Despite quickly becoming obsolete, the early ZX computers (ZX80 and ZX81) were a marvel of cost-benefit at the time. Most people had no access to computing of any kind... The difference between no computing and a machine that can perform thousands of operations per second is massive.
Yeah, let's go back to the ZX80 (or 81) because we can all afford 1kb RAM (some of use might even get the 16kb extension).
Despite quickly becoming obsolete, the early ZX computers (ZX80 and ZX81) were a marvel of cost-benefit at the time. Most people had no access to computing of any kind... The difference between no computing and a machine that can perform thousands of operations per second is massive.
This book
https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...
talks about how to build homebrew video systems similar to the ZX80.