The British Micro Behemoth | Hacker News Reader

The British Micro Behemoth

abortretry.fail

145 pointsrbanffy76 comments

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.

I used a Sharp MZ-80K (in fact I still have one and it works, started it a couple of days ago). It was a good, all-in-one machine with, as was common at the time, a nasty keyboard. I wrote this post about the MZ-80K 16 years ago(!) and that same machine is still going strong: https://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-ol...

I really love the design of thew MZ-80 family. Personally, I'm looking for one with 80 columns mode, but they are somewhat elusive to find.

Trying to run CP/M?

Of course!

I bought one when K-Mart blew them out for $30. I used it to compute loudspeaker response curves based on an equation that I found in a book. I remember that I couldn't get the cassette interface working, so I simply begged the family not to unplug it.

What were you measuring with binoculars? Did it have a filar micrometer?

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.

>21 5-inch floppy disks from my pal in South Africa with Slackware Linux 0.99

Cool! Closest I got to that was trying and failing to install S.u.S.E. (as it was called) 5.2ish from downloaded 3.5" floppy images. Never heard of Linux on 5.25" disks until now. A friend had a 5.25" drive in his computer for laughs until around 2010.

Now I want to rock up at work and plug in an external diskette drive into my macbook and move code around that way. Just rock up to the other team with a diskette, versions 1, 2, 3, final and final-final crossed out, ask "Hey can you do a quick review for this?" I'm gonna see if there's anything like that. I'm sure I have my old diskettes I used for school files somewhere still (that would be 2002-3, not long after I got my first USB stick). I can see they still sell USB diskette drives.

I often joke with people that I possibly have the last working Pentium MMX in the universe under my home desk. That thing has 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disk drives.

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.

A key difference between Sinclair and Jobs was Sinclair's hostility to quality control and UX. Cheap at all costs! I would liken Sinclair to Jay Miner, perhaps: an engineering genius with a tendency to hit the reset button on business affairs over and over again.

Closer to Jobs in the UK scene was--and I know this is maybe a funny claim--Alan Sugar. The key similarity being the mid-1980s intuition that computers needed to be simple all-in-one consumer products. Jobs was tuned to the needs of the creative and professional classes, whereas Sugar was aiming for working class families, so the machines were very different.

But the reality is there aren't easy matches. The UK didn't produce people who were good at computers, good at business, and had access to enough capital to achieve escape velocity in the 1980s. Even when ARM bore fruit it was sold off, same as everything else there.

America was a much richer market and Apple would never have reached the masses in a poorer place.

Spectrums didn't just kickstart programming in the UK but in places in Central/Eastern Europe too. I'm from Zimbabwe and they reached us too long before anyone could afford standard American fare.

That cost was absolutely critical. ARM and Raspberry Pi show you how the UK has been incredibly good at bringing computing and computing skills to people.

We programmers from everywhere have patched together Linux from bits and with this cheap commodity hardware, have made a world in which there is no locked door in our own house which we are denied the right to open.

ARM does originate from education — the Acorn RISC Machine was created by Acorn following on from the success of the BBC computer, which was developed to improve computing education in schools. It was first used in the Acorn Archimedes computer.

Acorn Archimedes which used it was relatively expensive though — £686 (without monitor) in 1990.

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochu...

> ARM does originate from education

But all our observations are in hindsight, who could predict that ARM/RISC would be a winner in the XXI century? Apple and mobile devices drove that wave, and Intel failing miserably in the space.

I think the people that created it knew it was important because prioritising performance per watt was a strange strategy and yet it was a killer strategy. ARM was in phones and PDAs long before Apple used one in an iPhone and it got there because of performance/watt. It had already reached 100s of millions of users before the iPhone was released.

The PC industry and phone industry were very different and the PC guys were sleeping at the point where ARM showed it was going to change everything. I think the most humorous thing is that the turning point was kicked off by Intel with it's StrongARM which showed everyone that ARM was much more than a microcontroller architecture. Whoever decided to drop that should win a buffoon of the century award.

Also ARM's licensing model hasn't made it a megacorp. I suggest (without data so be sceptical) that Qualcomm and Apple and Samsung and so on have all made much more money than ARM did and that's why they tolerated ARM and adopted it. So it was the fact that they weren't making some play for dominance that was absolutely critical - especially as a non-American company.

StrongARM was DEC originally then developed into XScale at Intel when they acquired that division from Digital as part of a lawsuit settlement I believe.

The funny thing about the ARM performance/watts thing is that it wasn't originally a design goal except for the need to use a plastic rather than ceramic package to save money. They were aiming for 1 watt but ended up at 0.1 watt!

Dead right. Sorry.

Another article on the same site has a good summary of the history of ARM — there was plenty I wasn't aware of: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses

> ARM was in phones and PDAs long before Apple used one in an iPhone and it got there because of performance/watt. It had already reached 100s of millions of users before the iPhone was released.

I put the iPhone and Apple as an example since they were very unique in customizing ARM for mobile devices. Sadly, we are waiting for M1, M2, M3, and M4 processors in the PC space.

Regarding a timeframe, it was around XXI century that ARM reached its users. There was a big time gap between the 70/80s microcomputers and mobile devices. Palm Pilot, for example, use the Motorola 68k. Psion started using ARM devices in the late 90s, before that they used an x86 variant. Newton was a failure, although it shows Apple mind clarity about ARM.

Reminds me of the posters for Linux that I saw at the time

"In a world without borders and fences, who needs Windows and Gates"

Yeah those costs allowed many (not only) kids in poorer countries to actually own a first computer. Apple even at those times would not be reachable. Spectrum clones were extremely popular in central/eastern Europe, for many an introduction to computers.

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.

A Spectrum clone was a very popular first computer in Brazil. Microdigital made a whole series of very successful Sinclair clones. Another company, Prologica, cloned the ZX80 and ZX81, the latter in at least three physical formats.

I had a great time at VCF East 2024 looking at South American clones and talking to these guys: https://arjorge1987.substack.com/p/mi-experiencia-en-fotos-d...

Yes! In Uruguay, my first computer was a Microdigital TK-90, and the second one a TK-95, and those are the machines I learned to program on.

I love how they just ripped Commodore's Plus/4 to make their 95. They also did give their Micro Professor II clone an Atari 1200 look.

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 :-)

and they almost got the BBC contract that eventually went to Acorn...

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.

He was a giant compared to all the nobodies knighted and enobled by the last government.

Despite his computers being very shonky, affordable computers from Sinclair, Amstrad and others drove a UK wide computing revolution which led many of us to have the careers we do today.

Absolutely had a net positive outcome. Was also a self boosting prat. The Sinclair electric car summed him up in many ways: overpromised and under delivered time after time.

But the zx80 and spectrum, bootstrapped thousands into computers in the home. BBC micro came one year after, absolute beast of a product by comparison. The acorn atom which proceeded it was meh (i had one)

That's a perspective I've never heard. In the US, Sinclair was never a particularly famous figure. I knew who he was - his name was on the TS-1000 my parents bought me when I outgrew the Atari 2600's BASIC Programming cartridge - but that's about all he was, a name on some funky hardware. I was under the impression he was kind of thought of as UK's Nikola Tesla or something.

> I was under the impression he was kind of thought of as UK's Nikola Tesla or something.

He was a brilliant self publicist. Nobody in the British computing or related digital electronics industry thought he was a second Tesla. The public at large was totally being sold that kind of line, not that Tesla's name was ever mentioned in those days by anyone. Same with Lord Sugar and amstrad.

Dyson gets similar accolades these days. Or Jony Ive.

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.

Was the same for me, with a Commodore Vic 20 around about 1982/3. I noticed that although my dad was a competent electrician and had built radios and fixed TVs he always struggled with using the computer and stuff like programming the VCR. It's surprising how hard it is to keep up. I'm noticing the same with myself and my 9 year old playing Xbox. It's insane how quickly [interested] youngers pick up stuff.

> I'm noticing the same with myself and my 9 year old playing Xbox.

I like to joke that if the game requires a joystick with more than two buttons, I can't play it.

It's fun to try and keep up, we can still play together and have a laugh and he tolerates my pitiful skills. It's even more fun when he's at his mum's house and we can chat and play squads remotely.

Oh yes. My failures are always hilarious to my kids. I’m the human version of Peppa Pig’s dad.

Silly daddy.

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.

I think this is an ungenerous reading.

The aunt may well have lived elsewhere in Devon, hence they "left London to stay with an aunt in (somewhere-not-Teignmouth,) Devon, and within Devon they eventually moved to Teignmouth"

I don't mean to be ungenerous, just pointing out a very small detail the author may not have been aware of.

I agree with your reading of the Wikipedia article, which I take to mean that they moved first to somewhere else in Devon, and then ended up in Teignmouth.

The re-wording is slightly less precise and does not offer more information.

It is re-written in the article as: "In his earliest life, he and his mother moved in with an aunt in Devon, then to Teignmouth, and then finally to Bracknell on account of wartime bombings."

As I said, it really is only a small detail - and completely forgivable as I'm sure many people have no idea where Teignmouth, or even Devon is. However, on current reading it would be akin to saying "moved from England to London"

Famously the Sinclair family died with the QL, but there was another machine designed for compatibility and which could have been a contender.

The SAM Coupé always looked pretty in reviews at the time, but I never met anybody who owned one, and I've never seen one in-person even now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAM_Coup%C3%A9

Largely because as an 8bit machine it wasn't really going to cut it against the Atari ST and Amiga and remember the had much bigger marketing power. I was thrilled with my Amiga which I got around the time the SAM was advertised. Then it was only a short window of 3-4 years until the PC came in and suddenly there was Doom, online gaming etc. Things went quick!

Agreed. It was outdated at launch, but it's always nice fuel for the "What if ..?" conversations!

I had one, unfortunately. It was a nice enough upgrade from a Spectrum, but far too late. I really regretted it when all my friends got Amigas and I was stuck in 8 bit land. It didn't help that they had to do a mass ROM replacement after shipping the launch units.

In terms of the brand I think the ZX Spectrum +3 came a good bit after the QL and there was a peculiar "Sinclair" branded MS DOS compatible machine, the PC200. Both in the Amstrad era of course.

Ignoring the brand but focusing on Uncle Clive there was also the Cambridge Z88 laptop/notepad device.

Sinclair also made some pocket-size black and white TVs, and we had one of those in the '80s: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/sir-clive-sinclair-pocket-...

pedantic comment but the screenshot of Elite on that site is of the original BBC Micro version, not the Spectrum version (which was a technical marvel in its own right)

And the Gauntlet shot is probably C64!

I’ll fix both. Sorry for that.

ah yes so it is!

I remember a guy at school in the 90s talking about the QL. He said it had a 32 bit operating system, but if you turned it upside down, the keys fell out.

It's a shame Sinclair didn't realise the QL was the moment he should have started being a bit less aggressive on the penny pinching.

One small change, a 68000, 1 extra ROM and 8 more RAM chips would have made all the difference. Could also use 4-bit memory chips to save space.

I'd have done that and ditched one microdrive.

Such a shame. The QL would look modern today. Replace the two microdrives with SD card slots and the rear ports with USB-C ones. And add a backspace key, of course.

I just love those keycaps.

The early Apple ADB keyboards for IIgs has similar key caps if you want something that could be usable on a modern system.

The ZX81 was my first computer. I remember writing an adventure game, but because I only had the basic 2k RAM, each room in the game was a separate program that was saved to tape at a specific tape counter location. Then, when you made a decision in a room, it would ask you to wind to a specific tape location to load the next room. Got played once, by my brother, but I was pretty proud of it.

Soon after I got a job as a student working at an astronomical observatory. The director had just bought a ZX81 for his personal use, and when he heard about my experience with the machine he gave it to me along with an article describing how to reduce photometric data. This time I had the luxury of the 16k RAM pack, so I wrote the whole thing, including data reduction, graphing, analysis in one app. Lots of fun accidentally knocking the RAM pack and losing everything multiple times. Once it was done and demoed, I was asked to publish it. However the observatory did not pay up for a printer so I had to use a typewriter to bang out the code for the article, meaning of course there were plenty of typos. Got amateur astronomers from various countries using different machines trying to get it working. Back in the days of paper envelopes with source code printouts to debug.

Good memories, and the launchpad for my programming career.

I didn't quite appreciate how much involvement the UK government had had in the Sinclair story - their prints are all over Acorn and the BBC Micro, but I didn't know that the NEB (UK National Enterprise Board) had taken a stake in Sinclair and bailed them out as much as they did.

For non-UK readers: the NEB was a UK agency that invested in companies the UK Gov considered useful or strategic. Part of the general Wilsonian agenda to forge the future in the "white heat of technology", as his phrase was back then. The original intent was to use the influence gained to direct their activity (all very socialist/central-planning in the 1960s, considerably more free-market later on). They funded Inmos and their Transputer, if anyone here remembers that. Ultimately they were wound up themselves and are now part of some UK healthcare(!) company, BTG plc.

Also: no discussion of Sinclair is complete without talking about the C5. The British could forgive Sir Clive his abysmal quality control, love his inventiveness (see: "boffin" in British English), but the C5 was roundly mocked and crushed his business. Shame really, but not too surprising once you consider how British roads were, and the climate.

I wonder how it would have faired these days with the popularity of eBikes and scooters now.

Reading this reminded me of the (long forgotten) single key instruction keyboard (you press key O and you get the pOke command). Its almost like an autocomplete :-)

Is that still a thing for any computing device today? Fascinating to read they did this due to hardware limitations, but it would seem to have some instructional advantages on a first programming device.

> Is that still a thing for any computing device today?

Yes, many graphing calculators still work that way.

But in regards to the ZX computer nowadays, people usually go to the Gosh Wonderful ROMs that allows typing in full letters.

The Sinclair calculator was my pride and joy as a boy, but the ZX series may as well have not existed ... computing for me in the UK started with the BBC Model B, as I am sure it did for many (maybe even most?) others.

Indeed. Acorn is the other British Micro Behemoth (and their legacy lives on today)

I suspect a lot more people got to use Beebs than Spectrums, because of shared hardware in schools...

But the Speccy outsold the Beeb by a large margin, I believe. Narrowly outsold by the C64 and that shifted 17 million units.

Obligatory reminder about Micro Men, the BBC4 docudrama about Sinclair vs Acorn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men

Obligatory YouTube link

https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM?feature=shared

Slightly confusing headline because there's another famous British micro which actually has 'Micro' in the name: the BBC Micro (developed by Acorn - the original 'A' in 'ARM' until it was retconned to 'Advanced' - the Micro still had a 6502 CPU though).

one famous user of Sinclair QL http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/01/odd-hardware.htm...

That watch looked pretty cool. The exploding part, though...

ZX80 was cloned in Bulgaria (during communist time) as Pravetz-8D - it was fun, because you just needed a TV, and not separate monitor.

The other clone (Pravetz-8M/82/8C/8M) were based more or like on the Apple ][/etc, but it was more expensive.

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