The British Micro Behemoth

In August 1980 I was working as a lab technician in a secondary school and was spending my spare time observing variable starts with binoculars and analysing the results with my brother's pocket calculator. I used to regularly drop in on the local library on my way home to read New Scientist. One day I noticed an advert for the Sinclair ZX80.

And all of a sudden, I realised that you could have a computer at home. This had never occurred to me before seeing that advert.

I immediately bought one, followed by a small portable television, so I didn't have to use the family television as a monitor. I wrote several simple programs to parse and reduce my variable star observations but I fairly quickly outgrew the ZX80's limitations, and then upgraded to a 'proper' microcomputer, a Sharp MZ80k.

Several years later, I felt confident enough to switch my career over to computing and took an MSc course at Newcastle.

Several years after that, my mother told me that her Women's Institute branch had held an 'Antiques of the Future' competition and that she had taken along my long-neglected ZX80 and won first prize with it.

My parents took us on a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Ireland from Zimbabwe. My cousin had a ZX-80. I think he's a very big shot in Tesco now and I'm just a programmer.

It was the first computer I ever saw. 1kb memory. Some game or other was made of black boxes on a white background.

Thereafter I never owned a Sinclair machine but spent hours having the privilege of watching friends or relatives play theirs to "show me how to do it." :-D I got the occasional chance to help type in a long program from some magazine.

All those people went on to do other jobs but I became a programmer much later when my family's fortunes changed and we got .... an Amstrad PC 1640. :-) I missed out on years of learning but I made up for it quite fast. Many years later when the 1640 was so old it was ridiculous, I got my parents to fork up for a generic 386 clone. I never ran Windows 95. I never ran Win NT or 2k. I got 21 5-inch floppy disks from my pal in South Africa with Slackware Linux 0.99 and that was my future course for the next 30 something years.

Sinclair was the UK's Steve Jobs - transformative products at super-cheap prices, which kicked off an entire industry.

The shared differentiator was industrial design. Sinclair spent a small fortune on making products look distinctive. The most successful designs (ZX81, Spectrum, QL) were done by Rick Dickinson, but you can already see it in the sleek black plastic Sinclair Executive and the flamboyantly gold plated Sovereign from the 70s.

All of these products were designed to look exciting and futuristic.

The internals were penny-pinched to a ridiculous extent, and were usually flawed and often not all that functional.

But the externals won design awards and caught the imagination of ordinary non-technical users, because they looked like nothing else on sale at the time.

I got started programming with a borrowed ZX-81. It was magical, and also absolutely terrible. You could only load and save via tape, which took ages. If I recall correctly, both the power cord and the giant rectangular 16K RAM expansion we were lucky enough to have plugged into the back of the computer could completely reset it if accidentally brushed against.

Books of programs you could type in had a starburst with "1K" in it for those smaller programs that would fit in the limited default RAM. Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTNlMwTi1PTlVxc2M...

My uncle would always come up with fun ideas. I remember after we typed in a "put in the angle and velocity and try to shoot a cannonball over the mountain to hit a target", him sitting there and eventually figuring out the necessary parameters to have the projectile land on the target in a single step.

The ZX Spectrum (also borrowed or secondhand) we had next was a huge improvement, although still only used tape. Somehow waiting half an hour for "Commando" or "Top Gun" to load from tape made the games seem all the sweeter.

When we finally got an (again borrowed) Apple II clone with a disk drive, we thought persistent storage was magical and enthusiastically ported the "High score" routine from one program we typed in to a bunch of others.

Actually, we didn't even have a real Apple II. It was a CV-777, although the fact that the chips in these pictures -- https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/npgkhr/cv777_canadi... -- don't all have Asian writing on them make me wonder if it was a clone of a clone or something.

Anyway, good times. Always fun to be reminded of a time when I was absolutely fearless: I remember writing an assembly routine on the ZX Spectrum by writing it out on paper, and hand-converting the Z80 opcodes by looking them up in the manual, and expecting it to work.

I don't think the article says so, but the QL was what got Torvalds started on the path to Linux.

I remember when I was working at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London in the mid 80s we bought one to see if it could be useful to us. After about 20 minutes we gave it a resounding "No!"

There are a lot of famous people who got their start in programming, game-development, and similar things from the ZX Spectrum in the UK.

A really iconic design and beautiful machine despite the limitations - or perhaps because of them.

My first contact with computing was a contemporary of the ZX80, the Grundy Newbrain (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundy_NewBrain), which my father used to repair. Primarily targetting the business market, it was a pretty powerful 'computer in a keyboard' like the Sinclairs, running a Zilog Z80 with 32KB(!) RAM in the base model, that could be expanded by adding another 64KB, which came in a box about the same size as the computer, and attached via a ribbon cable in the back. Another similar unit housed a disc controller and CP/M ROM, and daisy-chained off the other units using the same ribbon cable bus, allowing up to two 5.25" floppy drives to be attached. I had these three units stacked one on top of the other and it was like programming a shoe box.

A notable feature of one model was a 16-character vacuum fluorescent display built into the main unit, so you could in theory use it entirely without a separate screen, but more practically it was separately addressable and therefore presumably intended for displaying ancillary information.

Being a kid at the time I was very interested in gaming and I was lucky to have had quite a few including a great PacMan clone; one of the best was Peat: https://youtu.be/oGGjVMNTJlQ - water the plants, deal with the pests, harvest the carrots... fun times :-)

Had pre digital Sinclair op amp/transistor products. The reliability was awful, the instructions to build incomplete, massive mains hum on the stereo amp. Used it for years! (My dad built it, 3 transistor failures in construction from inadequate insulation. He was an EE and knew how to make stuff)

The calculators used firmware wired software loops and tables with fixed precision to do trig which introduced errors so inverting functions didn't return original input.

He was knighted under Thatcher. A lot of people felt he did not deserve it.

On the whole a mixed legacy. The path from Sinclair to Alan Suger suggests shonky UK entrepreneur boosting each other. Real innovation was in Ferranti, Marconi and GEC and of course what became ARM holdings and the wolfson institute. And Linn.

The ZX81 was my first contact with a computer - my parents bought one home just before Christmas one year. I must have been 7.

Learning how to program with the excellent manual was the first time I gained knowledge that me parents didn't have and it felt magical to control what was happening on the TV.

Of course, the ZX81 (1k!) was incredibly limited but that little box changed my life.

Spookily I was on that site that morning, reading his excellent history of Acorn (and ARM):

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses

The article is basically a short summary of this book: https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/UK-Books/The%20Sinclair...

Just a small detail, but Teignmouth is in Devon, i.e. the family didn't move from Devon to Teignmouth.

Assuming the snippet in the article was from Wikipedia, where it says: "He and his mother left London for safety to stay with an aunt in Devon, where they eventually moved to Teignmouth."

It means to say that they eventually moved to Teignmouth, Devon.