In 1980 Clive Sinclair did what everyone said was impossible With the Sinclair ZX80 he was the first person to make a computer that broke the
psychological barrier of £100, finally making computing affordable for anyone who wanted to give it a go.
If you were brave you could buy it in kit form for £79.95 and solder it together yourself, or you could save yourself £20 worth of heartache and get it ready-built for £99.95 It was based around an NEC Z80 processor running at 3 25MHz, had 1KB of Ram (expandable to 16KB), 4KB of Rom and used a TV and cassette drive to display and store programs. You could expand the memory to 16KB, but to buy the full amount would cost you £300.
It ran a form of Basic that our first reviewer was a little scathing about 'The software of the ZX80 comprises the Basic interpreter, the Editor and whatever else it is that does the rest of the work (operating system seems too grand a title),' although he did go on to admit that it was almost impossible to crash the system.
In 1980 Clive Sinclair did what everyone said was impossible With the Sinclair ZX80 he was the first person to make a computer that broke the
psychological barrier of £100, finally making computing affordable for anyone who wanted to give it a go.