The Century Computer Programming Course
A hardback programming manual at £9.95 — nearly a third of a Spectrum's own price — that covers the ZX81 and the Spectrum side by side rather than picking one.
Make and Program Your Own Robots
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£2.95 bought you a genuinely unusual proposition in 1985: a children's paperback that wasn't just BASIC listings to type in, but a guide to physically building small motorised robots — wheeled rigs and simple arms, built from Meccano-style parts and cheap motors — and then controlling them from a Spectrum program. The cover photo isn't false advertising; the book genuinely walks through both halves of that equation side by side.
That control side leans on the Datel Robotek interface, the same official add-on this site has a recreated PCB for. The book supplies the BASIC programs that drive it — forward, reverse, turn, stop, sequences of moves — while the mechanical half covers building the robot itself out of parts a mid-1980s kid could plausibly get hold of. It's a package deal: without Robotek (or a compatible recreation) the software half doesn't have anything to plug into.
Verdict
It's very much a book of its moment — short, cheaply printed, aimed squarely at kids rather than hobbyists chasing precision — but that's not a criticism so much as a description. For what it is, a hands-on, build-something introduction to robotics pitched at exactly the intersection of Lego, Meccano, and Sinclair BASIC that a lot of 1985 households already lived at, it holds up as a genuinely charming artefact, and it's still the primary reference for anyone building or recreating a Robotek interface today.
Score breakdown
Play & download
- Make and Program Your Own Robots at Spectrum Computing — bibliographic entry, cover scan, and a downloadable PDF of the full book.
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