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Slothie · 30th Jun 2019, 9:00 pm

Given that the MK14 issue 1 came out in 1977 and the ZX80 came out in 1980 I imagine any uogrades or further perripherals that SOC may have planned for the MK14 were canned in favour of the ZX80 which was a superior prospect for volume sales than the MK14. The Z80 processor had just dropped in price due to its widescale adoption in S100 machines, and even without the ZX81's ULA the chip count was only a little higher than the MK14!
While, from our perspective, it is a shame that SOC didn't produce the RAM upgrades, NIBL, ASCII keyboard etc it was clearly a wise decision because in one year of production before the arrival of the ZX81 it easily sold more than twice the number of units than the MK14 did in 3 years.
And then SOC/Sinclair took over the world with the Spectrum and looked unstoppable untill they produced the QL and... well the rest is history!!

30th Jun 2019, 9:00 pm	#212
Slothie Octode Join Date: Apr 2018 Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK. Posts: 1,287	Re: MK14 schematic revisions Given that the MK14 issue 1 came out in 1977 and the ZX80 came out in 1980 I imagine any uogrades or further perripherals that SOC may have planned for the MK14 were canned in favour of the ZX80 which was a superior prospect for volume sales than the MK14. The Z80 processor had just dropped in price due to its widescale adoption in S100 machines, and even without the ZX81's ULA the chip count was only a little higher than the MK14! While, from our perspective, it is a shame that SOC didn't produce the RAM upgrades, NIBL, ASCII keyboard etc it was clearly a wise decision because in one year of production before the arrival of the ZX81 it easily sold more than twice the number of units than the MK14 did in 3 years. And then SOC/Sinclair took over the world with the Spectrum and looked unstoppable untill they produced the QL and... well the rest is history!!