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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> The rush job was the UK launch of the ZX Spectrum 128, now known as the Toast Rack because of the lake heatsink bolted on the side.

The heat sink fins really add to the aesthetic, and that looks so cool for a small home computer in 1985, who could complain.

(The black NeXT cube wasn't for another few years, and it also cost a prohibitive sum for most homes.)

Would it even be legal now?

As a child I burned myself continuously on that mofo.

I was running that Z80 hard though :)

    o/~ played it till my fingers bled o/~

"Summer of '85"

    o/~ hacked it till my hand flesh grilled o/~

Oh, the days a computer could get away with just a heatsink instead of 20 fans...

The heatsink cools the LM7805 power regulator, not the CPU. In the original 48k Spectrum, the heatsink was internal.

And if you use a modern switch-mode replacement, you don’t need a heat sink at all.

I know some folks like to put small heat sinks on the ULA though.

Soviet clones had ULAs built from individual 74xx ics. No need for heatsinks!

Excellent! I need to mess around with them at some point.

looks at the Macbook Air she's typing this on now

Well, that's an outlier. Even the M2 Mac Mini I typed the previous post on has a fan.