Leningrad ZX Spectrum construction project PT. 0 & a little bit too much about me

Lets begin at the beginning; once upon a time a little C//D was very into computers but was quickly becoming frustrated with how complex and convoluted modern ones were, they just wanted to find out what's going on but no one seemed to know the answer! They didn't even care that they didn't! Every step of the way it was someone else's job to know the next piece and no one ever bothered to put all the pieces together (I have since learned this would be a nearly impossible task).

My fascination with knowing the complex answer to a simple questions lead me deeper and deeper, I messed around with linux for a while but found it unsatisfying so I moved onto more simple machines, I toyed with Arduinos for a while but found them unsatisfying too, this is where the humble 8 bit microcomputer. But even those often used the little black boxes of special purpose chips, ULAs, video drivers and the likes. The functions of which could be read about but never witnessed. This was a big turn off for me, as a guy that likes to make things and has strong opinions on the right to repair. How am I meant to build something like that, and how am I meant to rebuild it when it breaks?

This led me to the Homebrew computer scene, your NASCOMS, Compukits, KIMS and so on. I looked into trying to acquire one of these but yeah, they were way beyond my paygrade as a teen and they haven't got any cheaper. Although they were simple enough to understand with a bit of studying I still felt like they were missing something. They still had the holdover idea from the birth of microcomputing, they were scientific novelties and teaching aids, not for you average person and definitely not being build by them. They were failing in their goal of making computing accessible at the first hurdle. So I fell into off the shelf computers. 

 Around this time I was gifted a BBC micro, the computer that is largely responsible for a generation of microcomputer users in my country. I was impressed with how much fun basic was, sure it wasn't the bare metal experience I had come to idolise but it seemed to give me what I was looking for. The fact everything was laid out in front of me and not shrouded in layers of abstraction enthralled me and the prospect of expansion made the possibilities seem limitless. Maybe off the shelf computers weren't so bad? As a teen with a short attention span I was hooked. But of course the desire to dig deeper still lurked...
Somewhere around then I found out about the ZX Spectrum, of course i’d seen it mentioned but never really looked into it as it wasn't as 'serious' as the other computers I was exploring, it was built to a price point with a stripped back architecture full of compromises and was known for being unreliable. But it was cheap so it sold well, at least that's how I looked at it when I was younger and dumber. But this simplicity led to an appeal I hadn't seen talked about in the UK communities: cloning of the ZX Spectrum in the soviet union. This was a revolution to me. Every city seemed to have its own variant and each variant did the same thing in different ways. The sheer creativity poured into these clones blew me away. What really got me obsessed was that some variants were sold as kits or as assembled units, and they were almost completely built from integrated circuits that were equivalent to our humble SN74 series. 

This was what I'd been looking for, a computer that was DIY friendly, comprehensible and still usable by your average person, simplicity and complexity combined. Sure they were much more primitive computers than some more powerful machines but their simplicity was versatility in disguise. People did amazing things with the most rudimentary of machines, ram expansion, disk interfaces, sound cards and all sorts of other madness (seriously, some of the stuff people did on nemo bus is ridiculous, but is a bit outside of my design ethos). I was hooked and had to get myself involved but didnt know how. 

By now several years of microcomputer fixation had passed, I got myself a ZX spectrum in a fuller keyboard from ebay with the intention of modifying it in the soviet spirit, beta disk and all. But there was a problem, it was an Issue 1, an extremely rare bit of kit with its own problems. That and I was heading to university. Years passed, yaya yada, I dropped out, did some living and failed at some things, then I started to become interested in computers again, but my meagre collection was miles away and I wanted to do it properly this time. So I found a kit to build a Leningrad, complete with soviet ICs and started building. It never worked the first time and I was in a rough patch anyways, plus it did not align with my goals at the time so it sat in the RIP (rest in pieces) box for a few more years, until very recently. But that is a story for another time.