Missed Opportunities

Launch of the ZX Spectrum



I was a school teacher when the ZX Spectrum came out. I was impressed by its style and capabilities, and I have to admit to being biased as I was also a proud owner of a ZX81. Schools were just starting to get hold of the BBC Computer made by Acorn. I was obviously a rebel at the time. I liked the idea that both could so easily allow non experts like me to write programmes using BASIC. I had been using the ZX so I already knew what the key to sinclair programming entailed. i suppose out of laziness I continued to use the familiar code.

I was increasingly amazed at what it could do. I was responsible for producing the timetable and recording all the option choices for a large secondary school at the time and I was easily abl to write a programme to manage the logisitics of the timetable creation as well as storing all of the options chosen by every pupil in the school, as well as plenty of other data.

As each year went by I got more and more disillusioned though. The spectrum was never short of new games. It was clearly capable of much more sophisticated uses, but the games market took over. Eventually big companies started to produce management software for the BBC computer and then the PC. It marked the end of the massively underdeveloped Spectrum. For me at least it was one of the British Computer Markets big missed opportunties and I was forever left frustrated.

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