Micro Men. Thursday 8 October, 9PM, BBC4

[McMurdo]

I dont know about the IC amp range, I thought plessey actually made them to Sinclair's spec. The Spectrum 48 of course used duff RAM chips to keep the cost down, (it was designed that way) and had an onboard link to deselect the faulty bank of ram within the ic. This sounds typical of Sinclair's entrepreneurial nature which made the brand so popular. It would be otherwise unaffordable!

[Tom_I]

Originally Posted by MichaelR

For my penneth worth it is a pity we do not have quite a few more Clive Sinclairs in the country at least he had a go.

But unfortunately he made the fundamental error of giving the buying public what he decided they wanted, not what they actually wanted, or indeed needed. In that respect his judgement was seriously flawed.

[evingar]

Not altogether a fair comment IMHO.

As technology moves on, sometimes markets are created that previously didn't exist. I used to work for a company that did precisely that (in the commercial arena) in the late 70s and early 80s - In a nut shell, they digitised the TV signal, using technology designed within the group of companies for entirely different purposes. People didn't know they wanted many of the products that flowed from this before hand, but once they were available, the market grew to enormous size.

I watched the film tonight. We need people like Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry like never before in this country. IMHO the only way we are going to get out of this economic mess is to forget about shuffling bits of paper around The City of London and start innovating new products at the leading edge of today's technology. These people are always likley to be "prickly" and make bad judgement sometimes, but it's the energy, the innovation and the raw will to succeed that is required.

An excellent film that really reflected the "flavour" of those times

[Studio263]

An interesting programme, how many historical errors did you spot? Here are mine:

1) In ths Sinclair offices at the start one of the junior engineers is carrying around a PCB that is clearly the main panel of a CRT computer monitor of very recent manufacture.
2) When Chris Curry (?) clears his desk his "moving out" box contains a prominent and similarly recent desk fan.
3) in the scene in the Acorn workshop where they are eating takeaway food one of the engineers in using test probes as chopsticks. These are of a type that I doubt were availalbe at the time.
4) When the BBC visit the Acorn offices (which are supposed to be in Cambridge) one can clearly see out of the window cabling and supports of the type typically used by the London Underground.
5) At the computer show where the Acorn Atom is launched the first computer you see is an Amstrad CPC 464(?), which came much later.
6) The white Sony KV-1400UB TV sets which you often see used as monitors would have still been white back then, not the horrid yellow colour in which they have now turned and in which they where shown.

[McMurdo]

how many historical errors did you spot

Splitting hairs a bit there!

The only one that got me confused were the CPC464s in the display consoles, I too thought they'd arrived later and so was perhaps a lapse in a programme that they surely must have known would be watched by enthusiasts!

Still, I was greatly entertained by this rare treat; I rememeber the beeb commanding serious respect from us Commodore and Spectrum users at school in the 80's; a beeb was an unaffordable aspiration to most!

[Patrick Dixon]

Originally Posted by evingar

I used to work for a company that did precisely that (in the commercial arena) in the late 70s and early 80s - In a nut shell, they digitised the TV signal, using technology designed within the group of companies for entirely different purposes. People didn't know they wanted many of the products that flowed from this before hand, but once they were available, the market grew to enormous size.

Quantel?

I enjoyed the programme and it's good to see a dramatisation with a business and technology basis, rather than the usual medical or cops and robbers stuff. It was obviously a dramatisation and some of the scenes were a bit unrealistically OTT, although the situations rang very true from my experience.

IMV innovation is not about asking people what they want - its about anticipating what they want - and in that respect I agree with what the Sinclair character said. Having said that, I reckon that with Sinclair and computers everything just came into line, and his cheapskate, corner-cutting engineering was the right thing at the right time.

Looking back on it, I think the failure is that the UK market is just too small for mass market manufacturers to launch sustainable world-beating companies, and there isn't really the infrastructure to support a UK Apple or a Microsoft. There obviously are successes - but in general US companies have it easy in establishing a critical mass with which to conquer the world.

All Thames TV staff were 'given' a BBC micro, and in the 3 years I was there mine never came out the box. I was far too busy playing with PDPs and getting the lab Apple 2e to work properly.

[McMurdo]

his cheapskate...

Sinclair?? Or the consumer?? Better computers like the Apple II were already in the marketplace and people couldn't afford them or coudn't justify the expense!

[paulsherwin]

The problem with the ZX80 and ZX81 was that they were too cheap. There's a limit to how much you can cut costs and still get a usable product, and Sinclair went too far with these. I bought a ZX81 in late 1980, supposedly as a research tool, and never managed to use it for anything except playing a few extremely primitive games and writing 3 line BASIC programs. The keyboard was as awful as everyone always says, and the 16k memory pack did keep falling off the back crashing the system.

I've yet to meet anyone who ever used a ZX80 or ZX81 for real work. On the other hand, the Acorn Atom was just usable so I reckon Curry pitched the technology about right.

One Sinclair product that was alluded to in the programme but nobody has mentioned here is the System 2000 stereo amp. This was actually a good performer by the standards of the day if you couldn't afford proper hifi like Quad and Leak. I had one in the early 70s and was very satisfied with it.

Paul

[McMurdo]

the System 2000 stereo amp.

I have one! I used it up 'till recently as the workshop audio monitor. It does sound good, it was given to me by my former boss in 1989 when I started at his company, so it had been built from the kit by a qualified engineer, and has performed faultlessly throughout. But there are signs of Sinclair's cost-cutting, for example stereo pots made out of ganged pcb-mounted trimmers.

I have a brand new brushed aluminium decal plate for it as well in its original brown Sinclair Radionics jiffy bag...in case I scratch the original one, and the full construction plans.

Maybe we should open a Sinclair thread!!

[Denis G4DWC]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

I've yet to meet anyone who ever used a ZX80 or ZX81 for real work.
Paul

I actually did......

I used to visit a very nice Restaurant around 1993 called the Thatched House in the small village of Sulgrave:- http://www.sulgrave.org/

The owner used a ZX81 and the small printer to print out the customers Bills. He was quite proud of it and reckoned it was the only one used for a business purpose in England.
Sadly the place closed quite a few years ago and is now just a private home. It was about 100 yards further down the road from the Star Public house.

Denis

[llama]

I never had the external memory pack for my ZX81 having been warned off. However, I did stack up several static RAM chips (2002 ?) and with a bit of address decoding got a useful amount of RAM internally.
Graham

[julie_m]

After a few bad experiences with the Sinclair RAM expansion, I replaced mine with a Memotech one. This was a better design, shaped to fit snugly against the ZX81 case and with strips of velcro tape to attach it securely.

[Brian R Pateman]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

I've yet to meet anyone who ever used a ZX80 or ZX81 for real work. On the other hand, the Acorn Atom was just usable so I reckon Curry pitched the technology about right.

Paul

I built a climate control system for a friend's glasshouses which used a ZX81. I have to admit that we took it out of the case and it was running FORTH but it managed to operate reliably for 15 years until it was replaced by a much more sophisticated (and expensive) PLC system.

I agree with the comments regarding the system 2000 amplifier - one of the best around for the price.

[richrussell]

I never had any problems with the Sinclair 16K rampack on my ZX81. A big blob of Blu-tac did the trick, and held it securely for a few years.

I still have the ZX81, and it still works - though the membrane ribbon cable to the keyboard appears to have shattered with age. I suspect if I'm careful I might be able to bridge the broken bit and restore it to life.

My local radio controlled car racing club used a ZX81 with it's shiny thermal printer to record lap times. They upgraded after a few months to a Spectrum, and this did the job well into the 1990s.

[Rob_Lewis]

I worked for Acorn in the early 'eighties in a factory in South Wales that produced both BBC A and B models alongside "motherboards" for the Sinclair ZX. If an Acorn board failed the last production test back it went for the problem to be diagnosed and fixed. If a Sinclair board failed it went in the bin.

[McMurdo]

If a Sinclair board failed it went in the bin.

You must have had an off-day..my first ZX Spectrum didn't work from new!

[evingar]

Originally Posted by McMurdo

You must have had an off-day..my first ZX Spectrum didn't work from new!

Pointing that out to Sinclair would probably have got you beaten over the head with a rolled newspaper.

[Paul Stenning]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

I've yet to meet anyone who ever used a ZX80 or ZX81 for real work. On the other hand, the Acorn Atom was just usable so I reckon Curry pitched the technology about right.

I had a BBC-B (with floppy disk drive, Epson dot matrix printer and high resolution green-screen mono monitor) for several years and did a lot of real work with it. It only fell into disuse in the early 90s when I inherited a second hand 286 PC-AT clone.

I had a ZX81 before that (it was my first PC) which I fitted into a case containing a better keyboard. I had a third-party RAM pack of some description which fitted onto the ZX81 board reliably and was also mounted inside the keyboard case somehow. I also added a little circuit from a magazine of the time which inverted the video giving white text on black (switch selectable) which was more comfortable on the eyes with the cheap Ferguson mono telly.

I learnt to program in basic on the thing and used it for typing cassette case labels (the thermal printer paper was exactly the right width) but that's about as close to real work it did.

[McMurdo]

Whilst studying for 'o' level Computer Studies, (on the Research Machines 480Z) our teacher announced she'd bought a BBC B for home and there were 'oohs' and 'aahs' all round the classroom. It was considered home-computer nirvana.

[evingar]

I bought a BBC B just after I started work. It was a formidable outlay considering I was only on £1,600 PA at the time.

I too learned to program Basic on it - I later bought a Pascal programming environment (ROM based), as that was the language we used at work, finally migrating to assembler in association with some home built hardware.

I used the machine right though the 80s. It served me well when I went to Polytechnic to study Economics as a mature student. The essays generally has a limit of 1500 words, the BBC disciplined this well, becuase the RAM wouldn't hold much more than that as a single file. The thing failed only once. The colours failed one after the other, then finally it wouldn't boot up at all. ISTR it was a video driver IC with a heat sink mounted on it - It also provided a system clock. The BBC is still in the loft - must drag it down at some point to see if it still works.