When it was launched way back in 1982, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was available with a 16 kB of RAM for £125 or with 48 kB for £175 (or R300 at the time). Computer fanatics went for the 48K, then the first choice for writing game code.
Designed by Clive Sinclair, with hardware developed by Richard Altwasser, the ZX Spectrum 8-bit PC was based on the Zilog Z80A CPU and ran at 3.5 MHz.  It was, at the time, a very popular gaming platform.Â
There are still games and about 24 000 other titles available for the ZX Spectrum, according to Your Sinclair. Games that are still sought after include Ant Attack, Rebelstar, R-Type and The Sentinel.
The American competitor for the British Sinclair was the 8-bit Commodore 64 with its 64 kilobyte memory. In 1982 it cost about R600, a whole lot of money back then. The Commodore was powered by a 0.985 MHz or 1.023 MHz CPU.
Fastest Computer
Twice a year, TOP500 lists the world’s fastest computer. In November 2012, a Cray XK7 system, called Titan, achieved 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). Installed at Oak Ridge National Laborotary in Tennessee Titan has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.
Here is an interesting review of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K:
