In November 1981 Sinclair Research ran a two-page advertisement in the first issue of Computer & Video Games. It looked back to 1980 and the ZX80, “world’s first complete personal computer for under £100”, and then announced its successor: “For just £69.95 the Sinclair ZX81”. Readers could cut out a coupon, post it to Cambridge without a stamp, and order a kit version for £49.95.
That price is why Clive Sinclair matters here. He did not invent the home computer, and his machines were often late, fragile and hard to love. But they were cheap enough to sit under the family television, and that is where a generation of British teenagers learned to program. Sinclair User, writing just after he sold the business in 1986, put it in money: “Without his sub-£100 micros the Commodore 64 might still be £350 and Amstrad certainly wouldn’t ever have become involved in home computers.”
Radio kits and calculators
Sinclair was born on 30 July 1940. At 17 he decided that a university course could not teach him fast enough, and he became a technical journalist, writing small books for electronics hobbyists. He sold radio and amplifier kits by mail order, with advertisements that ran continuously from 1962, and his company, Sinclair Radionics, formed in 1961, moved to Cambridge in 1967.
In 1972 Radionics launched the Executive pocket calculator at £79.95. Then came the Black Watch, a digital wristwatch whose chips the suppliers could not deliver. It lost the company £355,000 in 1976, and the National Enterprise Board, a government investment body, bought a 43% stake. The partnership did not last. The board wanted to concentrate on measuring instruments; Sinclair wanted to keep building his pocket television. In 1979 he left Radionics with a small team. His separate venture with Chris Curry, Science of Cambridge, had already advertised the MK14 kit computer in March 1978. That company became Sinclair Research. (Science of Cambridge advertisement, Wireless World, March 1978, p. 113.)
Three computers in three years
Each machine cost less than the one before and did more.
- ZX80 (1980). About £80 as a kit or £100 built, with 1K of memory and a 4K ROM holding its BASIC. It could only handle whole numbers, and its RAM pack tended to wobble loose, but Computer & Video Games reported that over 50,000 were sold.
- ZX81 (March 1981). £49.95 as a kit, £69.95 built. A single custom chip, made by Ferranti, replaced 18 of the ZX80’s chips, so the whole computer needed just four. By the end of January 1982, 300,000 had been sold worldwide.
- ZX Spectrum (April 1982). Colour, sound and high-resolution graphics for £125 (16K) or £175 (48K). By January 1983 Sinclair had sold his first million computers, and by Easter that year Sinclair Research was selling 12,000 Spectrums a week.
All three used Sinclair’s single-key keyword entry and checked each line of BASIC as it was typed. CRASH explained why the tricks kept turning up: “each successive machine to leave the Sinclair stable contained a chunk of its predecessor’s ROM.”
In 1983 Sinclair was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Launched too soon
The same speed that made the machines cheap also made them unreliable. The early Spectrums were sold by mail order only, and Sinclair User later called it “a disastrous operation which left early purchasers waiting two months for delivery.” The QL business computer, announced in January 1984 at £399, was rushed out to beat Apple’s Macintosh and reached customers four months late with “half the operating system … left hanging out of the back”. The C5 electric tricycle, launched in January 1985, “branded him in the media as a kind of ‘mad boffin’”.
In 1985 the home-computer market fell away. Distributors had “wildly overstocked” the Spectrum Plus, the planned stock-market flotation was cancelled, and Robert Maxwell’s announced takeover collapsed. A £10 million bulk order of Spectrum Pluses from Dixons paid off most of the debt. Sinclair User’s verdict was fair to both sides of him: “Yes, sometimes his products are ill conceived. Often they have tripped up through being launched too soon.”
Selling to Amstrad
On 7 April 1986, at what CRASH called “the hastily called press conference at noon”, Sinclair sold Amstrad the rights to sell and manufacture all existing and future Sinclair computers, and the Sinclair brand name for computer products, for £5 million. He told reporters it was not a rescue, though the deal wrote off debts that had stood at “£6 or 7 million a few weeks before”. Amstrad went on to make its own Spectrums, the +2 and the +3.
After the computers
Sinclair kept Sinclair Research and went back to transport. In 1992 he showed the Zike, an electric bicycle with a top speed of 12 miles per hour, at the Cyclex show in London, priced at £499. He died on 16 September 2021, aged 81.
The people who built the machines
Sinclair set the brief and the price; other people did much of the building. The industrial designer Rick Dickinson won a Design Council award for the ZX81 and designed the Spectrum’s rubber keyboard. He described how Sinclair “always say[s] how small it has to be. I think how can it be that small? Yet he is always right in the end.” Richard Altwasser designed the Spectrum’s hardware, and its software came from outside: Steven Vickers wrote it on contract from Nine Tiles, the company that had supplied Sinclair BASIC in the first place.
The Spectrum’s world
The machines created a market for everyone else. Sinclair User, CRASH and Your Sinclair reviewed games and printed type-in listings. Budget labels such as Mastertronic sold full games for £1.99. Licensed and unlicensed Spectrum compatibles appeared abroad, such as Microdigital’s TK 90X in Brazil, which printed its messages in Portuguese.
Sources
- Computer & Video Games issue 1, November 1981, pp. 22–23: Sinclair Research advertisement (ZX80 “for under £100”, “over 50,000 were sold”, ZX81 £69.95 built, kit £49.95 on the order coupon, four-chip design).
- Computer & Video Games issue 7, May 1982, p. 86: “The ZX81 in kit form costs £49.95 and £69.95 assembled.”
- Sinclair User issue 51, June 1986, p. 47: career profile and timeline (born 30 July 1940; Radionics 1961; Executive 1972, £79.95; Black Watch loss £355,000; NEB 43% stake; Spectrum sales of 12,000 a week in 1983; knighthood in the 1983 Birthday Honours; QL, C5, the 1985 crisis, Dixons, “sub-£100 micros”, “launched too soon”).
- Sinclair User issue 46, January 1986, p. 88: 300,000 ZX81s by the end of January 1982; Spectrum launch prices; Altwasser designed the Spectrum hardware and Vickers wrote the software on contract from Nine Tiles.
- CRASH issue 15, April 1985, pp. 86–87, and issue 16, May 1985, pp. 126–127, “The Sinclair Story”: journalism and mail-order radio kits; Cambridge in 1967; NEB split in 1979; ZX80 prices and limitations; keyword entry and syntax checking; ROM carried from machine to machine; first million computers by January 1983.
- CRASH issue 28, May 1986, pp. 10–12, John Minson: the Amstrad sale, the £5 million price and the debts.
- Sinclair User issue 5, August 1982, pp. 55–56, Claudia Cooke’s interview with Rick Dickinson.
- PC Review issue 7, May 1992, p. 9: the Zike at the Cyclex show, £499.
- Your Sinclair issue 5, May 1986, p. 14: the Brazilian TK 90X.
- CRASH issue 24, January 1986, pp. 187–188: review index listing Mastertronic games at £1.99.
- The Register, 17 September 2021, Gareth Corfield’s obituary (web, secondary): date of death.