I once again own the first computer I ever owned. Very happy to have this for the collection even though I never loved this thing. In fact, I hated it. I was so envious of my friends with Spectrums.

February 04, 2026 - 12:55 UTC

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I'm really surprised by how SMALL the ZX-81 is. It's tiny! Been a very long time since I've seen one in person.
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I picked up the NTSC Timex version of this from a yard sale when I was a kid and wow was this a terrible computer for someone who started with the C64. It was already half broken too.

Still have it though. I should actually fix it.
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NICE! I don't quite go that far back, my first PC was the family computer in the early 90s, a 8086 12Mhz with 2mb of RAM I think.
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I had one of those in 1982. You could fry eggs on the 16k expansion. Sold it for $100 and felt bad for asking that price. Moved to a C64 after that. Changed my life
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I still have my Vic20. Originally I had the first version in 82 but it kept over heating so we exchanged it for the unit I still have!
It has had a couple of VIA 6522 as I built & connected it to many things!
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An ambiguous classic: the Trabant car of the home computer world...
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Yet still a step above the ZX80 with the flickering screen.

It was a simpler time.
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Nice, i have one, unfortunetly not in the box, got the progrmming book and a thermal printer with it.
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Took me very long to find a ZX-81 locally that was affordable AND in the box. And I'm all about the box. Unfortunately this one is not in the best condition, so I will keep looking. My ZX Spectrum box looks like it came out of the factory yesterday.
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a cousin received one of these from visiting a timeshare presentation in florida in 1981. itโ€™s the first computer i ever programmed and i was immediately hooked
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Thank you so much for sharing - this brought back so many powerful memories for me. 45 years later, and still happiest when coding, this hunk of plastic set me on the path to a lifetime of joy. 1k (+16k of unreliability), no addressable storage, and yet we mastered it. Suck it vibe coders!
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Thanks for sharing! This too was my gateway drug into a life of software development. My fond memories came later with different machines, but this one started it all.
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Same!
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My first was a ยซNewbrainยป. Good keys and a small, useless display. Still works, though.
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I reunited with the Texas Instruments TI/99/4, the first computer I owned. Found a scanned copy of a program book and a cassette recorder and wrote some old programs.
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I remember we had a class for those. It was fun. Simple but good. Before the internet,apps and these screens.
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Mmmm, chicklet keys! ๐Ÿ‘
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Ah that's my first love. โ™ฅ๏ธ
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Not quite my first love, but certainly my first computer.
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I had one as a kid and adored it.... because we didn't have anything else. Then we got a Spectrum +2 and it went into the wardrobe for about 30 years!
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I think I got mine too late in the day, when the Spectrum had already been around for some time. I'd saved up birthday and Christmas money and I couldn't stretch to the Spectrum, so settled for this one. I tried to like it, but it was just too basic.
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The keyboard is an abdomination, both by being a membrane setup, and by having half a gazillion of meanings per key. ๐Ÿ˜ฌ
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I still have my old Commodore Amiga.
Best computer ever made.
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William Govson talks about them in Pattern Recognition. It got European kids into computers. He posits that the membrane keyboard was terrible but contributed to its success, as a filter for dedication.
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*William Gibson ๐Ÿคฆโ€โ™‚๏ธ
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Theyโ€™re tiny - like a big calculator! I loved my ZX81, got one off eBay a few years ago for nostalgia value.
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I always loved mine... it was revolutionary to me.. changed my world
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No way!!! Envious!! Very cool! My first was also a ZX81.
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Our first was the Entre. So old I can't even find a picture of it.
Here's the list since then

TI-99/4a
Compaq Portable
Mac II
PowerPc 7100/66
Toshiba laptop
Gateway
Dell Inspiron (shoved it full of RAM and SSD. Got 6 years out of it)
Mac Studio
Various Lenovos for work.
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Sinclair Development is still alive and well, my friend. Maybe look into MSX-BASIC. enjoy: www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=sinclair+game+development+toolshttps://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=sinclair+game+development+tools
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โ€œI was there 3000 years agoโ€. Well, mate of mine had one at the start of the home computer craze.

I got banned from coming near it when games were loading from cassette, as my naturally high static electrical charge would reset it.

Years later I found out at IBM I carry a lot of static charge!
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Oh the memoriesโ€ฆ ( still got mine )
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Wow, blast from the past. My youngest brother's first computer.I remember all of us got together and got it for him. A zillion years ago.
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Oh and mine was an Apple II+. Still have it, along with some of those old floppy disk games.
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Fun! I drooled over those. Mine was a VIC20 and I still have it.
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Been meaning to get a sinclair 1000 for the shelf, I hated it as well, but it's taught me basic and "plot" was fun till I got my C=64
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I had a 16K Spectrum. Had trouble upgrading it to 48K as the motherboard was between revisions. So I needed an odd memory controller chip. Had TWO microdrives & learned assembler so I could save games from tape onto MD. Owe my career to that brilliant little machine & Mum & Dad for the Xmas gift!
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Hey, you saved 29 quid!
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Thatโ€™s ยฃ112 in todayโ€™s money!
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Even with a 1K ZX81 you can learn a lot of programming concepts. Beyond the normal arrays & strings, crude graphics & 3D; animation; game design; simulation; maths; orbital mechanicsโ€ฆ
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And, more importantly, you learn to code *small*. Neat, efficient, cram as much functionality into as few instructions as possible.

This stood me in very good stead a couple of years later when I started programming for a living, nobody could write code as tight or bug-free as me.
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Darn straight
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I swear if I sat down in front of one, Sinclair BASIC would come pouring out of my fingers. It was so beautifully simple...
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My brother and I convinced our parent to bring one back when they went to the UK to visit relatives. Had to rip an order page out of a computer magazine to make sure they got the right thing.

A couple of years(?) later their next trip resulted in a 48k Spectrum. Boom shanka!
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When I was about 10 or 12 I ordered one of these from a magazine and and built (assembled actually) one of these and sucessfully programmed (copied from magazine) the game "Life"
IIRC there was a way to save out to cassette tapes- though I could be mistaken about that.
โœŒ๏ธ
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...I remember my parents/grandparents being absolutely mystified...but delighted that-for a time- I had stopped playing in traffic, running with scissors and lighting things on fire...
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I hated it, too. Its propensity to overheat and glitch somewhere near the end of the 300 lines of code I typed in from a magazine - losing EVERYTHING - left a lasting negative impression. That said, I knew I was living in a SF movie when I first switched it on. ๐Ÿค”
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With the wobby RAM pack that meant it crashed just as you'd finished typing in a game from a magazine?
Simpler times ๐Ÿ˜‰
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And we just accepted it as a small price to pay for living in the future.
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