Back in early 1980s digital video was not even a dream, it simply was not present in any vocabulary. Words like MPEG, AVI, QuickTime have not been coined yet as their future creators were busy at work on much simpler things, like playing a Barbarian game on one of the 8-bit computers of the era, and computers themselves were still actually made in places like United Kingdom.

Made in United Kingdom

 Little did game players know that some of those machines already utilized some fundamental principles on which video compression technologies are based today …

ZX Spectrum, the legend that brought a “Sir” title to its creator, Sir Clive Sinclair! This machine that has become first “computer for the masses” in Europe, utilized some of the simple yet far-reaching principles that made it such a success. By far the most important was its amazingly fast and colorful video display that outshined many other displays of the time and led to appearance of vast library of, yes, games! All that despite being based on the relatively slow processor - 4 MHz 8-bit Z80. How it become possible to bring together the three qualities of the graphics system that tend to be mutually exclusive: colors, resolution, speed? The same general principle that is used today in many video compression schemes, including MPEG-1, although such connection is not very apparent at the cursory glance at the ZX Spectrum architecture, design and programming.

We, however, will take a closer look on these pages.

To be continued…