men, were developing games out of their homes based on advertisements in popular magazines. The growth of video games during this period has been compared to the punk subculture , fuelled by young people making money from their games. By the mid 1980s, Sinclair Research's share of the British home computer market had climbed to

15113-409: Was conceived and designed by engineers at Sinclair Research, founded by English entrepreneur and inventor Clive Sinclair , who was well known for his eccentricity and pioneering ethic. On 25 July 1961, three years after passing his A-levels , he founded Sinclair Radionics Ltd as a vehicle to advertise his inventions and buy components. In 1972, Sinclair had competed with Texas Instruments to produce

15240-449: Was deemed unsuitable for high-resolution graphs or diagrams that involved multiple colour changes. Altwasser devised the idea of allocating a colour attribute to each character position on the screen. This ultimately used eight bits of memory for each character position; three bits to provide any one of eight foreground colours and three bits for the eight background colours , one bit for extra brightness and one bit for flashing. Overall,

15367-428: Was expanded compared to that of the ZX81, which lacked lowercase letters. Spectrum BASIC incorporated extra keywords for better graphics and sound functionality, and support for multi-statement lines was added. The built-in ROM tape modulation software routines for cassette data storage enable data transfers at an average speed of 171 bits per second (bit/s), with a theoretical peak speed of 256 bit/s. The tape modulation

15494-601: Was issued as a prize. The ZX Spectrum's successor, the Sinclair QL , was officially announced on 12 January 1984, shortly before the Apple Macintosh went on sale. Contrasting with its predecessors, the QL was aimed at more serious, professional home users. It suffered from several design flaws; fully operational QLs were not available until the late summer, and complaints against Sinclair concerning delays were upheld by

15621-422: Was never a truly mixed language in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication). The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and abstract English is, the more it contains Latin and French influences, e.g. swine (like

15748-407: Was not used. The distinctive case and colourful design of the ZX Spectrum was the creation of Rick Dickinson , a young British industrial designer who had been hired by Sinclair to design the ZX81. Dickinson was tasked to design a sleeker and more "marketable" appearance to the new machine, whilst ensuring all 192 BASIC functions could fit onto 40 physical keys. Early sketches from August 1981 showed

15875-434: Was officially discontinued in 1992, after ten years on the market. Sinclair Research thereafter continued to exist as a one-man company, marketing Sir Clive Sinclair's inventions until his death in September 2021. The central processing unit is a Zilog Z80 , an 8-bit microprocessor , with a clock rate of 3.5  MHz . The original model Spectrum has 16 KB of ROM and either 16 kB or 48 kB of RAM. Video output

16002-444: Was reduced in price to £129. In 1985, Sinclair developed the ZX Spectrum 128 (codenamed Derby ) in conjunction with their Spanish distributor Investrónica (a subsidiary of El Corte Inglés department store group). Investrónica had helped adapt the ZX Spectrum+ to the Spanish market after their government introduced a special tax on all computers with 64 KB RAM or less, and a law which obliged all computers sold in Spain to support

16129-419: Was the most common use of home computers. Due to the large number of unsold Spectrum+ models, Sinclair decided not to start it selling in the United Kingdom until January 1986 at a price of £179. The Zilog Z80 processor used in the Spectrum has a 16-bit address bus, which means only 64 KB of memory can be directly addressed. To facilitate the extra 80 KB of RAM the designers used bank switching so

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