World of Spectrum is a website devoted to cataloging and archiving material for the ZX Spectrum home computer popular in the 1980s, and has been officially endorsed by Amstrad which holds the rights to the ZX Spectrum brand. It was started by Martijn van der Heide in 1995 as a website dedicated to hosting Spectrum games, but grew into hosting anything and everything that was remotely connected to the ZX Spectrum.
The site contains an extensive database of information about games, utilities, books, hardware, magazines, adverts and relevant companies. In December 2005 Retro Gamer wrote "World of Spectrum is not just the best Speccy site on the Web, but arguably the best retro resource full stop." From the FAQ: "'The WoS is the world's biggest and most popular archive of Spectrum related material." As of July 2012, that catalogue includes 24,000 software titles, 1000 hardware items, 1,500 books and more than 350,000 references, which can be accessed using a custom built search engine Sinclair Infoseek. The collection of Spectrum related magazines includes CRASH, Sinclair User, and Your Sinclair, scanned page-by-page.
One of the website's goals is to obtain distribution permission from copyright holders of the software kept in its archives, and has received hundreds of permissions to date. In 2003 the Interactive Digital Software Association filed a complaint against the site for copyright infringement, but this was later retracted.
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