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The Amstrad CPC is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, where it successfully established itself primarily in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the German-speaking parts of Europe.
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny, Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer developed by Sinclair Research. It was first released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982 and went on to become Britain's best-selling microcomputer.
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The Timex Sinclair 1000 was the first computer produced by Timex Sinclair, a joint venture between Timex Corporation and Sinclair Research. It was launched in July 1982, with a US sales price of US$99.95, making it the cheapest home computer at the time; it was advertised as "the first computer under $100". The computer was aimed at regular home users. As purchased, the T/S 1000 was fully assembled and ready to be plugged into home televisions, which served as a video monitor. The T/S 1000 was a slightly modified version of the Sinclair ZX81 with an NTSC RF modulator, for use with North American TVs, instead of PAL for European TVs. The T/S 1000 doubled the onboard RAM from 1 KB to 2 KB. The T/S 1000's casing had slightly more internal shielding but remained the same as Sinclair's, including the membrane keyboard. It had black-and-white graphics and no sound. It was followed by an improved version, the Timex Sinclair 1500 which had substantially more RAM and a lower price (US$80). However, the T/S 1500 did not achieve market success, given that the marketplace was by this time dominated by Commodore, Radio Shack, Atari and Apple.
Currah was a British computer peripheral manufacturer, famous mainly for the speech synthesis ROM cartridges it designed for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and other 8-bit home computers of the 1980s.
Your Sinclair, or YS as it was commonly abbreviated, was a commercially published and printed British computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, mainly the ZX Spectrum. It was in circulation between 1984 and 1993.
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The ZX Spectrum's software library was very diverse. While the majority of the software produced for the system was video games, others included programming language implementations, Sinclair BASIC extensions, databases, word processors, spread sheets, drawing and painting tools, and 3D modelling tools.
The ZX Spectrum character set is the variant of ASCII used in the British Sinclair ZX Spectrum family computers. It is based on ASCII-1967 but the characters ^, ` and DEL are replaced with ↑, £ and ©. It also differs in its use of the C0 control codes other than the common BS and CR, and it makes use of the 128 high-bit characters beyond the ASCII range. The ZX Spectrum's main set of printable characters and system font are also used by the Jupiter Ace computer.
Oric was the name used by UK-based Tangerine Computer Systems for a series of 6502-based home computers sold in the 1980s, primarily in Europe.
A BASIC interpreter is an interpreter that enables users to enter and run programs in the BASIC language and was, for the first part of the microcomputer era, the default application that computers would launch. Users were expected to use the BASIC interpreter to type in programs or to load programs from storage.
References
- 1 2 3 Your Spectrum:YS MegaBasic, Issue 8, October 1984
- ↑ YS MegaBasic at SpectrumComputing.co.uk
- ↑ "World of Spectrum - YS MegaBasic".
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