 was his attempt more or less to take his aggressive cost-cutting philosophy and bring it to the world of business computing, which didn't really go down too well. So, again, rather than having a proper disk drive, it was using these micro drives, which are these little postage stamp-sized things with a tape loop in them. They're horribly unreliable. So, yeah, this went down like a lead balloon in the business world. Although one of them did find its way into the hands of a certain Finnish student who bought a spectrum with his pocket money, sorry, a QL with pocket money, and used it to tinker around with operating systems. So, we all know how that turned out. So, in the end, Sinclair had to sell off the spectrum's intellectual property to this guy, Alan Sugar, and the computing world moved on, people moved on to the Atari ST and the Amiga and that sort of thing. And all across the country, the spectrum's generally got handed down to everyone's younger sibling, which meant that there were companies like Codemasters that briefly made a killing out of these cheap and cheerful cartoony adventure games that was attractive to this new, younger market and sold for just a couple of pounds, so it was just total pocket money stuff. And in the spectrum community today, I think Dizzy is kind of a bit of a Marmite thing. It's a few nods there. It's kind of... In the way it was the beginning of the end for the spectrum, it's like a bit of derivative and so, yeah, they carried on for a few years for this sort of thing, but eventually the supply of software from the likes of Codemasters also dried up and the magazines have run out of things to report on, so they ended up closing down. This is the big final issue, which is big in the sense that it was 64 pages rather than the 32 that it had gone down to. I think there was a general feeling that, well, it's possibly the magazine cover tapes were part of the death of the spectrum software industry, because people were saying that these magazines were just a pamphlet with a cover tape on the front. So this sort of... For the people who'd stuck with the spectrum right to the end, we suddenly dropped into the lurch a bit, and then, well, there was still a community around, and it was being kept alive with these sort of fanzines, this sort of mail order, and in a way it was a pretty nice sort of community in its own way, but it meant we kind of turned from it being the mass market thing to us being this sort of eccentric preservationist, sort of like steam engine enthusiasts or something. Incidentally, do you reckon that steam engine enthusiasts get really pissed off with the steampunk people? They're saying, yeah, you're just trying to ride on the coattails of the whole steam engine thing, but you're not actually really living the real thing, you're not really getting into the whole valves and things. They must get really pissed off with that stuff. Anyway, yes, so for a long time this spectrum has been propped up by these sorts of fanzines and I'll derail a bit into a bit site, which I didn't get any slides for, which is another pretty active subculture within a subculture of the spectrum, which is the demo scene, which I've mentioned at some length in previous talks, but just as a bit of a recap, it came out of the software piracy scene where people would pirate these games, break the protection on them, and then to show that they'd done this, they'd put in a little intro sequence with their logo and a few flashy colours and things and just as a sort of bit of digital graffiti, as it were. Eventually, this sort of took on its own life as an art form in its own right and people dropped the whole game-cracking side of things and just focused on the demos. And this went on the spectrum as well. It was perhaps never quite as big as things like the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, but it was a fun thing to be a part of. It was the whole mail-swapping thing and rushing home from school eagerly, hoping that there might be some jiffy bag from a far-off land like Poland or Czechoslovakia as it was then or who knows where. So people were using these demos as ways of exploring the hardware and just learning new tricks. And I think that this summarised the spectrum scene as a whole in this sort of era. It wasn't really driven by commercial pressures. People were able to really explore the spectrum as a platform in its own right and really discover what the hardware was really capable of. And one thing really to fit into this was the rise of emulators. So we didn't really have both feet in the past. We did, as well as sticking to the spectrum, we had real computers as well. So emulators sprang up to make your PC behave like a spectrum but with all of the annoying things like the five-minute tape loading times cut out. So these collections sprang up so you could earn CDs you could get in HMV with emulators and thousands of games that you could just instantly fire up. And so, yeah, this was... And as time went on, people discovered a lot more. These emulators became more and more accurate and as well as once the hardware was capable of emulating it at a lower and lower level. So as we discovered more about the spectrum, these emulators improved as well. Now, around the middle to the end of the 90s, a lucky few of us got access to the internet. And what we found was something quite surprising was that what we thought was this little island, this tiny, close-knit community, was just like one island out of many. And so once people got onto the internet, started googling, or not googling, altavistering or whatever for the spectrum, we were discovering these other things happening around the world that we'd kind of missed out on the first time round. And so one example of this was during the Sarajevo War. There were a couple of guys who, in order to distract them from the horrors of this, they worked on a spectrum emulator of their own. And there's an incredible story behind this of how they would have maybe one or two hours of electricity a day and they'd probably have power cuts like we had just before. So during that, they'd be coding frantically and then during the rest of the time, they'd be just working out the algorithms on paper. And in the end, they came up with something that was a pretty competitive emulator for against the other things that existed at the time. And it was really amazing what they came up with there. And so other bits of the place where it tied in with European history is the, so there was, in the city of Torun in Poland, it turned out there was this signal, a TV signal intrusion staged by the Solidarnosk anti-Soviet movement. And this was done by a couple of academics at Torun University using a spectrum and this is random bits of electronics. So the spectrum has obviously been an inspiration to hackers throughout the ages and it's also interesting to see how it's sort of feeding into these moments of European history. It's like the spectrum is this sort of computer equivalent of forest gump. It's this underdog where it's surfacing every now and then in these unexpected ways. But perhaps the most intriguing of all was what was going on in Russia. Because it turned out that the spectrum, it turned out at some point, someone had managed to smuggle an original spectrum through the iron curtain. And because of the way that Sinclair had driven down the costs and eliminated all this custom circuitry like Ben Heck was saying about, there was only really one custom chip and if you were determined enough you could replicate that in standard logic. And that's exactly what the boffins in Russia did. They came up with these designs that were basically, they got passed around just these blueprints for these spectrums reinvented with the locally available components. And pretty much every city and town in the Soviet Union that would have some kind of electronics geek who would have this little cottage industry of making these spectrums out of whatever bits and pieces they had to hand, whichever of keyboards and things, whatever bits of plastic, so all sorts of really whatever materials they had to hand. So if they had a job lot of these five-pin din sockets, then that's what they would use for all the connectors regardless of whether it's actually made any sense for that particular application because it just may do with whatever materials they had available. This is the Sinclair philosophy reborn effectively. And the intriguing thing with this was that along with all the hardware, of course, came the software, pirated of course, and they in fact had disk systems because they adopted one British disk system. The Sinclair never brought out an official disk system. He was still insistent on the micro drive stuff. But there's a couple of third-party ones and one of them, the fairly obscure one called Beta Disk, it's Find Its Way to Russia and that became their standard. So they would receive these disks of pirated games for local dealer. And because this was all happening in the beginning of the 90s, they didn't really experience the whole progression of video games as we knew it. So things like Jet Set Really, that meant absolutely nothing to them because they would get these disks with hundreds of games on and for a Russian kid growing up with these things all at once, well, which one of them are you going to leap on and say, yes, this is state of the art and obviously it's going to be the dizzy games. So these games that we in the West were kind of thinking this was like the low point of the spectrum's software output. In Russia, this was like the absolute peak of achievements, though spectrum nostalgia in Russia is now all about dizzy. So, yeah. Jet Set Really, Manic Minor means nothing. So now, yeah, we've come full circle in a way with the spectrums fashionable and retro again. So, yeah, see these bags and things. And this ZX500 trainer, that is an actual Adidas product a few years back. I don't think they acknowledge that it was an officially licensed, but you can see what they were doing there. So, yeah. So things are still going on with the spectrum community. People are still discovering stuff. There's collaboration over the internet. So this is one thing that I have had to put in after, in Benhex talk, there's a talk of recreating the ULA, the custom video chip in discrete hardware. So this is the prototype of the Harlequin, which is a spectrum clone, which was built by a guy called Chris Smith, who's based in Wales. And he actually brought this along to a gathering of spectrum geeks at a pub in Oxford. So these things have gone every now and then. And I have to say, when the barmaids have came along to our table and saw this sort of massive components and wires, she was a bit apprehensive and was like, is that a bomb? So, and yeah. So I think it lost a bit of the through the connections, got loose in transit. So I think once we finally got it working, we dared one of our party to shout out, the bomb's working. So yes, fun times. And another major achievement of these Oxford pub meetups was that we also had the first glimpse of the spectranet, which is an ethernet interface for the spectrum. And it's a thing with a lot of these interfaces. You end up with the interface themselves are actually kind of doing, they have as much processing power on board as the original spectrum, if not more. But it's still a nice intellectual pursuit. And so one thing that, so we got the first proof types of this, so we're playing around with them at one of these meetings in Oxford. And we decided on the spot that what we're trying to do is get the spectrum posting to Twitter. So this is again the much missed gloss around in Oxford. And this was the tweet from a spectrum that we just sent from the spectrum to a laptop that was bridged to the local Wi-Fi hotspots. So I do think there really should be a blue plaque on this pub now. This is the first spectrum, the spectrum tweet was sent from here. Unfortunately you can't do this anymore because they've now enforced all sorts of things. And for a while, the guy who produced the spectranet interface to go to the retro computing fairs and it would have a spectrum set up with the Twitter client where you could put in your username and password and people would go, look mum, I'm posting from a spectrum on Twitter. That's pretty much all everyone types. But yeah, you can't do that now because you've got to authenticate via OAuth. Because well, to be fair, I think it was the entire point of Twitter moving to OAuth was to stop people setting up random bits of hardware saying, go on, enter your username and password into this box. It'll do something cool. So you can't really blame them on that. So this is a Speccy 2010, which is the sacrilegious spectrum in an FPGA that is developed by a Ukrainian developer. And this is actually my pride and joy. I'm using this for my concert later on. It's a nice compact thing. So yes, these sorts of developments are happening all the time. It's really a fascinating international community. Oh yes, and incidentally, the issue with some of these clones, if you're trying to make them above board, there's an issue with the spectrum firmware because since it was passed on from Sinclair to Amstrad, the intellectual property now ultimately resides with Rupert Murdoch. So if you actually want to build these things and ship them with the spectrum ROM, then you would have to come up with some deal with him. So as a way of guessing around this, I actually worked on a project a few years back to produce an open source clone of the spectrum firmware that would actually reproduce the basic programs and so it would be enough to run games and things. And one to coo for this project was that we got hold of the ZX81 firmware, which due to various legal oddities didn't go to Sky, so we were able to use some of the routines from there which had then been passed on to the spectrum. And those included the trigonometric math routines. So not only did I eventually find out what Sincors and Tan did, I eventually became the custodian of the Sincors and Tan routines. So now it made me realise that this must be what Steven Moffat feels when growing up watching Doctor Who and then eventually becoming a writer on Doctor Who himself running the show. Well, simple pleasures, it made me happy. And of course now we've got the likes of the Raspberry Pi to really bring back this idea of a computer that encourages programming from the get-go rather than a computer that's just an appliance. And yeah, it's obviously, as we all know, it's a rewarding success. And it's hopefully going to inspire a new generation of programmers just as I was with the spectrum. And it might not have the keywords printed on the keys, but if it can help a few of the children of today slay their own bug-eyed monsters, then I think that the future's bright. Thanks very much. Before I rush off. Yeah. So, yeah, I think this is time for questions. Yeah, OK. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's the Suncupid. That was, it was touted as a successor to the spectrum. This was, I guess, in a way, it was like more of, it was like an 8-bit competitor to the ST and the Amiga. And I guess the selling point of it was that it was more or less compatible with at least some software for the spectrum. So the makers of it were hoping that it would be, that would be a natural upgrade path. But I think it was, that project, though, it was slightly plagued by problems. I think they were too late in actually getting it to market by whichever particular Christmas it was, Christmas 1989, I think. So they'd kind of missed the boat and people had already moved on to the ST and the Amiga, which meant that it never really became a sort of breakout of success in its own right. It always became a sort of postscript to the spectrum. But, yeah, throughout the 90s, it was, yeah, I'd say, it was like a close-knit community. A lot of the fanzines were sort of the spectrum and Samcoupay-based. So there's, yeah, a lot of shared heritage there. OK, so thanks again, all right, and I'll rush off then. Hopefully, yeah, hopefully see you at stage A.