The Sinclair ZX81: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is on March 5, 1981


A very small thing happened to a great many people on March 5, 1981, and it was called the Sinclair ZX81. The ZX81 was a computer that consisted almost entirely of Nothing. It had four chips. Not four hundred, not four thousand. Four. If you opened the casing, you’d find a vast, echoing plastic cavern that suggested the computer was actually just a very expensive place for a spider to raise a family.

It came with one kilobyte of RAM. To put that into perspective for the modern reader (who likely has more computing power in their electric toothbrush than existed on the entire planet in 1954), one kilobyte is roughly the amount of memory required to remember a medium-sized grocery list, provided you don't buy any exotic cheeses with long names.

And yet, it was magnificent. Or, at least, it looked magnificent in glossy magazine ads.

It was a sleek, black wedge of plastic that looked like it had been fallen off the back of a passing UFO. It didn't have a keyboard so much as a "membrane," which is a polite medical term for a piece of plastic that ignores your fingers until you poke it with the frantic desperation of a man trying to stop a leak in a submarine.

But here is the truly improbable bit: It cost $149.95.

In 1981, this was the price of a very adventurous dinner for two. For the first time in the history of a planet that was otherwise preoccupied with Cold War posturing and the inexplicable popularity of On Golden Pond, the average human being could own a piece of the Infinite.

The ZX81 didn’t teach a generation how to code; in fact, the damn thing wouldn't save a single program I wrote to the cassette tape, no matter how closely I followed the directions. It was a total ripoff. A scam. But it did teach an embittered generation patience, the virtue of brevity, and the fundamental truth that if you want to conquer the stars - or simply rip off children who want to learn how to code - you have to start with a very small black box that hums slightly and gets quite warm.

It was a small step for a scammer, and a giant leap for anyone who ever wanted to play a version of Space Invaders where the aliens looked suspiciously like apostrophes. Note to future such invaders from other planets: If you find a ZX81 in the wild, do not attempt to use it as a navigation computer. You will almost certainly end up inside a sun. 

Forty-five years on, we still remember the ZX81 not for what it could do, but for what it made us believe we could do - or what the ads in Time magazine fooled kids into thinking it would do. Rather than being toasted with nostalgia, the scammers behind it should be nearing the end of prison sentences for fraud today. On Riker's Island.

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