I was dimly aware of it at the time, but still it’s just amazing how little of the British computing scene of the 1980s made it to the US. Mostly, I suspect it was down to the different analog video standards, and both American and British designers misusing the video signal for a clock. If something like analog VGA had existed eight years earlier, PAL vs. NTSC could have been a non-issue.
2 Likes
Good ol’ Dom, and he’s bang on.
Clive, you glorious mad bastard, so long. You fostered a generation of bedtime coders without who, the gaming industry wouldn’t be what it is today.
Without you, there would be or have been no Rare; no Codemasters; no Bullfrog / Lionhead; no XCOM; no Football Manager; no Team 17; no Rock Star; no Psygnosis.
For my generation of Brit geeks, I don’t think anyone has been more influential.
9 Likes
I think about this all the time!
My working hypothesis is that the same things that made personal computing so explosive in the UK in the early 1980s made it too local to travel well.
Specifically, Sir Clive et al were meeting a very specific demand:
• a working/lower middle class turned onto computers
• in a particularly intense way cultivated by a national broadcaster
• on a tiny incredibly densely populated island with easy retail distribution and then able to manufacture the machines
• that’s fairly prosperous but with culturally-bound (and also plainly economic) limits on consumer spending compared to the US
Which resulted in really successful machines there but nothing that would really fly in the US. Or even lead to the kind of deep-pocketed and locked-in “fleet” purchases that businesses would make, which put computer companies on a secure footing.
So instead you have these 8-bits that were huge and led to some incredible long-reaching R&D, but the entrepreneurs who did it couldn’t even figure out how to make credible 16-bit follow-ups, let alone sell them.
And they still had to compete with US-built computers that hit the same notes, especially the C64.
Alan “Amstrad” Sugar was probably the actual smartest guy in the room, in the sense that his 8-bit machines were philosophically somewhat Mac-like (they just work and come with everything you need) and more profitable in the long run than Sinclair’s. But Amstrads were always technically obsolete the day they came out and he was clued-in enough to focus on IBM compatibles as soon as the 8-bit era faded. Which isn’t a very “inspiring” story.
10 Likes
I guess this explains why my memories of the Sinclair are so different than everyone else’s. I mean I had fun toying around with a neighbor’s but I had been using an Apple II and I was seriously concerned that this little thing was so shitty it was going to hinder home computer adoption. I’m still a little amazed to hear people say it got them into programming rather than scaring them off.
1 Like
A Timex/Sinclair ZX81 was my first computer. They weren’t marketed very well in the US, mine was purchased from an ad in some early computer magazine. My parents were disappointed when I realized 1K was not enough RAM and explained the 16K expansion would be necessary. (The ZX81 cost $150 but the expansion was $200, as I recall.) I wrote a game for it and actually signed a publishing contract, but the Spectrum came out before it was published. I was asked to port my game, but by that time I’d bought a used Commodore VIC-20 from a friend and was teaching myself assembler. Still, I’ve never forgotten the excitement I had learning to program that little slab of black plastic.
5 Likes
Respect to Sir Clive.
My first job ever was programming the Spectrum, so I owe him one.
7 Likes
To some degree. But realize that both the ZX-81 and Spectrum did have US releases using NTSC (under the Timex-Sinclair label), but the US market was pretty crowded. Also, the Timex Sinclair 2068 (the US Spectrum) was hobbled with incompatibilities.
2 Likes
Like so many others here, the Timex/Sinclair 1000 was my first computer, with a 16k RAM expansion. I had to use it on evenings when my wife worked, since we had only a single TV. I loved it, but not as much as the Commodore 64 I replaced it with a year later.
The most impressive Sinclair computer for me was the Cambridge Z88 laptop, Sir Clive’s last computer, I got when an attorney I worked for decided it wasn’t really what he wanted. I did a considerable amount of writing on that little beast, and the built-in Pipedream software (word processor, spreadsheet, database all in one) was pretty impressive for the day.
1 Like
I think you’re right that a blend of cheapness and WHSmith was the secret (prawn cocktail) sauce for the UK 80s computer scene. Sinclair computers were priced such that for a lot of families the purchase could be driven by the kids, and there was a thriving ecosystem of kid-affordable magazines with program listings and tapes on the cover. Having a ZX81 or Spectrum was kind of like having a Walkman – not everyone at school had one, but you certainly didn’t have to join a special club to know people who did.
When we moved to the US in 1989, I remember that (1) there weren’t that sort of magazines, and (2) while the kids who had computers had better computers, it was more of a nerd thing because, by the same token, this was a grown-up appliance that your parents decided to buy, which obviously made it less appealing if you were at all cool. That Walkman-type niche was more filled with NES and Master System consoles; I’d never seen one of those on Garbage Island at the time. There, again, the games were far better but there was no hope of writing console games.
I think what SCS tapped into was that a lot of people (especially in Britain) are excited by new things but averse to pretension, and would rather engage with new technology in a slightly crap, not entirely serious form. And he really did push the envelope of cheapness.
It’s almost forgotten that the British micro industry did make serious computers too, so effective was Sinclair at defining the scene. Although, I guess anyone who invested in Acorn and held onto that stock for 30 years probably feels OK about it too.
10 Likes
Not just Brits. The first computer this Australian bought was a Spectrum ZX81.
I STILL hate those f*cking membrane keyboards!!!
4 Likes
The only thing I have to add to this very important point is the class angle. No-one in the UK but doctors and lawyers were buying Apple IIs in 1981. They were £995. But pit miners and paperboys were buying £125 ZX Spectrums in 1982.
That UK price of £995, in 1980s US dollars, would have been about $2300 or so. But in the U.S., I think the Apple II was about $1,300—much more affordable to everyday middle class folks. And Americans were a little more well-off, then as now: a per capita income of about $13k compared to one of about $10k in the UK.
So you see how everything is broadly the same, but tipping points of affordability that really mattered and made a huge difference in who got what computers and when. The US developed a culture of personal computing centered on prosperous middle-class families and higher eduction. The UK developed a culture of personal computing centered on aspirational working class families and secondary education.
14 Likes
One of the secret and very British/Commonwealth aspects of the 8-bit computer thing, especially in terms of nostalgia, is how objectively terrible most of the games were.
1 Like
Certainly he invented a pocket calculator. By the time the Executive came out there were several Japanese pocket calculators out there. (That said, the thinness of the Sinclair one was a an engineering marvel.)
5 Likes
When I got my Spectrum +2 in the mid 80s I was the first person in my class at primary school to have any kind of computer at home. A friend got a C64 a few years later but by that time people with more money were buying Amigas and Atari STs. Knowing which relatives knew someone you could give a c60 cassette to and get it back full of games was important in those poorer areas.
My Spectrum lasted until the mid 90s, when the cat terminally pulled the power cable out destroying the PCB in the process. It was replaced with an overpriced/underspecced 386 PC that could just about run Doom.
5 Likes
Some real ingenuity here.
http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simulator.html
3 Likes
2 Likes
I had a ZX81 AND a Sinclair pocket TV which had the most atrocious battery life. It used weird lipo batteries that were flat squares a bit bigger than a floppy disk and cost ten nineteen eighties pounds. It permanently used an adapter and a wall wart after the first battery died.
1 Like
Oh, also, for folks interested in the Sinclair Research story and that whole era, there’s this rather good (dunno how accurate) dramatisation from the BBC:
2 Likes
I got the ZX-81 in kit form, extended it to 64k (kit). I was going to add a serial port, but didn’t. It was a valuable lesson in when stop pushing a design well-past its sweet spot. (I still get twinges. “Hey, my Palm IIIe is a 16 MHz 68000 with an unused SCI port and I have a 16G SD card that I’m not using…”)
Oh, and I studied all the Z80 tricks they were using to make it work. “An IN instruction outputs the A register on the high address lines? Weird, but cool.”
6 Likes
