A ZX-Spectrum Z80 clone. Something like 32KB of memory, and audio tapes for storage. A game would take 4-5 minutes to load, during which time the border of the screen would have funky coloured lines, and you could "hear" the program loading (similar to modem sounds). There was also a way to "compress" programs, which would make the lines thinner and the sound more high-pitched - I guess it simply recorded everything twice as fast and tried to deal with the error recovery as well as it could.
This was back in Romania almost 10 years after the original Z80 came out in the rest of the world. It was a big hit for a couple of years because it was so affordable, and many people got their computing start on one (or on a Commodore 64), before graduating to a 286 or 386. One TV station actually had a show where they broadcast games and programs - since it was just the audio signal, you could easily record them off the TV. So you basically had an entire TV show with the funky moving lines on the borders and the modem-like sounds. Looking back it seems a bit surreal. :)
I had one too! Just as in Romania, The ZX was a long time coming to India and was insanely expensive, but I learned programming on it, mostly by writing simple games.
. Once you got your head wround assembly, you could do anything with it and I was fiddling with that machine 12 hours a day till Mom took it away in an attempt to remind me of "normal" life.
Damn I feel old now :-(
This was back in Romania almost 10 years after the original Z80 came out in the rest of the world. It was a big hit for a couple of years because it was so affordable, and many people got their computing start on one (or on a Commodore 64), before graduating to a 286 or 386. One TV station actually had a show where they broadcast games and programs - since it was just the audio signal, you could easily record them off the TV. So you basically had an entire TV show with the funky moving lines on the borders and the modem-like sounds. Looking back it seems a bit surreal. :)