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World of Spectrum 404 Page
- ezekiel68 3y agoOh my gosh, it has been so long since I saw that bootup sequence. Took me back to my adolescence! Love it.
- nickt 3y agoI love it, even with the PTSD it incurs. I’m particularly impressed that they even included the jailbars.
- kn100 3y agothe only way this could be even better is if it includes the sounds that came from the spectrum!
- borgchick 3y agoI heard it, didn't your ears play it for you? I also heard my old 2400 modem connecting, which is rather odd...
- utopcell 3y agoNot odd at all! The bits-per-second rate that spectrum was getting from a tape was 1200 bps.
- SarahC_ 3y agoIt's BROKEN! Updates to the browsers have broken the audio of it. WILL SOMEONE PLEASE think of the children, and fix the audio for us please?
- bruce511 3y agoFor the youngsters among us; Spectrum in this context refers to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer[1]. A contemporary of the Apple 2, it was a LOT cheaper, used a TV as a monitor and a cassette recorder [2] for storage. It was especially popular in the UK, and was the "first computer" for a sizeable chunk of a generation. (I still have 2 in my collection :) The page mimics the boot-up sequence. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum [2] For the youngsters among us, a cassette recorder is a device for reading and writing cassettes. Cassettes? They're removable magnetic storage, most commonly used to store audio (music). They had a running time of between 30 and 45 minutes per side (the cassettes could be removed, inverted and played to get the second side.) Think ipod with no track selection, and the ability to store 12 songs. High tech baby. Some early home computers used cassettes as storage instead of floppy disk. It made the computer cheaper dinge everyone had a cassette player. But it you a LONG time to load and save. Think like 10 minutes or more to load.
- o11c 3y agoSome additional notes about cassette tapes: There was no fundamental limit to how many minutes of audio could be put on a tape, but longer tapes were necessarily thinner and more fragile. Commercially-produced read-only tapes would be however long was needed for their content. Yes, CD players existed in the 90s. But why would you bother with one, when all your music is on tape? Even if you have one, your car is probably tape-only, and those audio-jack-to-tape converters were finicky, so you want to get music on tape. If your tape player was fancy, it would be able to automatically start playing the back side. But this sometimes caused problems if you stopped it in the middle of the back side then wanted to start it again. It was really annoying when you listened to an audiobook and somebody had left the tape in the middle. At least this was easier than VHS since playing the back side of the tape would take care of most of the "be kind, rewind".
- rahimnathwani 3y agoAlso worth mentioning: If you wanted to listen to same song over and over and over again, you could record it on side A of a cassette, disassemble the cassette to remove the excess tape, reassemble it, and then record the same song in side B. (Assuming your cassette player had auto reverse)
- o11c 3y agoOh, also, I forgot! Home taping (the piracy of the era) killed Music, which is why nobody makes music anymore and we all just have to listen to silence 24-7!
- utopcell 3y agoThis [1] is a fun project to follow. [1] https://github.com/fruit-bat/pico-zxspectrum https://github.com/fruit-bat/pico-zxspectrum
- pjmlp 3y agoLovely idea!