Sinclair ZX80 BASIC Programs and Cassette Load Demo

This is a short demo of the Sinclair ZX80. Two short BASIC programs are entered to show editing peculiarities and speed. Also shown is a cassette load of a commercial program for budget analysis. It's surprising what passed for commercial software in those days. A TRS-80 cassette drive is used for tape loading. The RF out from the ZX80 is fed into a VCR where it is demodulated for composite out and displayed to an LCD flat panel TV.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• vintagecomputer
• historiccomputing
• Sinclair
• ZX80
• ZX-80

[HenrikFromDenmark]

Many thanks for the upload. I'm having troubles getting that superb (that you have) "fine-tuned" picture of my ZX80. Do you know if i could be the television or the ZX80?

[wheagy]

@HenrikFromDenmark Unfortunately, it could be the TV or the ZX80. I used an LCD TV, which, if you can get get it to work with you ZX80, gives a clear picture. It may be a challenge to get it to lock on to the ZX80 video signal, so if you have an old CRT TV, you might have better luck with that.

[dajwilkinson]

I had one of these. Not hugely practical but a lot of fun and educational in low-level programming and electronic/computer design. I note you manually inserted spaces in your program; usually the ZX80 would put in all spaces required in a listing. With that keyboard you didn't make any keypresses you didn't absolutely have to - plus, pretty formatting in your source code would take a fair chunk out of that 1K (expandable, according to the ads of the time, to a 'massive' 16K!) of RAM :)