[HN Gopher] The British Micro Behemoth
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The British Micro Behemoth
Author : rbanffy
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-01-23 10:53 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| stevekemp wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| fipar wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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!"
| jpcompartir wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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"
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The early Apple ADB keyboards for IIgs has similar key caps
| if you want something that could be usable on a modern
| system.
| timthorn wrote:
| Obligatory reminder about Micro Men, the BBC4 docudrama about
| Sinclair vs Acorn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
| louthy wrote:
| Obligatory YouTube link
|
| https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM?feature=shared
| zellyn wrote:
| 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.
| whobre wrote:
| The article is basically a short summary of this book:
| https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/UK-Books/The%20Sinclair...
| jlarcombe wrote:
| 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)
| tom_ wrote:
| And the Gauntlet shot is probably C64!
| jlarcombe wrote:
| ah yes so it is!
| stevekemp wrote:
| 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 Coupe 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
| thorin wrote:
| 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!
| stevekemp wrote:
| Agreed. It was outdated at launch, but it's always nice fuel
| for the "What if ..?" conversations!
| dcminter wrote:
| 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.
| zelos wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| 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.
| thorin wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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.
| gadders wrote:
| 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-...
| tristramb wrote:
| 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.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| What were you measuring with binoculars? Did it have a filar
| micrometer?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| 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...
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Trying to run CP/M?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Of course!
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| >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.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| beschizza wrote:
| 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.
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| Symbiote wrote:
| 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 -- PS686 (without monitor) in 1990.
|
| http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Broch
| u...
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| 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
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Indeed. Acorn is the other British Micro Behemoth (and their
| legacy lives on today)
| malkia wrote:
| 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.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| 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.
| openrisk wrote:
| 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.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > 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.
| TomMasz wrote:
| That watch looked pretty cool. The exploding part, though...
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
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