Radiohead hides ZX Spectrum proggie in OK Computer re-release

Re: Only a British would use a ZX spectrum for music...

If the track was written for the C64 it would have been four times the length.

Ah, so Radioheads later work

Re: Only a British would use a ZX spectrum for music...

@ TonyJ - isn't a Murkan a wig for a burger bap or other cheesy comestibles?

Re: Only a British would use a ZX spectrum for music...

I'm an Australia and I used the ZX81 and Spectrum. My keyboard suffered from the conductive membrane being above the heat sink, I had to do repairs. So sad that the Spectrum got lost. My favourite program was a talking clock: my voice was sampled by the Spectrum to build the vocab, it was recognisable. The C64 was much more sophisticated but the Spectrum was arguable more educational because producing sound and doing something else required understanding multitasking, either using interrupts or co-operatively. The C64 had a real sound chip.

Re: Only a British would use a ZX spectrum for music...

The Thompson Twins singer was from Sheffield. So, at least part Brit.

Re: C90 cassette, as that medium was the dominant way? No!

The 8 track would have been useless for home computers.

Too right. I worked in radio when "carts" were the predominant playback media for things like jingles, stings, intros and adverts. Carts were physically the same format as 8-track, but had a three tracks; one pair for stereo and a control track to cause the player to cue (i.e. fast-forward back to the beginning*), stop, or trigger another player.

The trouble we had keeping those things running to speed and without too much wow or flutter made my tribulations with Compact Cassettes for my Spectrum and later my BBC Micro look trivial, and we used Sonifex units which were probably the best in the business (anyone want a Sonifex cart machine? I have a couple in the garage).

The Spectrum's notoriously fickle circuitry would never have coped. The BBC Micro would likely have done better, especially if you just left the cart to run in a loop. The Spectrum (and most other home computers of the era) needed to load the whole program in one go, and an error near the end of 20k of code would mean starting from scratch. The BBC Micro loaded programs in (IIRC) 256 byte blocks. An error in one block would simply pause the loading so that you could re-wind and try just that block again. This saved an awful lot of time. You could have just left a cart running unattended, and the Micro would have picked up a bad block the next time it came around. Actually, didn't Sir Clive appropriate that idea with the "Microdrive"? :-)

M.

*For those who don't know, an 8-track cartridge was a tape loop. There was no "rewind", you had to fast-forward back to the beginning. The 7½ips cartridges we used at the radio station came in lengths up to about 10 minutes, IIRC, but since fast-forward was done by the same capstan and pinch roller that was used when playing the tape, and since the tape loop relied on decent lubrication for smooth running, you couldn't fast-forward all that fast in reality. In other words, you used the shortest cart suitable for the job, and for things like 5-second or 10-second jingles you might actually use a 30-second cart and record two or three copies.

Where's my 'nostalgia' icon?

Re: C90 cassette, as that medium was the dominant way? No!

I usually used C-46 or C-60 cassettes for albums, depending on the albums length, many fit on the former (the original LP capacity was 23m per side). C-90 only for dual LP albums, cassettes I could play on a smaller hi-fi system in my room which had not an LP player.

Saw very little reason to have two different albums on the same cassette but for car or walkman use, where it saved space. Otherwise, smaller cassettes meant less wear.

Re: C90 cassette, as that medium was the dominant way? No!

'C90 was only dominant for LPs'

It was also the dominant format for people who copied games from their mates, and enjoyed / endured the 'will it wont it' tightrope of loading games. The hours I spent waiting for Daley Thompson's Supertest 128 to load, just to get to the very end then crash.....

Re: C90 cassette, as that medium was the dominant way of storing Speccy programs and data

Or use your ears.

Perhaps displaying a misspent youth I could identify the program from its opening warble, no sissy counters for me.

Re: C90 cassette, as that medium was the dominant way of storing Speccy programs and data

Until you changed to different tape deck and found the tape counter counted at a different speed on the new one....

Re: C90 cassette, as that medium was the dominant way of storing Speccy programs and data

SA stands for Still Available.

I dread to think how much £29.59 would be in 80's pocket money.