Conclusions

Summary

The subject of our study was the ZX Spectrum platform in light of the research and theories on platforms proposed by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. When writing a computer monograph, we were interested not only in the technical specification of the equipment, but first and foremost in the cultural aspect surrounding the object. In this sense, our monograph differs from many technical books devoted to the computer. We have examined both the community of people identifying with the platform and the works created on it. We also proposed a narrative about the computer and its clones from the perspective of the demoscene, situated on the margins of the official history of the platform. We have limited it to the countries where the demoscene on the ZX Spectrum—Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia—has developed the most.

Our research was guided by the intuitions of media archeology, a discipline affirming the departure from objective, standardizing and chronological approaches. We have therefore tried to build a computer micro-history that will allow us to write our own narrative, based on our logic and to establish unofficial beginnings. In this perspective, we agree with Siegfried Zielinski that “order is a sign of lack, not excess.” We propose an approach that addresses the peculiarities and atypical story of the ZX Spectrum. We present a story that is not taken up by media historians or theoreticians and does not fit into the linear understanding of computer development. The understanding of “an-archeology of media” described by Zieliński is for this reason shared by us:

The main rule underlying my thinking became the conviction that there are no common, single-origin, beginnings, that is why I prefer to say that I am undertaking the “an-archeology of media” instead of “archeology of media.” An-archeology stands in opposition to the idea of linear development.

Therefore, our narrative eludes scientific standardization as well as uniform academic argumentation (we give voice to the surveyed members of the community), and it constructs a history of the computer not from the perspective of the producer but the sceners who took over the platform (without the knowledge and consent of the producer) for creative purposes.