Spectrum as a serious business machine?

[Jbizzel]

Sinclair was obsessed with the idea that the spectrum could be a serious business machine.

Anyone use if for that purpose today?

Could you do (any element of) your work on it?

[PeterJ]

@Jbizzel,

Check out recent episodes of The Spectrum Show. @PaulJ has been running a regular feature on running a fictional business with a Spectrum.

I used Masterfile recently for logging my amateur radio reception reports. I did end up swapping to the Amstrad CPC version as it has the benefit of more columns and has basic relationship handling (as long as you are happy with just two colours on screen)

[Jbizzel]

Interesting

https://www.timexsinclair.com/product/masterfile/

That must be this software.

Tasworld is a fairly decent word processor too.

I quite like the idea of downgrading and setting up a functional office at home that only uses 8 bit computing.

Call it the 'slow computing'

[PeterJ]

Masterfile is here @Jbizzel:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/8 ... Masterfile

[flatduckrecords]

If you pop into The Framery in Sheffield you might spot Spectrum step-sibling the Amstrad CPC 6128 still hard at work.


[via Twitter]

[TMD2003]

This is one of times where "you could, but probably shouldn't", especially if you're sticking rigidly to Sinclair hardware. Tasword is all well and good, but are you going to print out your letters to the editor of the Daily Mail on a ZX Printer and photocopy them so the aluminium doesn't drop off the paper, or are you going to get an Epson FX-80 like everyone else and rig it to the correct interface? Are you going to stick with microdrives, or get a proper disc drive, an Opus Discovery, a Beta Disk, or best of all, a +D? And a replacement keyboard, like that one made by DK'Tronics in the Spectrum's early life, wouldn't go amiss either.

[Kweepa]

If you pop into The Framery in Sheffield you might spot Spectrum step-sibling the Amstrad CPC 6128 still hard at work.

Good prices too

[Matt_B]

This is one of times where "you could, but probably shouldn't", especially if you're sticking rigidly to Sinclair hardware. Tasword is all well and good, but are you going to print out your letters to the editor of the Daily Mail on a ZX Printer and photocopy them so the aluminium doesn't drop off the paper, or are you going to get an Epson FX-80 like everyone else and rig it to the correct interface? Are you going to stick with microdrives, or get a proper disc drive, an Opus Discovery, a Beta Disk, or best of all, a +D? And a replacement keyboard, like that one made by DK'Tronics in the Spectrum's early life, wouldn't go amiss either.

You could just use a +3 as it's got a printer interface, disk drive and a half-decent keyboard built in.

You're still stuck with 32 columns even then, mind you, so a CPC6128 or C128 would be a better bet.

[flatduckrecords]

Tasword is all well and good, but are you going to print out your letters to the editor of the Daily Mail on a ZX Printer and photocopy them so the aluminium doesn't drop off the paper, or are you going to get an Epson FX-80 like everyone else and rig it to the correct interface?

I’ve found the old Alphacom is not bad if the paper is kept out of sunlight. (Depends on the quality of the bog till roll I suppose).

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m a fan of RWAP’s RetroPrinter. I think of it as not-cheating since the Spectrum is still doing all the work (even if the results appear magically as PDF via a wireless network-share).

Are you going to stick with microdrives, or get a proper disc drive, an Opus Discovery, a Beta Disk, or best of all, a +D? And a replacement keyboard, like that one made by DK'Tronics in the Spectrum's early life, wouldn't go amiss either.

Yeah the main thing I’ve stumbled with is connecting the hardware all at the same time. The PlusDLite is great, but the “lite” in the name refers to the lack of parallel port. An original Disciple or PlusD would be ideal though. For a keyboard I’d really like one of these.

Another approach if you’re working on a Spectrum with an RS232 socket is to transfer your work that way. After talking with @Journeyman about it, I found I quite like taking my NC100 (though I wish I had a Z88 of course) and drafting up some text—offline and away from my desk—and bringing back into the modern world, if need be, with a serial cable later on. Or indeed importing text from the NC100 into the Spectrum with a short BASIC program, then adding fancy fonts with TasPrint before making a hard copy!

Hooray for Slow Computing

[Jbizzel]

@flatduckrecords I did not know about the centronics interface for connecting to a modern printer. It's cool, but also very expensive -£90 + as raspberry pi? And thats without the box.

Actually after @Journeyman s thought provoking post re z88

I bought an old printer with a parallel port from eBay. It's was very cheap, and when I plugged it into the z88, opened an doc and pressed print - i was shocked to see that it worked! And also how high quality the print was.

I also started to use my z88 for taking notes (using spell master to spell check), and using the pipedream to HTML print driver discovered I could quickly send files to PC over telnet.

I see that there was software written for the spectrum (with IF1) and the QL to send files from the z88 to these machines over serial.

That has got me wondering about having a true 8bit home office.

I think for many people's needs a simple word processor, a simple spreadsheet that sums columns, a printer and diary software fits most needs.

I guess the barrier is that you need to email files in a modern office, and that maybe is the stumbling block.

So at the moment I need a modern PC to connect with the outside world, via a serial connection for email.

But I very much like the idea of the slow office, or slow computing, where you do as much as possible with very little.

[Jbizzel]

If you pop into The Framery in Sheffield you might spot Spectrum step-sibling the Amstrad CPC 6128 still hard at work.


[via Twitter]

This is amazing! Next time I'm in Sheffield I want to go

[flatduckrecords]

I bought an old printer with a parallel port from eBay. It's was very cheap, and when I plugged it into the z88, opened an doc and pressed print - i was shocked to see that it worked! And also how high quality the print was.

Yeah that’s probably what I should’ve done! I did get the cheaper older model of RetroPrinter (£45) and I had a RPi 3B gathering dust anyway. I justified it to myself by not having to worry about ink ribbons or mechanical faults (I never used printers of that era so there’s no nostalgia in it for me either).

[Jbizzel]

@flatduckrecords £45 isn't bad at all actually, especially when, as you say, you don't have to worry about ink and mechanical problems.

Some old printers are so cheap, but then you try to buy ink and you can't get it or else it's super rare and expensive.

I managed to buy 5 ink cartridges for £10, but I also need to clean the print head, so there is cost and risk to that. And the printer I got is from the 90s so it doesn't even seem that retro to me!! A sure sign I am getting old

[1024MAK]

I think y’all have missed a trick.

The humble ZX Spectrum can easily have an 80 column screen. No internal upgrades needed.

Spoiler

You just need an expansion, e.g. Interface 1, with a RS232 port. You can then connect a ‘dumb’ VDU terminal to the Speccy. Okay, the application software would need a serious rewrite. But it’s possible…
Some dumb’ VDU terminals also have a RS232 or Centronics printer port.

Mark

[catmeows]

I quite like the idea of downgrading and setting up a functional office at home that only uses 8 bit computing.

Call it the 'slow computing'

Think is, the only computer I can imagine for semi-serious work is probably CPC or some later edition of Apple II.

[1024MAK]

Think is, the only computer I can imagine for semi-serious work is probably CPC or some later edition of Apple II.

The CPC6128, or one of the PCW range, or the Acorn BBC B / Master 128 / Master Compact, the Research Machines 380Z, some of the Sharp computers based on the Z80, the Memotech MTX512 with the SDX and 80 column board or the FDX expansion. There are others…

The limitations with the Spectrum, are, the limit of the width of the screen. When running a custom display routine, the humble ZX81 can actually have a slightly wider screen width (yes, more than 32 8x8 characters).
The keyboard (on the Sinclair produced models). And the lack of a Sinclair disk drive or standard for a disk drive.

The Amstrad +3 got a lot closer to a practical useable system, but for the same screen limitations and the choice of the 3” disks (which were more expensive than the 3½” disks that most other manufacturers were moving to).

Of course, Sinclair’s answer was the QL. This was much better for business or serous use compared to our humble Speccy. But still Sinclair crippled it. Microdrives may have seemed like a good idea in the early 1980s, but although useable, were not really going to be a long term everyday practical solution for someone who just wanted the system to work every day without any messing about. Plus, 128K bytes of RAM on a 68008 processor system without a disk drive was a bit limiting. And the keyboard was not what people were used to. Plus you needed a special specific monitor (it had to be adjusted to cope with the non-standard video output). And the connectors used for the RS232 ports and joystick ports were also unusual and hence the plugs were not easy to find.

Mark

[PeterJ]

Also the Commodore 128 @1024MAK.

[Jbizzel]

I was surprised that the cpc6128 doesn't have a serial port and you have to get so sort of add-on.

The +2/+3 spectrum's do have a rs232 port, but I confess I've never used them.

Interestingly Clive didn't use a computer at all. He only used a calculator and notepad. The reason he gave for this was can't type. That suggests to me he say computers as secretarial perhaps?

[zx64]

IMO business computer need to have:
- floppy drive
- printer interface
- keyboard suitable for typing

So, if the question is about any sinclair (not the 48k one), then yes, +3 can be used for business. Although 3'' floppies are not very good choice for transferring data to other computers

[Journeyman]

Aha, what a brilliant thread!

When I was a kid, I always wanted to do serious things with my Spectrum +2, but discovered it was very difficult if you didn't have a bunch of expensive addons, and of course, back then, they cost more than the machine itself, and I totally couldn't afford it. Nowadays, though, I have some nice extra bits and pieces, and yes, you can actually do useful things with the Spectrum, in albeit pretty limited ways.

I've got two printers, a Brother M-1009 dot matrix and a Brother EP-44, which is actually a typewriter with an RS-232 port. It produces very nice text actually. I've got two configured versions of Tasword Plus 2 set up for them, the EP-44 connected via IF1 and the M-1009 via a Kempston E Centronics interface. The EP-44 produces very decent quality typed text and I have actually used it to send business letters, not often hooked up to my Speccy, but it's perfectly do-able. I often print stuff from my Z88 with it. I conduct a lot of my personal business by post as I'm somewhat phone-phobic.

For storage I use the vDriveZX, which works very well. I think you'd need to be bit of a masochist to stick with original Microdrives these days, but the vDriveZX provides an extremely authentic experience, and the Microdrive was surprisingly well supported by serious software back in the day.

The 128K versions of Tasword were pretty capable, and support stuff like mail merge. My M-1009 configured version has Tasprint built in, enabling use of five different fonts. Only a couple of them are actually useful, but it does produce quite nice-looking results.

I also have Tascalc, which is a passable spreadsheet for 128K machines, although the big flaw with this is that it doesn't integrate with Tasword at all, preventing you from loading/saving files in word processor documents. They missed a trick there. There was certainly a plan from the makers of The Artist and The Writer to produce a database and spreadsheet, all of which would integrate with each other, but these never appeared.

Tas-Diary is an interesting program - it's a microdrive-only time management program that is surprisingly capable and flexible. It creates a cartridge for each year you want to use it, and it creates a file on the cart for each month, so it can store quite a lot of data. It sorts things into time order automatically, and for planning stuff it really does work. I've even printed lists of appointments onto Filofax pages!

There were plenty of databases knocking about for the Spectrum, of course, some of which interact with word processing programs, after a fashion. There's a couple of DTP packages as well. Sinclair's early software releases included stuff like Club Record Controller, Collector's Pack and even a small business accounts package (no idea if you could use it today, though). Many of these were written in BASIC so could be hacked and modded for different storage devices and printers etc.

I've done a couple of significant things with my Speccy, including using it to partly prepare a magazine article I got paid for writing, so I've earned money with it! I write the "Slow Tech" column for The Idler magazine, and my first piece was about using basic computers to avoid distraction when writing. It was inspired by George RR Martin writing Game of Thrones on an ancient MS-DOS machine. I compared using the Spectrum, Amstrad NC100 and Alphasmart Neo2 for writing, and whether it was realistic or possible, and I wrote each bit of the article on the machine concerned. I cheated a little by extracting the text using an emulator, because I didn't have the right cable to transfer over RS-232, but the text itself was typed on a real Speccy.

That ultimately is the biggest problem - Clive Sinclair seemed to think that industry standards were for losers. IF1 RS-232 just about works but struggles with a lot of things. It's OK for printing but comms with other machines can be very challenging to get working properly. Another major issue, of course, is that you can't run more than one program at a time.

If you're willing to do a bit of coding, you can actually convert files to different formats and transfer stuff to modern computers. It shouldn't, for example, be too difficult to write a program that will convert Tasword files to .rtf or .docx. All good fun!

[Journeyman]

@flatduckrecords £45 isn't bad at all actually, especially when, as you say, you don't have to worry about ink and mechanical problems.

Some old printers are so cheap, but then you try to buy ink and you can't get it or else it's super rare and expensive.

I managed to buy 5 ink cartridges for £10, but I also need to clean the print head, so there is cost and risk to that. And the printer I got is from the 90s so it doesn't even seem that retro to me!! A sure sign I am getting old

Consumables are certainly a big problem with old printers, but there's a couple of ways around it. Dot Matrix printers can be used with carbon paper to produce output if you can't get ribbons. Thermal printers are also a solution - my Brother EP-44 typewriter/printer uses thermal paper, and you can get good-quality A4 cut sheets to use with it. Expensive, but easily available. It can't print graphics, but the Brother HR-5 printer, which is also thermal, can.

[1024MAK]

The RS232 interface on the Interface 1 and on the 128K models has one fundamental problem. They both lack a special chip (UART being the most common terminology for this type of chip) that handles the parallel to serial and the serial to parallel conversion. Hence the Z80 has to do this.

This makes full duplex communication difficult at slow to medium speeds, and unpractical at higher speeds.

Mark

[animaal]

The RS232 interface on the Interface 1 and on the 128K models has one fundamental problem. They both lack a special chip (UART being the most common terminology for this type of chip) that handles the parallel to serial and the serial to parallel conversion. Hence the Z80 has to do this.

This is a topic I've wondered about. There were numerous things Clive did to keep the Spectrum cheap - not decoding full port addresses, use of a ULA to do so much, using the "good" halves of faulty RAM chips....

I had wondered if Clive did the same kind of things with other Sinclair peripherals such as Interface 1, Interface 2. It sounds like he did.

[TMD2003]

Consumables are certainly a big problem with old printers, but there's a couple of ways around it. Dot Matrix printers can be used with carbon paper to produce output if you can't get ribbons. Thermal printers are also a solution - my Brother EP-44 typewriter/printer uses thermal paper, and you can get good-quality A4 cut sheets to use with it. Expensive, but easily available. It can't print graphics, but the Brother HR-5 printer, which is also thermal, can.

Talking of printers and paper sizes...

Am I right in thinking that the tractor feed paper I remember from back in t'old days was always US Letter? And if so, was it possible to get hold of A4 tractor feed paper?

As late as 2006 I was using an HPLC machine hooked up to a circa-1988 386 PC with MS-DOS 3.3 and a dot matrix printer, and all my printed HPLC traces were on shorter and wider paper than all my other spectra. It was slightly inconvenient - but nobody else used that machine so I had it all to myself... that's one thing that had me wondering if a ZX81 could have been used to control an HPLC machine, as long as there was the right interface plugged into the edge connector. A pumping station was a bit ambitious, wasn't it, Sir Clive...

[Journeyman]

The RS232 interface on the Interface 1 and on the 128K models has one fundamental problem. They both lack a special chip (UART being the most common terminology for this type of chip) that handles the parallel to serial and the serial to parallel conversion. Hence the Z80 has to do this.

This makes full duplex communication difficult at slow to medium speeds, and unpractical at higher speeds.

Mark

Am I right in thinking that the 128K RS232 port isn't properly documented either? The manual only discusses printing, and it isn't clear whether you can receive data on it. I believe you can, but you're on your own trying to work out how.