The emphasis should be on "our" in the title: I think they mean Portugal's first involvement, which was around 1984. If you took "our" to mean Earth, then other PCs predate the ZX Spectrum and these.
Indeed, I was part of this generation, the first real computer I got, by opposition to build your own kits from electronic stores, was the Timex 2068 from that same factory.
Only recently I got to understand Timex spotlight in USA was long gone, while in the Iberian Penisula it was still all over the place, alongside ZX Spectrums and some MSX models.
I never knew anyone with a C64 back then.
Then the next computing wave was mostly Amiga, there were some people with Sam Coupe, until Windows 3.1 came to be, which is when I left my dear Timex 2068 into PC land, buying on credit, hardly anyone could afford paying on the spot.
The iberian peninsula was all about the ZX because pirating tapes was the norm. Also, saving custom software in tapes was cheap and producing the games in tapes, the same; they could even fight piracy by selling the games in newspaper kiosks at a very cheap price.
Similar on how the Play Station spread about the country: burning CD's and modding the PSX was trivial.
Yeah, one reason why I grew up bilingual, besides having grandparents close to Badajoz, was the amount of Speccy stuff in games and magazines that we got from the other side of the border, because why bother with translations. :)
Microhobby, Micromania, Solo Programadores (this one came later in 32 bits days), are some I still remember the names.
La Abadía del Crimen, Sir Fred, Livingstone Supongo, Game Over, and such.
And Aventuras AD; but TBH most modern games written for the ZX in Spanish (especially text adventures) are many times better than "La edad de oro del software español" (The golden age of the Spanish software).
I have some text adventure saga (Los extraordinarios casos del Dr. Van Halen) which is about
Lovecraftian/Poe themes and such; it's composed of nine tapes.
If you are interested, I can send a zip to you with a PDF and the TAP files.
Also, on modernish platforms, there's "El archipiélago", probably the best Spanish Z Machine game ever. You can get the last one at IFDB. Getting the first saga it's a bit cumbersome because you need to get nine downloads and sort the 'volumes' after that.
Back to "Van Halen", as the games are designed with PAWS/GACG or whatever was called that universal format from the 80's, the Zesarux emulator can trap all the interpretatation (as if it were a ZMachine-like interpreter itself) and giving you options to both debug the adventures and translate them to Portuguese (from any to any language) on the spot with online services (and maybe local, IDK; it shoudn't be difficult to add support to Argos Translate, Apertium and the like). Input is not translated but, well, these games have a really common verb set.
Spain is still pushing out great titles for these machines- the scene around the Oric-1/Atmos computers (competitors to the ZX Spectrum) is particularly virulent, among the Spanish retro hacking community. Some truly astonishing things coming from those folks, for these 40+ year old machines ..
For the ZX81 there was almost none programs! I could get a chess and a flight simulator (1kb Ram), the rest i used to get from printed magazines. But for later with the Spectrum the double deck tape player was a must! We would go to the local shop and buy one game, when home, duplicate it then return it saying that it didn't load well. want another and pick a different one and so on...
And before the Apple II, the Apple I and Kim-I.
As a sokoban lover I'd love one for the Apple I or the Kim-I over serial, but the 1K RAM limit looks tiny.
But you can always create several tapes/ROMs with different level sets...
I love vintage computers, have a vintage computer collection, and have enjoyed visiting computer museums, but does this computer museum website really need to send me desktop notifications?
I visited a couple years ago - it was lovely to finally touch an authentic Spectrum, 3 decades after spending my early life hacking around on various clones. Was well worth the 30 minute ride from Coimbra.
The ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum were interesting machines at the time, but man did they have crappy keyboards.
Perhaps with a decent keyboard, the ZX Spectrum could have stood a chance against the Commodore C64. The price of the ZX Spectrum was 175 £ ($306 at the time) and the Commodore cost $595. Of course, the C64 also had much better gfx and sound capabilities.
> the ZX Spectrum could have stood a chance against the Commodore C64
Isn't it kind of the other way round? When both machines were current there wre about ten ZX Spectrums sold for every Commodore 64, at least in the UK and Europe.
The Commodore 64 like the Apple II was very much a North American thing.
Exactly. The membrane keyboards weren't aesthetic choices, they were one of a number of compromises that were necessary to achieve the price point set by Clive Sinclair. He intuited that a sub-£200 colour computer would sell in huge quantities, and he was right. My (middle class) parents couldn't countenance the cost of a Commodore 64, but they were prepared to buy me a ZX Spectrum.
Computers were a luxury item then, beside that lots of people had no idea what to do with one too. Only the most computer curious people would spend around $900 (inflation corrected) on a fancy calculator ;)
The Spectrum did feel slightly better, but the most annoying thing of the ZX81 was the lack of autorepeat. Moving the cursor on a long line was real physical exercise :-)
On minicomputers (or microcomputers, can't remember) I am always astounding that some people wrote some micro-text adventure for the Kim-1 (think of it like a reduced version of Apple I), played with a numeric keypad plus A-F keys.
Also, MicroChess. I tried to find a MIT licensed copy for the Kim-Uno in order
to adapt it from the ACIA (serial) output to the simulator from https://t3x.org
written in T3X, but I had no luck. But you can virtually use the C sources
with the bundled MOS 6502 CPU emulator, so in the end it's the same
outcome as running an emulator and the MicroChess code on it.
Also, it's MIT licensed.
GCC/Clang will compile it staight under GNU/Linux, BSD and OSX.
Windows users can just use MinC
and compile it if they want to peek and improve the implentation.
And, well, as for gaming, The Hobbit surpasses the adventure of the Kim-1,
but with far more resources. Still, before the ZX there was the ZX81 and people
did crazy things on it, even Sokoban games. But Sokoban it's something
playable even with a graph paper, pen and some tokens.
Nice, I live in PT. Will visit. I have around 30 working speccy's and especially the rubber key ones give me great nostalgic joy even though I was an MSX child.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Computer_2048
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