The first of the famous sinclair computers although some will say its not, as back in 1977 Sinclair had a kit computer the MK14, while this is true it had even less memory than the 80 and no VDU or Tape backup and was purely aimed at the hobbyist, as opposed to the home user.

The ZX80 was launched in early 1980 and was the first computer to break the £100 barrier, as would be expected there were plenty of critics of this machine, but what they seemed to have forgot was that the ZX80 was 20% of the price of its nearest rival therefore if it was only 20% as good, you could say it equaled them and more importantly made computing affordable to around 70,000 people. Its very easy to criticise and I think most people can or could find fault with the 80 but the bottom line is it was the start of the Sinclair Phenomenon which lead to a multi million pound business.

The ZX80 was a monochrome machine built round the Z80 processor, with a ROM of  4 kb and 1 kb of RAM expandable to 16kb using an external RAM pack, it used a simple version of Sinclair basic which used Keywords, from a single press of a key a command could be entered.    The Machine Input / Output was very limited with only a tape in/out and expansion bus