Date   : Wed, 18 Oct 2006 18:55:26
From   : "chris whytehead" <christopher.whytehead@...>
Subject: Re: [OT] Would anyone happen to have a 4116 dram chip

> Tim Fardell wrote:
> > On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Jules Richardson wrote:
> >
> >> Another common Spectrum fault is the design... ;)
> >
> > Oi, less of that thankyou! ;-)
> >
> > Spectra are lovely computers.
>
> Nah, you are right - as I just said to someone in private, a
> speccy was my
> first machine and they really were great. They *were* built to a
> price though,
> which is evident by that keyboard, lack of expansion, and bad
> build quality.
> Still, it got me into computing (back when that really meant
> something), and
> there's no way I could have got my hands on a BBC for home use
> due to the price!
>
I well remember the build quality of the Spectrum.

<nostalgia> Back in 1983/4 when I worked in a BT computer centre in Cardiff,
by day and programmed my BBC by night. In the days when there was a company
called ICL that made mainframe computers. When a computer centre had
engineers on sire round the clock, they were reliable ICL mainframes after
all </nostalgia>.

Any way one of the engineers got his son a spectrum for Xmas and by New year
it had given up the ghost, so he bought it to work and used the diagnostic
tools (kindly supplied by ICL) to find what was wrong. It was one of the
memory chips, and luckily ICL used the same model in their mainframe so he
substituted one of them and the spectrum worked, so he replaced the others.
He later told he he had found that all the chips were faulty, but only in
the top 4K(?) where they were masked by the ROM. So Sinclair was buying
faulty chips to keep the price down.

Or is that another urban myth?

Chris

--
How does a project get to be a year late?... One day at a time.
Chris's Acorns    http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk