How long did the early Sinclair computers take to develop?
The Z80 took about nine months from start to finish. One of my sons had been using a Tandy Radio Shack TRS80, which he really loved. I could see how exciting these were for young people but the cost of them was very prohibitive. I felt sure that if a working computer could be made for a reasonable price, then there was potentially a mass market for it. We had to come up with some neat tricks to reduce the costs such as using a TV display instead of a separate monitor and having a tape-recorder in place of a floppy disk drive. Instead of having a video chip and video memory, I used the Z80 processor chip to do everything. I also used the main memory as the only memory. Are people today incredulous of how impressive 1K Ram was back then? It really is hard to believe how memory is squandered now and how much was achieved with so little in the past. I find it sad that the modern PC is so cumbersome and that such a monopoly exists in the operating system, which allows the monopolist to be l
