Join us on Wednesday 29 May 2019 at noon Pacific for the Retrocomputing for the Masses Hack Chat!
Of the early crop of personal computers that made their way to market before IBM and Apple came to dominate it, few machines achieved the iconic status that the Sinclair ZX80 did.
Perhaps it was its unusual and appealing design style, or maybe it had more to do with its affordability. Regardless, [Sir Clive]’s little machine sold north of 100,000 units and earned a place in both computing history and the hearts of early adopters.
Spencer Owen is one who still holds a torch for the ZX80, so much so that in 2013, he hatched a seemingly wacky idea to make his own. A breadboard prototype of the Z80 machine slowly came to life over Christmas 2013, one thing led to another, and the “RC2014” was born.
The RC2014 proved popular enough to sell on Tindie, and Spencer is now following his dream as a retrocomputing mogul and working on RC2014 full time. He’ll be joining us to discuss the RC2014, how it came to be, and how selling computing nostalgia can be more than just a dream.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday May 29 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
Very cool, have had my eye on the RC2014 for a long time. Would love to know more about its background.
I would like to see some versions of the Atari computers myself. That’s more of my era.
Check out the c256 foenix project then. Its about that “era”
“few machines achieved the iconic status that the Sinclair ZX80 did.”
and yet the graphics for the hack-chat are actually mirroring the ZX Spectrum ;-)
I would have said that for Sinclair, while the ZX80 and ZX81 were the first significant pioneers for home computing, it hit big with the speccy 48k (and probably why it is more referenced in images over the pale ZX80)
I have a feeling the time zone converter is not working as expected….
It shows time renaming to 17:00:00 PDT for me…
I like the idea of retrocomputing, had some fun on the website TrailingEdge.com tho not lately, and built a copy of simh 3.9 though I don’t have the knowledge or operating systems to play with the simulated computers. The Z-80/8088 pcs weren’t my thing; I was a Commodore boy with an assembler and wrote a text editor for Vic20 and C64 that ran on both and printed to a Diablo-compatible printer. It did nice letters with up to about 130 full-justified chars per line. Also did a science application I’ve been meaning to redo on a modern system.