Sinclair ZX80 Technical Details and Trivia

Connectors

  • a 3.5mm jack for Tape load/save (using any off the shelf cassette recorder)
  • an expansion port for peripherals to directly access the Z80 CPU
  • a 3.5mm DC-in power socket
  • an RF-in socket for connection to a TV

 

Technical Facts

  • The low price of the ZX80 was possible primarily because the design pushed most of the processing onto the CPU, the Zilog Z80. This included keyboard controller, video generator, and the tape interface. Whilst this made it cheap, it had its drawbacks. For example, the video display vanished whenever the processor had something else to do, so hitting a key caused the screen to flash!
  • The BASIC interpreter built-in was non-standard, and was integer-only.

 

Trivia