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[Kevin Wood]

The Speccy was a fine home micro.  It had some limits to make certain price points, but was pretty capable, and all the hardware was accessible from the default BASIC.

I was amazed how Sinclair made something so crude so reliable. (not that they were terribly reliable in the scheme of things)..

A friend of mine had one which suffered clear symptoms of a memory problem. I narrowed it down to one of the DRAM chips, bought a nice new replacement and fitted it for him. Nada.

I later found out that Sinclair had tweaked his design to use some out of spec ram chips that he got in a large batch off the back of a lorry, so a properly sourced chip wouldn't work.

Replaced it with one from another dead speccy and it worked fine.

[TheBoy]

Yup, how the early revisions even worked was amazing, given the out of spec use of many components.  Although most of these stunts had been fixed by Issue 3, which was the most common of the pre Amstrad ones

[Kevin Wood]

Yup, how the early revisions even worked was amazing, given the out of spec use of many components.  Although most of these stunts had been fixed by Issue 3, which was the most common of the pre Amstrad ones

Yeah, I think this was one of the early 48k ones where the additional memory was on a little daughterboard across the back.

[TheBoy]

Yup, how the early revisions even worked was amazing, given the out of spec use of many components.  Although most of these stunts had been fixed by Issue 3, which was the most common of the pre Amstrad ones

Yeah, I think this was one of the early 48k ones where the additional memory was on a little daughterboard across the back.

Oh, issue 1.  Pretty rare