Issue One: Things smaller than 5K

The Sinclair ZX 81

In 1981 Clive Sinclair launched the ZX81, predecessor of the ZX Spectrum and the machine firstly used by many famous programmers. It was originally sold by mail order through advertisements in colour supplements of Sunday newspaper, and has 1KB of RAM, a fifth of the maximum size of this magazine. It costed £70, or £50 if sold as a kit.

> More information

4KB intros

Nowdays the demoscene is losing almost every limitation. Productions are getting to look and feel like real music videos or short movies as technologies, such as 3D cards, advance. However, hardcore programmers probably seeking a job as either BIOS chips or mobile phone programmers, still spend many evenings creating creating 4KB intros, the technically hardest competition in demoparties (demo contests). Some 4KB intros have music and real textured 3D scenes, and although they end up eating a lot more RAM after unpacked (sometimes up to 32MB) they fit in small, ultra-compact 4096 byte files. That is, four fifths of the maximum size of this magazine.

> Scene.org

ZX Spectrum screens

You know, those loading images that would appear on the screen for about half an hour, giving enough time to have a cup of tea while some game loads. You know, those screens that would get corrupted when it crashed. Those screens inevitably associated to those tape loading sounds, those that to get addicted to is the first step to madness. The ZX Spectrum, launched in 1982, one year after, had eight colour graphics on a 176x256 resolution, which enabled at the time 'photorrealistic' images to be stored on just 4KB of video RAM. Anyway, they are actually bad-looking, but the games were good though.

> The World of Spectrum

ZX Spectrum color table

Well as there is some space left in this magazine here's that ZX Spectrum color table:

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Bye.