i let my mums friend borrow my Spectrum so she could play the hobbit and she broke it,
and to make matters worse she didnt even offer to give me any money to buy a new one
im still bitter about it all these years later,
and have never forgiven her
And the Oric's 6502 motherboard. The nice thing about these machines was they were small enough to learn the whole system with a sybex book and a rom disassembly. Lovely clean, simple design. The main chips you can see are: ULA to the left of the speaker, ROM to the right; 6502 below the ROM, and 6522 VIA below that; bank of 64k DRAM at lower left. GI AY-3-8912 sound chip directly below the speaker. Then from the top left along the back we have the astec RF TV modulator, one of the two DIN sockets is the casette interface and one is RGB video, the smaller IDC socket is parallel printer port, the larger IDC socket is expansion port, and finally power jack socket. Linear voltage regulator with good quality heatsink, and reset button just to the right of it. It ran a BASIC interpreter in ROM with full color graphics. Like the spectrum the oric hardware was affordable but rather better made than the spectrum. Even now it is remarkable how low the chip count on this board is, of course the ULA replaces what would otherwise be quite a large number of discrete logic chips. From memory one of the 8-DIL packages to the left of the ULA is an LM386 audio amp to drive the speaker.
However we have to hand it to Sir Clive Sinclair for being first and kick-starting the market, it was the first time computers had ever been available, fully built, at an affordable price to the public in the UK. IMHO the ZX81 was the real masterpiece out of all of them, being a working computer with BASIC in just 4 chips(!), for the first time in history, for pocket money as a kit you could build at home. That was my first ever machine.
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. Good time
