BROADCASTS.com

Britain, 1979. To most people in the 70's, computers were monstrous, bleeping big-brother machines the size of a bus with hundreds of valves and great reels of magnetic tape. They were expensive to run and difficult to understand, and certainly, not something any of us would want at home. Clive Sinclair, a serial inventor, thought differently. He saw that the next step in modern computing was to create a small, affordable machine that could be used alongside our existing televisions and cassette players at home. His idea was to give the general public a tool to learn, organise and play on, that they could programme themselves. So, in 1979, he gave us the ZX80 - a home computer with a 1KB memory, no sound and a monochrome display. It may seem strange to us now, but that temperamental (and sometimes glitchy) little beauty launched the home computer industry that surrounds us today.