Get a Raspberry Pi - the spiritual successor to the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro
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Sir Clive Sinclair has died
- Thread starter yaxomoxay
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I got it for a while, it was somewhat funGet a Raspberry Pi - the spiritual successor to the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro
I'll pass on that!! (Plus I do have a photocopy of it somewhere!)Maybe i should put my factory original ZX Spectrum 48k repair/service manual on ebay and ask $1 million for it hehehe
Sir Clive Sinclair was a visonary, Bill Gates was not. Sir Clive's passion was to bring an affordable computer to the masses, Gates passion was to just make money. As for Jobs and Apple shaping the look and feel of modern computing, it was the likes of Sir Clive Sinclair (Sinclair Research), Alan Sugar (Amstrad), Chris Curry & Hermann Hauser (Acorn Computers), Jack Tramiel and Manfred Kapp (Commodore) in my opinion who shaped the look and feel of modern computing because all of them built affordable computers, computers being at the time very expensive which only a select few could afford. When those people and their companies came along, suddenly a huge majority of households around the world could afford a computer. These computers shaped the lives and minds of those using them, suddenly there was masses of ideas being floated around as to what could be achieved now and what could be achieved in the future. People wanted to program their own games and other types of software, people wanted to make hardware modifications to improve their computer and any peripherals they had with it.
Tape drives, floppy drives, hard drives, joysticks, light pens, computer mice, modems and much much more....all of this got the creative spark in those that were using computers made by one of those companies. It is the minds of those that owned those computers that shapped modern computing, not Jobs/Apple
A lot of us in the U.K. who are into computers owe everything to this man. My older brother used his paper round money to buy a zx81. I remember him bringing it home and I was like 5 or 6 and was mesmerised by the thing. I suppose I just wanted to do what my big brother was doing. i Remember 3d monster maze! Then when he got a spectrum, manic miner, jet set Willy etc… what an amazing time!
unlike nowadays when you need to configure npm or some other massive thing to just get Into coding, back then it was the first thing you saw when you turned the machine on. You could start doing things straight away. That was the magic of computers back then. It was more than something you bought software for. It was like getting a guitar vs listening to someone play guitar. You get a guitar And it was fairly useless if you didn’t learn to play it. Same with home computers then for most of us.
the other thing was learning how to make your own games by typing in code from magazines. That’s how so many people started software houses etc.. magical times. RIP Sir Clive!
and let us not forget the perils of that wobbly ram pack!!!
unlike nowadays when you need to configure npm or some other massive thing to just get Into coding, back then it was the first thing you saw when you turned the machine on. You could start doing things straight away. That was the magic of computers back then. It was more than something you bought software for. It was like getting a guitar vs listening to someone play guitar. You get a guitar And it was fairly useless if you didn’t learn to play it. Same with home computers then for most of us.
the other thing was learning how to make your own games by typing in code from magazines. That’s how so many people started software houses etc.. magical times. RIP Sir Clive!
and let us not forget the perils of that wobbly ram pack!!!
This was my point. Sinclair wasted resources trying to be an Acorn me too, and Acorn wasted resources trying to be a Sinclair me too. One company, (them merged), could have produced a basic home computer, based around the BBC, and a better spec machine (which is what Acorn should have done rather than produce the disappointing Electron), utilising their tube system, allowing you to chose the processor or processors you wanted to use. Acorn had many excellent products in development. With some input from Sinclair and his staff, (cost cutting etc), it could have been a very successful company.
I remember going to a computer fair as a kid in, I believe, 1983 and they had quite a few weird and wonderful little computers.
I had the most fun with the Jupiter Ace, which used Forth as its language rather than Basic.
There was also the NewBrain which, I didn't know at the time, was only in prototype form and was meant to be the BBC's computer before they went with the Acorn. The NewBrain was cool as it had a small 16-character VF display at the top of the case. Clive Sinclair was involved with that too, but seemed to realise it wasn't going to be commercially viable and concentrated on the ZX80/81 instead.
I had the most fun with the Jupiter Ace, which used Forth as its language rather than Basic.
There was also the NewBrain which, I didn't know at the time, was only in prototype form and was meant to be the BBC's computer before they went with the Acorn. The NewBrain was cool as it had a small 16-character VF display at the top of the case. Clive Sinclair was involved with that too, but seemed to realise it wasn't going to be commercially viable and concentrated on the ZX80/81 instead.
I knew his audio inventions long before I got into computers, I remember getting a small audio mixer that had a wooden box, cheap but decent.
I think you're short-changing Apple a bit there - the Apple II was one of the first microcomputers that you could buy, take home, plug in and use if you didn't own a soldering iron and a terminal scoured from an amateur radio fair (ISTR it was the first, but by a matter of months and very closely followed by the likes of the PET and TRS-80). Those machines weren't affordable in the way Sinclair products were, but they were vastly cheaper than anything that had gone before, and within the reach of schools and small businesses.... and, yeah, the Mac cost a small fortune - but it introduced ideas from the Xerox Star workstation that cost a not-so-small fortune (if/when Xerox bothered to try and sell one), along with the neat trick of networking a laser printer between multiple Macs so that small businesses/workgroups could afford them. Popularising the GUI, WYSIWYG wordprocessing and DTP is a pretty major contribution.
None of that detracts from what Sinclair, Commodore, Acorn, Amstrad et. al. did to, in particular, get kids into computing - but Apple were pretty important too (plus, of course, Kildall and the CP/M people, and many software innovators from the 70s and 80s...).
The Xerox PARC labs probably still win the "group with the best claim to have invented personal computing" prize, though, even if they totally failed to turn it into product.
The Electron was a basic home computer based around the BBC, and Acorn did a completely competent job of implementing that brief without any help from Sinclair.
The problem was that the selling point of the BBC Micro was a veritable Swiss Army Knife of a computer loaded with chips for interfacing, video, sound, teletext emulation, and turning it into a "basic home computer" threw that away and broke compatibility with the BBC (simply removing the dedicated Teletext chip was enough to do that).
There wasn't some clever compromise between the BBC Micro and Spectrum to be found - one had been built up to a spec, the other built down to a price. Try, and you'd have got something that was more expensive than a Spectrum but lacked the versatility of the BBC.
There are fundamental reasons why the BBC and Spectrum were different horses for different courses - For example, the BBC had (for the time) very high resolution fully-bitmapped graphics that were great for graphs, tables, diagrams etc. but guzzled RAM and had limited colours. The Spectrum had a low-res graphics mode that could only display 2 out of 15 colours in each 8x8 block - which saves a ton of RAM, speeds up processing and turns out to be the sweet spot for writing a lot of colourful arcade games that would be difficult on the BBC (the BBC did better with monochrome high-res wireframe games like Elite). 5 years later, fully bitmapped 256+ colour graphics would be cheap as chips, so the difference went away. In 1982, you paid your money and took your choice.
I was coming across BBC in many uses for well into the 90's at many sites. Basically monitoring and reporting systems and usually hooked up to a dot matrix. (didn't know a lot about them and not had the course so left well alone).
Wouldn't mind betting they were stuffed in the cupboard just in case when superceded.
Edit. Thinking about it, company would have had asset db and logged and stickers the kit. No one would have done anything with it regards disposal unless the order from up on high. Wonder how many are still in squirrel stores.
Wouldn't mind betting they were stuffed in the cupboard just in case when superceded.
Edit. Thinking about it, company would have had asset db and logged and stickers the kit. No one would have done anything with it regards disposal unless the order from up on high. Wonder how many are still in squirrel stores.
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I’ve got one in my cupboard... probably have to change all the capacitors to get it running.
The Acorn vs. Sinclair war was fun at the time, but a bit sad, really: the BBC cost £400, the Spectrum £130... and they were both bargains.
The BBC was “better” because it had £270 worth of extra bits in it, making it suitable for everything from small business to light industrial control. It filled a gap in the UK market that the Apple II had priced itself out of (£1000+ and the BBC was a newer, better, faster design).
The Spectrum was seen as “just” a games machine... but it was “just” a games machine that people could afford and, maybe, learn to write their own games. Many did, and that’s something that, possibly, Sinclair should have felt more pride over.
Get a Raspberry Pi - the spiritual successor to the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro
I agree, but the learning curve is steeper than the 8-bit micros. That is a large part of the current retro computing appeal: simplicity. Getting your head around the OS/networking/tools/integrated devices on a Pi requires a commitment beyond casual tinkerers.
Dragon acquired and used at the folks, who had a TV. But is was short while after I got the Amstrad. I didn't have a TV for a number of years.
Edit. I was not living at home either.
Again, the main problem, too much competition, with incompatible devices, Acorn with their Spectrum rival the Electron and Sinclair with their BBC rival the QL. Both products would have been a huge R&D investment, plus the huge investment in inventory these companies made, to produce and stock devices the public didnt want.
Their sales figures were boosted, by dumping their products at crazy cheap prices, Dixons bought most of their stock for a song. I doubt they sold many at their original RRP.