Rick Dickinson was Sinclair’s industrial designer from the end of the 1970s to the mid-1980s. Clive Sinclair set the brief and the price; Dickinson decided what the result looked like and how it could be made cheaply enough. The black wedge of the ZX81, the ZX Spectrum and its rubber keys, and the long, flat QL are his. He was 26 when Sinclair User profiled him in 1982, and he had already won a Design Council award.
Straight from college
Dickinson grew up in Yorkshire, spent a year on an art foundation course in Grimsby, and took a degree in industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic. It was a sandwich course, and one of his work placements was with Clive Sinclair, then still making calculators and pocket televisions at Sinclair Radionics. He spent six months there working with John Pemberton, who had designed Sinclair’s calculators.
About six months after graduating he got a telegram from Pemberton: “Ring me ASAP”. He later admitted he had no idea what ASAP meant and spent hours puzzling over it. When he called, Pemberton was about to leave Sinclair’s new company, Science of Cambridge, and Sinclair wanted a replacement. Dickinson got the job, which he found “quite scary as John was a world-class designer and I’d just left college”. Pemberton’s parting advice was: “It’s just down to common sense, really. The bits that you don’t know you just muddle through till you do know.”
In August 1982 Sinclair User reported that he had started “almost three years ago”, when the staff numbered five. By then it was 30.
The ZX80, then the ZX81
The ZX80’s case was not his. “The first job I had to do was put John Pemberton’s design for the ZX80 into production,” he told Edge in 2004. Pemberton had drawn the parts; Dickinson found the mould makers and plastics manufacturers and took it through production. Sinclair “didn’t have the financial muscle to lay down expensive tooling”, so the case parts were vacuum formed, which was cheaper, “and the final result looks cheap as well”. His first design of his own was the ZX80’s 1K–3K RAM pack. “Can you imagine? Three kilobytes of random access memory!”
“My first product was the ZX81,” he said. Its design took about six months. Its flat membrane keyboard, Sinclair User wrote, was “revolutionary and largely responsible for the low retail price of the product”, though it had no click and gave no feel of a key going down, so you had to watch the screen to see whether a press had registered. The ZX81 won him a Design Council award.
Edge also asked him about the ZX81’s “RAM pack wobble”, in which a memory pack plugged into the back of the computer could lose its connection when nudged. He explained it as a cost decision. A proper connector on every ZX81 would cost money even though only a small share of buyers would ever plug anything in, so the expansion bus came out on an edge connector: tracks printed to the edge of the circuit board, which is free. Without a gold finish the contacts oxidised, and a slight wobble lost the connection. “Every decision you make is a risk. Most of them work out. This one didn’t.” He had designed a recess with two screw holes to fix the pack in place, but the ZX81’s RAM pack reused the ZX80’s mouldings to save money and never had them.
The Spectrum and its rubber keys
“I like the Spectrum much more than the ZX-81,” Dickinson told Sinclair User in 1982. “It was much quicker to design but much more complicated. It is a step up-market and I was really trying hard for a super-smart machine.” The keyboard took most of the effort: “It is the only interface between the user and the product and it has to be right. We were trying also to cram on more information than anyone had ever done.” By his later count there were five or six separate pieces of information to fit on and around each key.
In 2004 he told the story of the keyboard for Edge. The idea of a single rubber mat, he said, “could well be David Southward, with inputs from Clive and Jim Westwood”, and it took computer keyboards “from 200 components to one”. “No one made anything like this, and there was nobody to ask!” Each key hinged down from its top edge on thin rubber walls. Silicone rubber survived the constant flexing, but it could not then be printed on, and the main British users of silicone seemed to be condom makers. So the team went to the London Rubber Company, “and amongst the condom and hot water bottle machines” worked out how to print on it. A printed aluminium plate covered the gaps between the keys, and a Birmingham company that made cooker dials in huge volumes had “all the know-how we needed”. He admitted that “the keys could get stuck under the metal plate”, and that with more time the faults could have been engineered out.
Not every owner loved the result. Computer and Video Games offered readers alternatives in February 1984 for when they tired “of the piece of dead flesh known as your Spectrum’s keyboard”, and by 1985 CRASH could refer to the “standard issue ‘dead flesh’ keyboard” without explaining the joke.
Microdrives and the QL
Dickinson designed the cartridge for Sinclair’s Microdrive tape loop. The mechanism was built in-house; his job was the cartridge and how it worked. It sat almost flush with the drive, hence the serrations to grip it by, and the only place for a label was its end, so he added the protective sleeve.
The QL showed him the cost of Sinclair’s deadlines. Sampling the moulds at an Italian toolmaker, he pressed in all the keys, turned the case upside down “and four or five fell out. We rattled it, and four or five more fell out.” Fixing it would have taken another week, and the production controller refused to miss his delivery schedule. “I remember reading the reviews and each of them had a bit: ‘it’s a shame the keys fall off.’”
After Sinclair
About a year before Sinclair sold its computer business to Amstrad in April 1986, Dickinson moved to MetaLab, a research group Clive Sinclair set up. There he worked on Pandora, a portable computer that never reached the market. He then ran his own consultancy, Dickinson Associates, in Cambridge. In 2004 Edge found its office working on the Gizmondo, a handheld games system.
He came back to the Spectrum for the ZX Spectrum Next, a new Spectrum-compatible computer funded on Kickstarter in 2017. Its case is credited to Dickinson and his design partner Phil Candy. He died of cancer in Texas in April 2018, two years before the first cased machines reached backers.
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 5, August 1982, pp. 55–56: Claudia Cooke, “Modest award-winner sets the pace in micro design” (his age, Yorkshire, Grimsby and Newcastle Polytechnic, the Design Council award for the ZX81, the membrane keyboard, six months to design the ZX81, the Spectrum and its keyboard, staff numbers).
- Edge issue 137, June 2004, pp. 80–87: “The Rick Dickinson guide to classic computer design”, interview (the placement with Pemberton, the telegram, putting the ZX80 into production, vacuum forming, the RAM packs, “My first product was the ZX81”, the edge connector, the Microdrive cartridge, the QL keys, MetaLab and Pandora, Dickinson Associates and the Gizmondo), and the sidebar “From condoms to keys” on the Spectrum keyboard.
- Computer and Video Games issue 28, February 1984: “the piece of dead flesh known as your Spectrum’s keyboard”. CRASH issue 17, June 1985: “the standard issue ‘dead flesh’ keyboard”.
- Shaun Nichols, “RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP”, The Register, 26 April 2018 (web, secondary): his death in Texas and his part in the Spectrum Next. https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/26/rick_dickinson_dies/
- Next Magazine issue 10, October 2025, p. 7: the case design credited to “the late Rick Dickinson and his design partner Phil Candy”.
- Wikipedia, “ZX Spectrum Next” (web, secondary): the Kickstarter campaign of 2017 and first deliveries of cased machines in 2020.