Date   : Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:42:47 +0100
From   : tim.fardell@... (Tim Fardell)
Subject: Electric Dreams last night.

Rick Murray wrote:
> 
> Still, the Acorn bloke got his own back by introducing the kids to 
> programming with a dead-easy MODE2 demo. You CAN program the Speccy, but 
> it is so painful that I never personally met anybody who actually did it 
> for fun.

That's a bit unfair. Once you get used to where the keywords are on 
the keyboard, the Spectrum is quite easy to program. Easier than the 
BBC in fact, because it's a much simpler machine to get your head 
around. Since you personally didn't meet anyone who programmed a 
Spectrum for fun, I presume you didn't know anyone who owned a Spectrum!

> Why was the Speccy so small? Didn't Sinclair have a larger one with 
> built-in tape and joystick? My memory is really fuzzy here, I only 
> remember a gaudy coloured keyboard on a black machine, and a tendency to 
> spit lines of coloured garbage onto the screen, which I believe is a 
> mostly-Spectrum trait...?

Sir Clive was a bit obsessed with making things small. I agree the 
keyboard on the early Spectrums was terrible. But the Spectrum was one 
of the few machines that gave you both visual and audible feedback 
during cassette tape loading. I really don't know how BBC and 
Commodore users lived without this (those that didn't have disk 
drives, that is).

Obviously the Spectrum was an inferior machine to the BBC, nobody can 
deny that, but you have to remember that it was also substantially 
cheaper.