On This Day - 29th January

The Sinclair ZX80 was developed by Science of Cambridge as a low-cost personal computer aimed at bringing computing within reach of a much wider audience. Work on the project began in 1979, with Jim Westwood responsible for the hardware design and John Grant of Nine Tiles developing the BASIC software. Sinclair's aim was to produce a complete computer for less than £100, an ambitious target at a time when competing personal computers could cost several hundred pounds. The ZX80 used a Z80-compatible processor, 1KB of RAM and a 4KB ROM containing Sinclair's integer-only BASIC.

29 January 1980 — Sinclair launches the ZX80. The new computer was introduced in Cambridge at £79.95 in kit form or £99.95 ready assembled, making it one of the first personal computers available in Britain for under £100. It connected to an ordinary television for its display and used a cassette recorder for program storage. The ZX80 proved immediately popular, generating a waiting list of several months, and its success convinced Sinclair that there was a substantial market for inexpensive home computers. The machine would be followed by the ZX81 in 1981 and ultimately the ZX Spectrum.

Image: Sinclair ZX80 — Daniel Ryde, CC BY-SA 3.0.
CC licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Your Spectrum magazine was relaunched as Your Sinclair with its January 1986 issue. The magazine had originally launched in January 1984 as Your Spectrum and had become a monthly publication later that year. The change of name reflected plans to broaden its coverage to include the Sinclair QL and future Sinclair computers, although the magazine continued to concentrate heavily on the ZX Spectrum. The first Your Sinclair issue was numbered 1, beginning a new numbering sequence separate from the 21 issues of Your Spectrum.