The PC turned 30 last summer, and this week, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum turned 30 as well.
My personal perspective is the other way ’round: ignoring the couple of weeks I “enjoyed” the ZX81 (until the keyboard became unusable), the ZX Spectrum was my first computer that I actively programmed on (read: BASIC and tape recorder). Years later I switched to the Sinclair QL, and finally to the PC world (good-bye SuperBASIC, hello Turbo Pascal). By the way, TP’s 30th birthday is just a few months ahead.
Since then, computers have become bigger and fast enough that you can run a ZX Spectrum emulation in JavaScript in a browser on an operation system that requires a million times more disk space than the original computers had memory available!
Despite all that progress, the past is still with us, and will be so for quite some time 😉
Update: TheRegister has a special on eight-bit classic games featuring mostly the Spectrum.
