Sinclair ZX80
Completed ZX80 Reproduction
Manufactured By: Science of Cambridge Ltd. (later to be better known as Sinclair Research).
Designed By: Rick Dickinson
Release Date: January 1980
Introduced in 1980, the ZX80’s claim to fame was how cheap it was, selling for around $100 - $150 (CAD). It had a 4K ROM with BASIC built in but only 1K of RAM of which 768 bytes was taken up by screen memory (32 x 24 characters). So not a terribly useful computer but I love the look of it.
I remember trekking across Waterloo during a blizzard in December of 1980 so that I could purchase one of these for my brother as a Christmas present. Fun times.
The ZX80 Shipped With a Pretty Good Manual
One thing that I try to do with all of my retro computer reproductions is to print the manuals that shipped with them. Since computers were so new in those early days the manuals had to be pretty comprehensive, often starting with a section on “What is a computer?”. Fortunately someone archived high resolution images of the “ZX80 Operating Manual” that included “A Course in BASIC Programming”. I was able to print and bind a fairly accurate facsimile of the original manual.
Great Replacement Keyboard and Pi for Brain
I was a little surprised that you can still obtain replacement keyboards for the ZX80, but the end result is that the reproduction looks spectacular. The heart of the new machine is a Raspberry Pi W running the ZX80 firmware on top of a Z80 CPU emulator. The unit is powered at 5V via a micro-USB port.
This reproduction was not my design. I used the excellent design files, software, and instructions created by Cees Meijer. You will find links to Cees’s work below.
Build Instructioms
Project Logs
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