ZX Spectrum: 30 years old, and still one of the cheapest computers ever made

Today is the 30th birthday of the ZX Spectrum, one of the most popular home computers ever made, and probably the single most important factor in the creation of the IT industry in the UK. The ZX Spectrum, made by Sinclair Research in Cambridge, England is usually considered the UK equivalent of the US-made Commodore 64.

Hardware-wise, the ZX Spectrum was completely unremarkable. There was an 8-bit Zilog Z80A CPU, a graphics chip capable of outputting 32 columns by 24 rows (256x192px) with 15 colors, and either 16 or 48KB of RAM. At just £125 ($200), however, the ZX Spectrum was incredibly cheap. The Commodore 64 cost $600. The BBC Micro, made by Sinclair’s arch rival Acorn Computers, cost £299. Despite costing just a fraction of its contemporaries, the ZX Spectrum had comparable functionality. All three computers had similar amounts of RAM and processing power, and all three had similar editions of the BASIC programming language.

How did Sinclair Research pull it off? Innovative design and aggressive engineering. From the very start, Sinclair Research knew that it wanted the ZX Spectrum to be as cheap as possible, and so almost every component was engineered from the ground up with penny pinching in mind. The main printed circuit board was kept as small and dense as possible, which resulted in a very lithe chassis (just 23x14x3cm, compared to the monstrous 40x21x7cm Commodore 64 and gargantuan 40x35x8cm BBC Micro). Instead of using a conventional keyboard with hundreds of moving parts, a rubber, chiclet “island” keyboard with just four or five parts was used. (In the eyes of original users, this resulted in the ZX Spectrum keyboard feeling like “dead flesh” — an early example of a tech meme.) The ZX Spectrum was wrapped in a plastic case and weighed just 550 grams (1.2lbs), compared to the metal, clunky 1.8kg (4lb) Commodore 64, and back-breaking 3.7kg (8.1lb) BBC Micro.

In short, the ZX Spectrum was simply better engineered than its contemporaries — much like iPhone, except Apple uses its engineering and supply line advantage to squeeze out higher profits, rather than slashing prices. Like the ZX Spectrum, it’s not like the iPhone uses fundamentally different silicon or materials — Apple is still limited by the state of the art — but through design, engineering, and supply line expertise, Apple simply manages to cram more tech into the same (or smaller) space — and with a cheaper bill of materials.

ZX Spectrum+, a later version that did away with the “dead flesh” keyboard

The ZX Spectrum would go on to sell five million units — not bad, when you consider there are only 30 million homes in the UK — and net Clive Sinclair, the owner of Sinclair Research, a knighthood for “services to British industry.” Curiously, Sinclair, a serial inventor, recently admitted that he doesn’t actually use computers — he prefers the telephone to email.

To this day, even after 30 years of being hammered at by Moore’s law and accounting for inflation, there are remarkably few home computers that have been sold at a lower price point than the ZX Spectrum (it would cost around $450 today). The Raspberry Pi, a British-made Linux-based PC that will be sold for around $25, is the obvious exception, and the spiritual successor of the ZX Spectrum.

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Nanocopters, Smartbirds, and beyond: The coolest robot videos ever

Hardly a week goes by without an amazing new robot video showing up on the web. After diligently watching well over a hundred of them, I’ve collected a number of videos that demonstrate the incredible capabilities of modern robotics. Think of this as a primer on awesome robot videos as well as a refresher on some of the most viral technology videos to hit the web recently.

Have fun watching, and let us know if I’ve missed your favorite.

Best of the nanocopters

Quadcopters are definitely cool, like the construction ‘copters we wrote about earlier this year. Nanocopters, though, bring awesomeness to a new level, with their maneuverability and dare I say cuteness. As robots go, they aren’t the smartest on their own — since they rely on nearby computers for high-level programming and in this case their vision — but as a system they are capable of some amazing stunts. These two quadcopters, shown in the ETH’s Flying Machine Arena in Zurich, can respond to the ball more quickly than a human pilot would be able to.

To give you a better idea of what swarms of nanocopters are capable of, here is a video from the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP lab, featuring a variety of solo and “swarm” stunts.

However, if you think humans are about to let a bunch of plastic ‘bots take the formation crown, think again. These Japanese show that humans can perform in unison as well:

If you’d like to learn more about what it takes to program a swarm of nanocopters, there is an excellent TED Talk on the how to of building and programming nanocopters:

Finally, if you haven’t seen it yet, robots indeed have their own version of silly kitty videos. Here the University of Pennsylvania’s swarm is programmed to play the theme from James Bond:

 

Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog

Our tax dollars pay for a lot of different things, but one of the coolest is the DARPA-funded Big Dog robot from Boston Dynamics. The first robot capable of walking across rough terrain, Big Dog and its relative, AlphaDog still hold the crown for best mechanical pack animals.

Robots like Big Dog and others funded by DARPA will help lay the groundwork for the newly announced DARPA challenge to build a humanoid rescue robot.

 

Haile, featured in this video, doesn’t look all that human, but if you close your eyes, you can definitely imagine that it is a real — if novice — jazz drummer. To get behind the scenes and look at what it takes to build a robot that can not only play the drums but also jam along with other musicians, Georgia Tech provided this video of its work in creating Haile, a robotic percussionist:

 

DIY amusement park ride in Google car

Who needs an amusement park when you can program your self-driving car to race around a parking garage at high speed like these Googlers. Imagine the day when we can all program our own fun — hopefully not all at the same time. For those who may worry about the high-speed thrill ride in the video, I’ve passed Google’s cars on the road where they meticulously cling to the speed limit — and, so far, the right lane.

 

SmartBird

As fun as it is to watch nanocopters, they’re pretty simple to comprehend. A few little motorized rotors, a battery, a gyroscope, and a spiffy control system. Flying using wings is an entirely different challenge. Even the physics of modeling a bird’s wing movement is complex.

Festo’s SmartBird does an amazing job of modeling the flight of a herring gull — using only its wings to take off, fly, and land. Ultralight construction helps make this involved form of flight not only possible, but elegant. In fact, if you didn’t know this was an article about robots, it’d be easy to think we’d gone bonkers and were now posting random videos of flying birds. Think I’m kidding? Here’s a video of gulls mobbing SmartBird, thinking it’s a threat:

There is a lot of fancy science behind SmartBird, which Markus Fischer, head of R&D for SmartBird maker Festo, explains it in this “how-to” video he presented at TED:

 

Towel-folding:

For decades people have speculated on robots helping us with housework. A brace of vacuum-cleaning robots have shown up, but most other tasks have proven beyond their reach. This UC Berkeley video of a towel-folding robot, as impressive as it is, shows one reason why — speed.

While the robot does eventually figure out how the towels — that it has never seen before — are arranged, the video needs to be sped up 50x to be watchable. A human can perform the same task almost effortlessly and quickly — although perhaps for some of us, not as neatly. As with most computer-based tasks, though, now that it can be done at all, it’s only a matter of time before a robot is as fast as a human.

 

Asimo just keeps getting better

No list of robot videos would be complete without at least one featuring Asimo, the venerableshowcase robot that has been around for over a decade. Each year it learns some new tricks. In this video Asimo shows that it can walk around people, keeping its balance while changing course. However, it can still only do this task we take for granted slowly and carefully — once again reminding us just how amazing humans actually are.

 

Honorable mentions

Self-assembling robot research funded by the EU.

A Rubik’s-Cube-solving robot.

And finally, the cat-petting, Wii-and-Kinect-based robot ExtremeTech covered in December.

That’s all the robotics awesomeness for now. If there is anything the article missed, please leave a suggestion below.

[Image Credits: SmartBird]

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How real people will use Windows 8 on the desktop (video)

When it comes to attacking Microsoft’s dubious Windows 8 design decisions, ExtremeTech is no stranger. When we first learnt about the Metro interface making the leap to Windows 8, I predicted the death of the PC. When Matthew Murray tried out the Consumer Preview, he threatened to leave Windows for Linux.

When Microsoft killed off the Start button, however, we could see almost no recourse for the average Windows user. Yes, I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to convince you that Windows 8′s new interface, despite being obviously touch-oriented, is actually usable with mouse and keyboard — but at the end of the day, the vast majority of Windows users are not power users.

You and I might know that tapping the Windows key on the keyboard pops up the Start Menu/Screen, but as the video below makes clear, “real people” do not. In the video, Chris Pirillo’s (of Lockergnome fame) dad tries to use Windows 8 for the first time. What follows is an agonizing example of why Microsoft shouldn’t have removed a design element that users have relied on for almost 20 years, since Windows 95.

At this point, of course, I have to wheel out one of my favorite videos: a two-year-old using an iPad for the first time.

It’s not too late for Microsoft to reinstate the Start button!

Read more at Geek

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High-tech bad parenting: Giving your kids a tablet

Better living (or parenting) through technology? That is the question posed by Nielsen in a recent study looking at the use of tablets in families with children.

The firm finds that in households owning a tablet computer and with children under 12, 70% of children use the tablet. What these parents are letting them use the tablets for is likely cause for concern among those who feel parents today are not fulfilling their parenting duties.

77% of these children are playing games, while 57% use the tablet for educational purposes. The rest of the most common responses read like how to keep children occupied without actually parenting: 55% use the tablet for entertainment purposes (less “Are we there yet?”, more peace and quiet); 43% to watch television and/or movies; and 41% to keep the child occupied while at a restaurant or event.

At least 15% have used the device to keep in contact with other family members, but kids appear to be missing out on valuable life lessons, such as manners or learning from life’s experiences. It poses an interesting question as to whether or not society is only making the problems caused by technology worse, such as the end of interpersonal communication, or just not having the skills to deal with each other in real life.

There is a good deal of evidence that tablets can be amazing learning devices, such as the amazing video above from YouTube of young Bridger Wilson at ease with his father’s iPad. Tablet manufacturers have also created child-centric tablets like the Vinci, aiming to make the tablet a true learning device.

While kids can use these devices to learn, at the same time parents still need to parent. Nielsen’s numbers suggest that parents are increasingly using the devices to do more than teach; instead they’re increasingly used to babysit. Is this the right thing to do? It’s a question that has been asked for years. Like televisions before it during the 1950s and 1960s, there is probably not an easy answer.

One thing is for sure, though: childhood is short. Being in a children’s life as much as possible does make a difference later in life. Ask yourself, do you want to raise your children yourself, or have somebody to do it for you? Think about it.

Read more at Nielsen

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Intel fakes Ivy Bridge GPU DirectX 11 demo at CES

In a move that casts yet another shadow over Intel’s ability to craft a decent integrated GPU, the engineers from Santa Clara were caught cheating at its CES 2012 press conference last night. Mooley Eden, the general manager of Intel’s PC group, was on stage to show off the the DirectX 11 capabilities of Ivy Bridge’s HD Graphics 2500 GPU — but instead of actually driving a lap in F1 2011, Eden cheated and pressed play on a pre-rendered video in VLC.

As you can see in the video below, the VLC control panel pops up, and the car continues to drive itself after Eden leaves the steering wheel (causing the astute audience to laugh). Curiously, according to some sources, Eden then went on to state — in front of press and financial analysts — that the demo was running live from an Ivy Bridge chip. Intel has since issued an official statement, admitting that Eden used a video “for expediency.”

It’s not a question of whether Intel cheated at the CES press conference, then, but how badly Intel cheated. Is the video a recording of an Ivy Bridge integrated GPU playing F1 2011, or is it another GPU entirely? Intel’s official statement says that Ivy Bridge runs DX11 “extremely well” — but then why did Eden fudge his way through the demonstration and then lie about it afterwards? If Intel is happy to admit, via a spokesperson, that they used a pre-rendered video — why didn’t Eden tell the audience before the demo?

Update: AnandTech was treated to an actual, live demonstration of F1 2011 running on an Ivy Bridge GPU — and, fortunately, it looks like it runs just fine.

Read more at Bright Side of News

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Cubelets: Modular robot construction kit

Move over Lego! Cubelets, inch-sized modular cubes that can be snap assembled into autonomous robots, are here — and once you (or your kid) sees them in action, the hand-me-down, attic-dwelling box of Lego might never be seen again.

Made by Modular Robotics, Cubelets come in 15 different varieties (pictured below), broken down into three species (Action, Sense, and Think/Utility), and all of them can be magnetically snapped together in any arrangement. Action blocks consist of motors for moving your robot, speakers, flashlights, and rotation. Sense blocks have sensors that respond to distance, temperature, or brightness. Thinker/Utility cubes provide programmatic functions, battery power, and “insulator” blocks that carry power but prevent signals from propagating.

The end result is a bunch of construction blocks that can be arranged in almost any order, without wires or external controls, to create robots with semi-intelligent behavior. For a hardware hacker, Cubelets are probably nothing more than a curio — but if you’re a newbie (or child!) who lacks the skills to program Microsoft’s Gadgeteer or Arduino, then Cubelets could be exactly what you’re looking for.

Unfortunately there’s a stumbling block: Cubelets are not cheap. They’re around $30 each, which for a bit of plastic with some simple circuitry inside seems a little over the top. You can buy a set of six for $160, or 20 for $520 (and they’re not available until April, incidentally). Watching the crazed, Dutch gnome play with his Cubelets in the video below, though, you can almost forgive the inflated price. We’ll certainly try to get a shipment of Cubelets sent to the ExtremeTech bunker so that we can tell you, authoritatively, whether they’re worth the money.

Read more at Modular Robotics

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