The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer.
MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, the director at ASCII Corporation. Microsoft and Nishi conceived the project as an attempt to create unified standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period, in the same fashion as the VHS standard for home video tape machines. The first MSX computer sold to the public was a Mitsubishi ML-8000, released on October 21, 1983, thus marking its official release date.
The Pentagon home computer was a clone of the British-made Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128. It was manufactured by amateurs in the former Soviet Union, following freely distributable documentation. Its PCB was copied all over the ex-USSR in 1991-1996, which made it a widespread ZX Spectrum clone. The name "Pentagon" derives from the shape of the original PCB, with a diagonal cut in one of the corners.
The SAM Coupé is an 8-bit British home computer that was first released in late 1989. It was based on and designed to have compatibility with the ZX Spectrum 48K and marketed as a logical upgrade from the Spectrum. It was originally manufactured by Miles Gordon Technology (MGT), based in Swansea in the United Kingdom.
The ATM Turbo, also known simply as ATM is a ZX Spectrum clone, developed in Moscow in 1991, by two firms, MicroArt and ATM.
A fast loader is a software program for a home computer, such as the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, that accelerates the speed of file loading from floppy disk or compact cassette.
TR-DOS is a disk operating system for the ZX Spectrum with Beta Disc and Beta 128 disc interfaces. TR-DOS and Beta disc were developed by Technology Research Ltd (UK), in 1984. A clone of this interface is also used in the Russian Pentagon and Scorpion machines.
Beta Disk Interface is a disk interface for ZX Spectrum computers, developed by Technology Research Ltd. in 1984 and released in 1985, with a price of £109.25.
The 5.6×39mm, also known in the U.S. as .220 Russian, is a cartridge developed in 1961 for deer hunting in the USSR. It fires a 5.6mm projectile from necked down 7.62×39mm brass. While it originally re-used 7.62x39 cases, once it became popular enough commercial ammunition started being manufactured, both in the USSR and in Finland. When it was introduced to the United States by SAKO it was stamped .220 Russian. Lapua later changed the designation to .220 Russian for the American market as well.
The Kay 1024 was a Russian ZX Spectrum clone introduced in 1998. Created by the NEMO company of St. Petersburg, it has 1024 KB of RAM. It was a rival to Scorpion ZS 256, having a slightly lower price. It offered a controller for a PC keyboard and HDD, but not for floppy disks. Adding a General Sound card was easy, and the CPU had a 7 Mhz turbo mode.
Tumanskiy, Aleksandr Grigorevich (1861–1920) was an orientalist, military interpreter, and Major General of the Imperial Russian Army, belonging to an ancient Ukrainian aristocratic family which had originated from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
ToBoS-FP is a floating point compiler for the Sinclair BASIC on ZX Spectrum. The name stands for Toruń, Jerzy Borkowski, Wojciech Skaba, Floating Point. The compiler was released in Poland in 1986. Source code compilation enables substantial (20+) speed up of execution of programs that are normally interpreted. The acceleration results mostly from the utilization of compiler's own floating point arithmetic library and graphics library that replace the ZX Spectrum built-in routines. In a 1992 independent survey, ToBoS-FP was named the most popular of all known BASIC compilers for the ZX Spectrum. It is still referred to as one of the best BASIC compiler for ZX Spectrum.
Mishik Airazatovich Kazaryan was a Russian-Armenian physicist specialising in laser physics and optics, the winner of the State Prize of the USSR in the field of science and technology, foreign member of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences, member of the AM Prokhorov Academy of Engineering Sciences. Kazaryan was a creator of the brightest repetitively pulsed laser in the visible region of the spectrum.
Ivan Aleksandrovich Flerov was a Soviet educationist, journalist, and writer on problems of religion and atheism.
The Scorpion ZS-256 was a very widespread ZX Spectrum clone produced in St. Petersburg by Sergey Zonov.
