The Sinclair ZX80 was released by Science of Cambridge (later to become Sinclair Research Limited) in 1980 as the first true home computer to cost less than £100 and be designed to work on a standard television set.

Supplied in kit form, its white styalistic design and flat touch-sensitive keyboard has made it into an iconic computer.  It is also quite rare to find fully working today (there were around only 50,000 Sinclair ZX80 computers ever sold), and many of the computers have yellowed with age, or suffer with cracked or broken cases.

One of the interesting features of the design is the mound above the ULA, with what appear to be heat disippating fins - on closer inspection, these were black lines drawn on the case to make it appear that the computer generated more heat than it does.

Designed by Rick Dickinson and Jim Westwood, it is based around a Zilog Z80 chip running at 3.25MHz, and has only 1K of onboard memory, with a 4K ROM chip containing the BASIC and editor.

As with the ZX81 and early Sinclair ZX Spectrum, commands were entered by pressing a combination of keys, cutting down on typing errors when entering programs.

The earlier Sinclair peripherals for this machine have white cases (including the rare white PSU and white 3K RAM pack), although when the later Sinclair ZX81 was released, Sinclair adopted black cased peripherals with white writing for the ZX80.

Later upgrades included a new 8K ROM to convert the machine to a Sinclair ZX81 (with an updated keyboard overlay to show the additonal ZX81 commands) and a 16K RAM pack.

There are also pictures on Rick Dickinson's website of a clear plastic Sinclair ZX80 computer which must be the rarest version of this computer ever conceived.

Finally, some clones were also made, including the MicroAce in the USA and the Brazilian Microdigital TK82.

Support for the Sinclair ZX80 continues through the English ZX80/ZX81 forums