By the end of the seventies, the discordant tone of British politics found its way into even the most remote corners of broadcasting. The national obsessions, at least as understood by the press, were unemployment and industrial action, the downward spiral of the manufacturing industries, and the inflationary battering of the economy by oil and currency shocks. It was a rare news day that didn’t feature some moment of social or economic gloom.
One of the less likely conduits for this air of despondency was the BBC’s flagship science programme, Horizon. Although factual, it often veered towards wide-eyed futurology: advances and trends were extrapolated, and their implications guessed at. Usually, these had an optimistic tilt, but in 1978 the BBC broadcast an edition written and produced by Edward Goldwyn called ‘Now the Chips are Down’, which promised a foreboding look at the inescapable impact of the then fledgling microchip.
It made famously uncomfortable viewing. Through this unflinching lens, the predictions for a nation in decline bordered on apocalyptic: the new technology was shown replacing human labour, displacing long-standing professions and industries, matching each advance with an economically destructive counterpoint. By the end of the programme, the tone was wavering between nihilistic – ‘Could this technology be the end of an age, the end of a line of evolution?’ – and urgently practical: a Hobson’s choice of leaving automation and its prosperity to other nations, or taking it on and facing ‘the problems of large-scale unemployment’.
At a time when the Post Office was the monopoly provider of telecommunications and Harold Wilson’s boast of capturing the ‘white heat’ of technology still lingered in the public memory, perhaps it was no surprise that the programme’s final accusation was levelled at the politicians. ‘What is shocking is that the government has been totally unaware of the effects that this technology is going to create. The silence is terrifying. It’s time to talk about the future.’
In a converted industrial mill just outside Cambridge, the government-sponsored National Enterprise Board was all too aware of the impact that fast-moving microchip technology could have on a business. For some months, the Board had been trying to help a popular and slightly gimmicky electronics company called Sinclair Radionics regain some of its former success. The firm had sunk a million pounds into researching a pocket-sized television, and the Board was keen to salvage its £650,000 share of that investment.
This portable television was the latest in a series of miniaturised products from Sinclair Radionics, which had produced tiny radios and hi-fis, as well as the world’s first pocket calculators and digital watches. The company had become famous amongst hobbyists for ingeniously squashing big ideas into small boxes. Unfortunately, it was also notorious for selling gizmos prone to spluttering out of life – Sinclair hi-fis were sometimes returned four or five times before being made to work, and it’s likely that the smaller products would have provoked similar complaints if they hadn’t been such bargains to start with. Customers had learnt that Sinclair Radionics was both brilliant and maddening, and in that sense it reflected the man who gave his name to the company: a bearded veteran of the young electronics industry, Clive Sinclair.
His business desperately needed the government lifeline, but Sinclair himself loathed the thought of sacrificing his independence. A prodigious self-starter, at the age of ten he was told by his prep school that he had already taught himself more maths than his teachers knew. The young Clive subsequently attended a string of schools around Britain, immersing himself in electronics and eventually rejecting university to write books for amateur circuit builders – such as himself. He quickly had a taste of fame: his face appeared on the covers of Practical Wireless magazine where he was assistant editor. With intense eyes and a quizzical half smile, he seemed every inch a British boffin – an image that would pursue him throughout his life.
By the time his company was answering to the NEB, Sinclair had assembled one of the most inventive development teams in the world. Jim Westwood, a softly spoken engineer Sinclair had discovered working in an electronics shop, was usually tasked with realising the company’s seemingly ludicrous product design specifications and making the components fit into the tiny spaces demanded. The managing director, Nigel Searle – who had once spent a couple of days holed up with Sinclair working out the innards of the company’s scientific calculator – had recently resigned, but was still around for those who knew where to find him. And Chris Curry was Sinclair’s right-hand man, running businesses to promote these technological mini-wonders. By now experienced in the vagaries of the electronics markets, he had seen firsthand how Sinclair Radionics had coasted through quality problems on the good will of hobbyist consumers, and how its winning calculator product had been undermined as manufacturers in the Far East replaced quaint LED displays with whizzy new LCDs, leaving Radionics with a warehouse full of parts. An approachable manager, Curry also filled a substantial gap in Sinclair’s personal armoury – Sinclair was not an easy-going boss. As his friend, games designer Anita Sinclair put it, ‘I don’t think he’s a very good manager of people.’
This was a team already looking to the future prophesised by Horizon: microchips were an obvious next step for a company that sold miniaturisation, and Radionics was hard at work on a computer for its loyal core market. But that project was never given time to be completed – exasperated at the restrictions of effective public ownership, Sinclair pre-empted the breakup of his company by the state, and played a deft sleight of hand trick of his own. He reactivated a dormant shelf-company and repositioned key staff to it, with Chris Curry at their head.
It was to prove a fatal fragmentation of the core team. Within a couple of years, Sinclair might have succeeded in re-establishing himself as the country’s leading technology entrepreneur. But when he split his own company, he unwittingly unleashed his greatest rival.
Christopher J. Curry was already known to the people of Cambridge as a name on the ballot sheet of the second 1974 general election. He was one of a handful of candidates representing the United Democratic Party, a loosely organised collection of right wing Conservatives disaffected with their leader, Ted Heath. Curry was the party’s most successful candidate – he had secured 885 votes, which was still 21,000 fewer than the winning Tory.
Unlike in his political career, Curry’s split from Sinclair Radionics was endorsed by its leader. Science of Cambridge Ltd was owned by both Sinclair and Curry, and had offices on King’s Parade in the heart of the university town, fifteen miles from Radionics in St Ives, and the eyes of the NEB. Although legally independent of its progenitor, the company’s first job was to find a use for the mountain of redundant components that Radionics had lumbered itself with. ‘We had quite a big stock of old calculator parts on our hands,’ recalls Curry, ‘which had displays and keyboards and not a lot else. I was trying to find a way to use them, in a way that wasn’t a calculator.’
On a trip to the United States, Curry had encountered a bizarre concept. As in Britain, books were exempt from various sales taxes, but in the US numerous ruses had arisen to take advantage of this, and one used the format of a book to package the hardware required for a home computer kit. Curry had spent some time trying to import this idea, but it turned out to be too tricky, and in any case the ‘book’ ploy was unlikely to pass muster in the UK. But the concept had lodged in his mind and now it looked like the perfect fit: a hobbyist computer would be an ideal way to shift his new company’s component glut.
By this time, home scale computer kits were starting to become known in specialist circles, especially in America. The Altair had been the first, with the first models from Tandy, Commodore, Apple and a few ‘garage’ companies starting to make themselves known. But these had to be imported into Britain, and most consumers wouldn’t have thought of even attempting to buy something so exotic. It was an open market and, for Science of Cambridge, a smart but risky way to shift some stock.
His first attempt to put together a home computer kit used a simple General Instruments chip – barely more than a calculator itself, but enough to build a prototype. When Curry mentioned that he was using this to a contact at the components manufacturer National Semiconductor, they scoffed: ‘Why bother with a half-baked thing like that,’ he recalls them saying. National Semiconductor was proudly pushing a new general-purpose processor called the SC/MP at the time. The rhetoric may have been trash talk, but it was right: unlike General Instruments’ chip, the SC/MP processor could make a real computer.
Science of Cambridge called its new product the MK14, standing for Microcomputer Kit with fourteen components. It looked like a naked and stretched Sinclair calculator, but was an order of magnitude more powerful than any home electronics Radionics had previously produced. It didn’t have any single function like a calculator, but came with the promise of many, as long as they could fit in an eight-digit numerical display and 256 bytes of memory – about the amount needed to write a single sentence of text.
It was obvious to Curry and his team that the MK14 was brimming with potential, both in its technology, and in the market it would create. There was a problem, though: they had built a key chip from copied National Semiconductor specs, hoping it would fit their components. And what they didn’t know yet was that it didn’t work.
There’s rarely a shortage of technical talent in Cambridge. The university had run the world’s first computer science degree, and as excitement about computing technology grew in academic circles, students in other disciplines sought to join in. Steve Furber was studying for his PhD in Aerodynamics when he learned that some students were forming a society to explore microchip technology: the Cambridge University Processor Group. He got involved from the start – it was an entry to this heady new world, filled with enthusiasts and ideas. They were held back only by their lack of computers.
So, like many other members of the group, Furber started building one for fun. Buying components from abroad, he built a simple machine using a modest 2650 chip and ‘verowire’, an amateur circuit-building tool that he later learned gave off toxic vapours.
Curry had a friend researching physics at the university, an Austrian called Hermann Hauser, and through him, he recruited Furber to build and test the first MK14 kit. Having verowired it in his house, Furber discovered the bug that might have stalled the first British home computer before it started. It came from the chip design that Science of Cambridge had miscopied from the National Semiconductor development kit, a problem that had been missed by the entire design team. As Furber recalls, ‘I sorted it and got that going,’ and in the summer of 1978, the MK14 – the first microcomputer kit in Europe – went on sale through magazines such as Practical Electronics and Practical Wireless. Steve Furber had just debugged Britain’s entire home computer industry.
The MK14 was programmed using HEX, a laboriously manual method requiring advance planning and saintly patience with the calculator-style keyboard. There was also, at first, no means of storing the programs, so when the machine was released it came with a booklet containing a suite of twenty applications that could be typed in by the user. They were a mixture of utilities and demos, but three of them were games.
Of these, the best remembered is Moon Lander. An MK14 games designer had to think laterally to overcome the limitations of the screen. It was a rudimentary calculator-style display with eight digits – and Moon Lander used them to show the simulated stats for a module descending to a lunar landing. The speed, height and fuel consumption of the module were updated in real time, and it would be fair to say the game was one of the most popular uses for the new owners of the machine.
There are plenty of landmarks in the history of computer games, but this one seems to have been overlooked. Moon Lander and its two companions were the first commercial games for a British home computer. Unnoticed, the British computer games industry had started.
Curry’s friend Hermann Hauser is a charismatic presence, whose lilting Austrian accent holds listeners’ attention with compelling charm. After recruiting Furber, Hauser had started to spend more and more time with Curry in the Science of Cambridge offices, both of them fascinated by the future that microchips promised. Curry was by now running the company with barely any input from Sinclair and, with Hauser urging him on, it was no surprise when Curry started to pull away from his old employer.
The MK14 had been as successful as any of Sinclair Radionics’ products. In two years, Europe’s first microprocessor kit sold 90,000 units at £30 apiece – a fair week’s wages at the time. To Curry it looked like the birth of a new industry. Clive Sinclair’s view is harder to make out: he may have thought that Science of Cambridge was fulfilling its role, and that computers should be treated like any other fad electronics kit of the month. However, Curry believes Sinclair wanted to focus on his own project, the ‘Newbrain’ computer. ‘There came a point where it was quite clear that Clive wanted to move into computers in Sinclair Radionics,’ Curry says. ‘So Science of Cambridge would be a bit of a difficult place to work because it would be in direct competition.’
Hauser represented the Cambridge University view – that computers were exciting and inevitable, and that there was already a nearby talent pool determined to get involved – and he encouraged Curry to make his own start. When Furber was building the first MK14 he had invited his friend and fellow University Processor Group member Sophie (then Roger) Wilson over to see it. Wilson was unimpressed. ‘Sophie looked at the MK14 and gave a characteristic “I could do better than that” reaction,’ Furber says. ‘And she went home over the Easter Holidays and came back with a design for the Hawk.’
The Hawk was inspired – a real improvement on the MK14. When Curry and Hauser saw it, it was obvious that this was the future, regardless of Sinclair’s plans. At the end of 1978, they set up a new company to sell it, named Cambridge Processor Unit, a jokey riff on the central processor unit at the heart of their computers. It is doubtful Sinclair knew much of their activities, but they were certainly happening on his premises, as Curry admits: ‘Hermann came to spend a lot of time in the office in King’s Parade. It started before we had a chance to move into CPU’s own offices.’
Sinclair finally shook himself free of the NEB by quitting Sinclair Radionics, with a golden handshake of £10,000. It wasn’t enough to prevent him from having to sell his house and his Rolls Royce, but it did leave him able to take full control of Science of Cambridge, where Curry’s efforts gave him a running start: there was product line to extend, and a consumer base to leverage. Curry’s absence also meant there was no objection to renaming the company once again, and it soon became Sinclair Research Ltd.
The MK14 had been a great success for a small outfit, but with its open circuitry and Heath Robinson component list, it didn’t look like a consumer product. Sinclair’s previous business had been built on compactness and smart design, and he carried that philosophy over to Sinclair Research, along with a crucial third pillar: the products had to be cheap.
Sinclair brought Jim Westwood over from Radionics, to weave his magic and minimise both the size and cost of a home computer. The Financial Times had run an article in 1979 that daringly predicted the appearance of a proper consumer computer for under £100 – meaning a machine with a QWERTY keyboard and full screen display. The newspaper set the timeframe for this at five years. Sinclair told his team that they had to make it happen within six months.
Meanwhile, the Cambridge Processor Unit needed premises, staff and money. The core members were recruited gradually. Chris Turner, a well-regarded design engineer from Philips, was employee number one, and Hauser’s persuasive character and university connections helped CPU to assemble an excellent team. Furber started spending more time with the company, as did Sophie Wilson, who now had a completed prototype of the Hawk, her rival to the MK14. For premises, they found a small office squeezed down a rather forbidding alley. Money was harder to come by. The new company had yet to generate any income from products, so the team set about selling their sole asset: their expertise.
Sophie Wilson’s first electronics job had been to make an automated cattle feeder, and in a sense CPU’s first consultancy job covered similar ground. A Welsh one-armed bandit manufacturer called Ace Coin wanted to make its machines more attractive to punters and statistically more precise in their payouts. Furber set about building a sound-and-light show, and then with a ‘possibly over-complicated arrangement’, used another processor to control the reels. There was a problem with this approach, though: the electronics of the era were susceptible to being shorted by nearby electrical pulses. In practice this meant that the machines could be made to pay out a flurry of coins simply by flicking on a cigarette lighter, and unfortunately this trick was becoming rather well known. Wilson devised a typically ingenious solution. An FM receiver was built into the casing that would detect these attacks and cut out the mechanism. Ace Coin was satisfied that it was now only the customers who would play against the odds.
As a consultancy, CPU surfed a wave of quite random contracts – one they pitched for was to provide the graphics for the computer screens in the film Alien – but its core product was a set of modular circuit boards developed from Wilson’s Hawk design. It made sense to Curry to sell these to the same hobbyist market that had bought the MK14, and an expandable kit was put together.
The £20,000 earned from Ace Coin was enough to put Sophie Wilson’s Hawk design into production as the ‘System 1’. It was sold in the form of modular cards that could be mounted on a rack. This approach allowed its users, mainly university labs but also some home hobbyists, to add floppy disc drives and more memory to the machine as well as – for the real computer experience – a monitor and keyboard. And it was all assembled by the user; in this market, knowledge of soldering and debugging was a given.
But CPU needed a brand name to market its products, one that would reflect the company’s potential for growth and also lend itself to a logo that would look good as a silhouette in the smudgy, black-and-white adverts of electronics magazines. Although it had few competitors in Europe, CPU wanted to stand out in a global market rapidly filling with manufacturers, of which the most prominent was Apple – not least because it was always at the top of alphabetical lists. Curry and Hauser chose the name Acorn.
CPU and Science of Cambridge were selling similar products into similar markets, and like Sinclair, Curry realised that although there was clearly a huge interest in computing, the ‘boffin’ user base was reaching its limits. There was a charm and a teasingly futuristic feel to their output – the System 1 featured as a prop in the Blake’s 7 BBC TV series – but US products, such as the Apple II and the Commodore Pet, were professionally packaged with built-in keyboards and branded monitors. Beside them, the British kits would be forever trapped in the world of Practical Wireless, and Curry knew it: ‘We realised after a year or so that selling modules that were really intended for the industrial market was not going to get far in the consumer market.’ With their exposed circuitry and the technical know-how required for assembly, kit computers were also forbidding and impractical for the markets with most profit potential: homes and schools.
After his departure from Radionics, Sinclair had lost control of the Newbrain, but the same compact, cost-saving mantra that had driven its development was now echoing around the offices he had taken over in King’s Parade. The magic price point target was £100, psychologically important to consumers, but also fixed in Sinclair’s mind by that prophetic Financial Times article. His vision was of a single, smart box that would overcome the hurdle of high hardware costs by using a cassette recorder for storing programs, a clever trick for a built-in keyboard and, most challengingly, a home television for the display.
Jim Westwood was given the job of making the computer send its pictures to the television through the analogue aerial input. The technology was known, but not at this price point – a modulator that could send a digital image to the analogue scan lines of a home television had never needed a mass market before. But eventually Westwood summoned Sinclair to witness a stable screen that read ‘Jim has done it’, a nod to the BBC’s Jim’ll Fix It programme. It was the first practical demonstration of the way that British players would see their computer games for the next decade.
The rest of the machine was a collection of compromises. It had one kilobyte of memory – four times that of the MK14, but tiny compared to its American rivals. The processor was so slow that the screen went black when it was asked to do anything at all. And the miraculous money-saving keyboard consisted of a pressure pad broken up into 96 sections, each representing a key, which had to be pressed with real force to provoke a response. It worked, and had three parts instead of the hundreds of a fully moving keyboard, but was only barely usable.
The computer was finished within Sinclair’s bold six-month timeframe, though, and it would sell for the uniquely desirable price of £99.95. A young industrial designer called Rick Dickinson had devised a sleek white plastic case, about the size of a hardback book, which made it look like a slice of the future. Sinclair called it the ZX80.
For as long as computer games have existed, the ‘platforms’ – the computers or consoles that play them – have determined the boundaries of the medium. Most obviously this flows from the technology, as graphical and computational power lifts games or holds them back. But the platforms also segment the games’ players – once they own a particular computer, they are locked into buying only the games that computer can play. This affiliation with a particular platform often feels deeply personal, like supporting a football team, and their chosen machine can subtly influence a gamer’s habits and tastes.
Another, hidden distinction between platforms happens under the hood, one that was especially true of the computers used in 1980s Britain. Only a handful of microprocessors were widely available to computer manufacturers at the time, and even fewer that would make sense used in a home computer. Machines that looked entirely different on the outside could have identical technology at their heart and, wrinkles aside, converting a game from one of these to another would be quite straightforward. But where the processors were different, the game’s programmer may as well have been rewriting from scratch – the step change in effort could be the difference between a couple of days of tweaking and months of hair-tearing frustration. The boundary lines that gamers saw between machines could look very different from a developer’s perspective.
The early eighties computer games industry – the ‘8-bit’ era – is a story of two chips: MOS Technology’s powerful but pricey 6502 chip, and Zilog’s cheaper workhorse, the Z80. The choice between them was often made at the whim of a developer, or due to the hard realities of cost. But each individual decision would help set the landscape of British computer games for a decade.
Sinclair’s ZX80 was not named by combining the year of its launch with letters that sounded futuristic, although that impression was a happy one. The name was actually chosen by Rick Dickinson and his team to convey that it was powered by a Z80 chip – with an extra, unknown ingredient.
For Clive Sinclair, that ingredient might as well have been success. He was back in the game, and his marketing was shameless. Adverts boasted that the ZX80 was ‘powerful enough to run a nuclear power station’, which even then required a very indulgent analysis to accept. He also made sure that the public knew that his children had helped him test it. This was a consumer product that looked smart in the home – it sat neatly under the family television as a tool, a conversation piece, or a mark of aspiration. For all that it invited hours of lying on your stomach jabbing fiercely at keys, it also opened a portal to a new world.
Sinclair’s company had a secretive culture, so the team at Acorn found out about the unit at the same time as the rest of the country. By then, Curry and designer Nick Toop had been developing Acorn’s own machine, called the Atom, which was much closer in appearance to the American ‘beige boxes’. This was Curry’s intention: ‘The Atom was in many ways like the Apple II. It was smaller and cheaper, and had more bits to go with it as well.’
The Atom was a reduced version of the 6502 based System range of computers that Acorn had been selling to the hobbyist market, packaged into a consumer-friendly machine complete with high-resolution graphics, colour and sound. It appealed particularly to schools: it was a tough unit with a full-sized keyboard, and, for the first time on a home computer, it could be networked using technology that Acorn had devised for sending data around its own offices. The Atom cost more than twice as much as the ZX80, and the education market was still tiny, but some schools – mainly fee-paying – could justify the extra expense of a computer that looked as if it would withstand an onslaught of children, especially if the teacher could manage all of the computers in the classroom. And for all Sinclair’s hype, even a cursory glance revealed that the Atom could do much more than its flickering, blocky rival.
Acorn arranged to launch its new computer at an electronics show in 1980. Two months earlier, Curry had secured a commitment from a supplier in Hong Kong to have the first cases ready within six weeks – much faster than the twenty it would have taken in the UK. By the deadline, having heard nothing, he flew over only to discover that they hadn’t even started. Curry stayed in Hong Kong and refused to leave until the cases were finished. They were ready just in time – he took the prototypes straight from the airport to the exhibition.
Sinclair Research and Acorn were now clear rivals. Both sold their products by mail order, as cost-saving soldering kits for enthusiasts, or ready-made for consumers. They looked to the same home and schools markets, segmented by price but not much else. And vitally, each machine had a small version of the programming language BASIC built into its hardware. Sophie Wilson had written an elegant, compact form for Acorn. Sinclair had outsourced the job to a company called Nine Tiles – which probably did the best job possible given the fierce deadline, although the end result was still visibly compromised. BASIC was famously easy to program, but notoriously slow at running the code once written. On the Atom, this meant a more sluggish appearance. On the ZX80, you might hear a faint buzz, the machine would be as hot as ever, and then the screen would switch off and ignore you altogether.
Sinclair often seemed to target price before quality, and the ZX80 was certainly prone to overheating – some apparent ventilation vents were in fact painted on. But the Atom also had problems: a key component was designed to hang upside down in the case, and as it heated through normal use, it would slide gently out. And both companies were discovering that allowing inexperienced consumers to build their machines from kits threw up huge numbers of support issues. Furber recalls that one despairing customer wrote to Acorn to say that they knew that chips were heat sensitive so they had glued them in instead, ‘and it still didn’t work!’
Acorn had also adopted Sinclair’s trick of using a cassette interface. Tapes were cheap and common, but incredibly frustrating: saving and loading took minutes and could still fail, while finding the file on the tape meant listening for gaps in the computer’s recordings, which to the human ear sounded like ungodly screeches. But tapes could also be made at home and swapped and sold, and for the first time computer manufacturers started to see a retail software industry grow around their products.
Steve Furber’s only published game was for the Atom. It was a clone of the arcade game Asteroids that he had written at home on a 6502 machine he had built himself. It was quickly seized upon for the first ‘Games Pack’ tape released by a company called Acornsoft, which was run by the author of Moon Lander for the MK14, David Johnson-Davis. Founded with Acorn’s blessing in 1979 to maintain a supply of software, Acornsoft would claim many obscure achievements – the country’s first ‘zombie’ game, for instance, which appeared on its second Games Pack soon after the Atom’s launch.
Meanwhile, ZX80 coders had found ways to coax real-time graphics out of a machine that was already famous for blanking its users. Amongst these pioneers was a company called Macronics based in a suburban Solihull house. By skipping BASIC and talking straight to the processor using machine code, Ken Macdonald and Ron Bissell developed intricate timing and hardware tricks that made gaming possible. And they were interestingly open about their technology. ZX80 owners wanting to play Macronics’ primitive version of Space Invaders had a choice: it was available as a pre-recorded cassette or, for a pound less, as a sheet of paper with a code listing for the user to type in.
Sinclair Research and Acorn were first into the consumer market, but by the end of 1980 other manufacturers were actively contemplating similar moves. It was an exciting, ultramodern industry, which had only seen huge growth, and there was every expectation that a giant market remained untapped. Home computing hadn’t yet ‘broken out’ – it was still a niche, mail-order speciality bubbling away in a corner of the public’s consciousness. So when the BBC announced that it would be choosing a single machine to use in a prime-time television series to teach computing, both Chris Curry and Clive Sinclair leapt on the news as the biggest marketing opportunity their young industry had ever seen. And so did everybody else.
If the decade of strife fell upon Britain’s industries unevenly, it’s fair to say that the BBC was amongst the more insulated. Predominantly based in London, and midway through the 10-year cycle for which its funding was set, it remained functionally independent of the wider, increasingly gloomy, economic climate. It was not untainted, though; for all its belief in its own lack of bias, on some issues it felt a self-conscious need to lead the nation’s agenda. Having raised the question of the changes heralded by the microchip, the BBC felt compelled to provide an answer.
So did the government. Soon after the Horizon programme, ITV had run its own series, called The Mighty Micro, which had delivered more optimistic predictions, and between them the two broadcasters had spurred the Manpower Services Commission, an autonomous government-funded body, to fill the terrifying silence that Edward Goldwyn’s programme had pointed to.
Apparently, Goldwyn had been right about the government’s ignorance, because the MSC went straight back to the BBC to help it investigate. It gave the Corporation some money to help with the budget, which arrived at the Continuing Education Department and fell into the hands of producers David Allen and Robert Albury, who put it to good use on a worldwide fact-finding tour.
If it was a junket, it was an effective one. Most developed countries turned out to have relationships with the microchip far in advance of the UK’s – not only in the United States and Japan, but also Germany and Sweden. The BBC’s line changed from panic to ambition. Allen’s conclusion was that the country needed a public awareness campaign, not only about computers, but also how to program them. ‘If we wanted to democratise the technology, rather than be dominated by it as some people seemed to think, we needed people to experience it and to control it,’ he says. ‘And in those days that meant programming. It was very much a hands-on philosophy.’
Fortunately, programming didn’t require an absurdly advanced display of computer literacy. Both the British machines, and most others from around the world, treated coding as the natural first task of a computer owner. When you turned them on, the screen presented you with a few words of information and a blinking cursor – an invitation to write code.
Unless you were a fan of obscurities, there were two ways home computers could be programmed in 1980: the hardcore, ‘next to the metal’ language of machine code, sometimes called ‘assembler’ after the tool used to create it; and BASIC, which was the language of choice for the beginner. BASIC allowed simple tasks to be described in order, made repetition easy, and enabled complexity to grow quickly from simple building blocks.
Following his tour of global computing, David Allen embarked on three projects. He made a thoughtful documentary series called The Silicon Factor, which eschewed doom-mongering and won a prize at the New York Film Festival. He bought a TRS-80 – an American home computer – and began to learn BASIC, although he wasn’t particularly impressed with this version of the language, or any other on the market. And he co-wrote a report for the BBC, the Manpower Services Commission, and ultimately, the Department of Trade and Industry, which recommended that the BBC create a Computer Literacy Campaign, complete with all the books and courses that should go with it.
The report had been commissioned in the dying months of James Callaghan’s embattled Labour government, and was first read by outgoing MPs before the 1979 general election. But the new Conservative administration and its far-sightedly titled Minister for Information Technology, Kenneth Baker, received it surprisingly favourably. Perhaps because the involvement of the BBC seemed to be minimal at this stage, the parties least interested were the manufacturers.
Allen had asked John Coll, an electronics whiz teaching at Oundle School in the Midlands, to help explore the requirements for an educational computer. Principal among these was an invention Coll called ‘Adopted BASIC for Computers’, an idealised, utopian and very powerful version of the language. The manufacturers, who were invited to talk to the DTI at the BBC, proved more than resistant, as Allen found: ‘We said: “Can you implement this?” And they said: “Woah, given a lot of money!”’ Some weren’t interested at all – why should they spend this money and resource on something that would help their rivals?
It was a false start, but one that would be overcome via the application of a rather unfashionable idea: state intervention. It was decided that the BBC should sponsor an entirely new computer as part of the course. Both the Corporation and the government were sensitive about backing a commercial enterprise, but the DTI broke the deadlock. After all, Britain had a thriving young computer industry – why not take advantage of its expertise? And one machine that had emerged from the East Anglian hotbed of genius appeared to be the perfect candidate.
The Newbrain.
After the breakup of Sinclair Radionics, the NEB had sold the viable businesses, and spun-off research projects of varying degrees of credibility into independent companies. The Newbrain, Sinclair’s first attempt at entering the home computer market, had been given to Newbury Laboratories where, with delicious synchronicity, it became the Newbury Newbrain. Freed from Clive Sinclair’s energetic urgings, work had continued at an unhurried pace under designers Mike Wakefield and Basil Smith. And, as Newbury was still largely publicly funded, the DTI was comfortable that promoting its version of the Newbrain would avoid the charge that the government was giving preferential treatment to any one of the new technology entrepreneurs.
Chris Curry found out about the BBC’s new computer on the BBC news. It was a fait accompli – this was the way the Corporation was going and, for a short while, it pulled him and the rest of the industry warily together. ‘I rang Clive, who was now a competitor, of course, and said, “What do you know of this?”’ Curry recalls. ‘He said he had never heard of it. I said, “Well a television programme is the biggest advertising campaign you could possibly get – something has to be done.”’
In fact, the deal was less assured than was being reported. John Coll’s specifications far outstripped Newbury’s plans, as they had those of every other manufacturer approached. But by now all the parties were committed. And crucially, the BBC had started developing its courses and programmes, which, with the certainty of a national broadcaster, it had scheduled for the following year.
Winter arrived – but the Newbrain didn’t.
Curry visited London on a fact-finding mission: ‘I went off to the Department of Trade and Industry to find out what was going on, and then to the BBC . . . There was clearly some mixed feelings at the BBC, because the Newbury Newbrain didn’t appear to do a lot of the things they wanted to do with it, and it wasn’t ready, and wasn’t ideal in various ways.’
Then and there, Curry told them to open the project out to other computer makers, but the BBC was in the driving seat, and it was still optimistic. For six months it pursued the Newbrain, but the designers couldn’t bring it up to the BBC’s specification, or down to its price point.
Allen remembers the period as one of desperation and despondency. Between Christmas and New Year, he and his team gave up on Newbury Laboratories, and drew up a brand-new specification to pass around other manufacturers. In the face of this setback they consoled themselves with the thought that, since the manufacturing run would be no more than ten or twelve thousand, at least the BBC Continuing Education Department wouldn’t be making anyone rich.
Curry and Sinclair had each seen the way the computer market had jumped in size with every new appeal to the consumer sector, and both men knew that a computer endorsed by ‘Auntie Beeb’ would win the confidence of parents and teachers. The computer the BBC chose could be very profitable.
They each had a machine that they thought could do the job. In 1981, Sinclair Research updated the ZX80. The designers had considered calling the new machine the Series B or Series II, but eventually embraced their accidental nomenclature and released the jet-black ZX81. It represented only a small refinement; the forthcoming ZX82 would be the real leap forward, a graphics powerhouse, with a sound chip and a massive 48 kilobytes of memory. And this time, a keyboard with moving keys.
Acorn was also in the early stages of designing a ‘professional Atom’, which, with a brand consistency that would appeal to its science-aware market, was christened the ‘Proton’. But the name was almost the only decision that had been made about it. There were divisions throughout Acorn over the form the machine should take – the technology, the specifications, and even the target market. Again Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber were tasked with designing the Proton, but they found themselves juggling the different demands of those advocating ‘super workstations, super home computers, and everything in between’. Even the core question of the processor was up for grabs. The 6502 had worked fine, but Acorn was a hive of technologists endlessly buzzing with alternative opinions.
Wilson literally engineered a truce. The new computer would have the reliable 6502 at the core, but also include a ‘tube’ that could hook in other – yet to be decided – processors, so the two could work in harmony. It was both a compromise and an inspiration, and another ‘butterfly effect’ decision that would contribute to creating a tsunami in the wider technology world.
Early in 1981, Acorn and Sinclair Research officially learned the industry’s open secret – that the Newbrain had faltered and any and every computer manufacturer with a British headquarters was now in the running to replace it. Allen and Coll’s specification was sent out to anyone who wanted it. Slender but specific, in two pages of bullet points it described a utopian machine of state-of-the-art power and myriad features: full positive keyboard, high-resolution colour graphics, sophisticated sound, both cassette and floppy disc drive interfaces, ports for controlling every conceivable peripheral device – it was easy to see why Newbury had found itself falling short of the BBC’s vision. Most important of all, the chosen machine would need to handle Coll’s souped-up ABC BASIC.
Nobody had a design that matched the aspiration but, in their different ways, the companies tried to satisfy it. Sinclair looked at the cost of building this Platonic form of computer, and was convinced that he could bend the BBC’s will to his. As well as having advanced plans, he had another, powerful weapon: he had secured the industry’s first deal with a retail chain, striking up a relationship with WH Smith, which was looking to diversify from books and magazines. Soon, ZX81s would be available for £69.99 at shops throughout the country, and the same could be true for a Sinclair BBC.
Acorn, on the other hand, had no demonstrable hardware at all. The spec had arrived a few days ahead of a visit from Allen and his team and, as it seemed to Curry and Hauser, all they had with which to greet him was conversation.
There is a legend in the British computer industry about what happened next. Hermann Hauser rang Steve Furber and asked him if what Allen wanted was possible. The answer was a firm ‘no’. So, he rang Sophie Wilson with the same question, and received the same answer. Then he rang Furber back with a simple lie: that Wilson had said it was plausible. Furber rose to the bait and promised it could be done. Hauser then passed this news on to Wilson, who decided that if Furber could do it, so could she. The design race was afoot.
The story is more or less accurate. Hauser enjoys recounting it, but Curry is more circumspect: ‘It was fairly common practice, yes it’s true,’ he admits. ‘And people knew that it was being done to them. It was not enormously crafty on that occasion . . . it did happen, but it happened all the time, actually.’
Working around the clock, Furber, Wilson and the team managed to construct an embryonic Proton ready for the BBC’s visit. Allen’s team arrived fresh from seeing a company called Tangerine, where they had seen the innards of a computer that two years later would become the Oric 1. Then, at the vital moment of the BBC’s arrival, Acorn’s newborn device stopped working.
It’s another mythic event from the birth of the industry, but this time even Curry concedes the truth contained real drama: ‘That was quite a nail biter when the BBC came to look at it, but everything was met.’ Not working though. It was Hauser who, in desperation or for lack of any other choice, cut the earth wire to the machine. The wire protected their electronics from overload, and severing it could have been a fatal moment for their equipment, but instead it sprang to life. In retrospect, Curry can afford to be sanguine about this nerve-racking moment. ‘We had a deadline, and nothing was working until the last possible moment, which was all true, but then that’s the nature of things. It’s always the case,’ he says.
The BBC liked the machine, and Allen’s team liked Acorn. The company had the atmosphere of a PhD lab with commercial energy: Hauser an inspirational ideas guy, Wilson evidently brilliant. ‘They were,’ says Allen, ‘an impressive outfit. Quite a high-powered group of university people. It was very much “above the shop in the centre of Cambridge”. We were pretty green, but they seemed to be a nice bunch. They were very open to ideas, and very enthusiastic.’
After lunch, Allen’s team visited Sinclair Research. Unlike at Acorn, they didn’t get to meet the designers. Instead, they were faced with the famous and fired-up managing director, full of passion for his new machine, but, from Allen’s perspective, with rather less respect for his visitors’ efforts. ‘“Call this a spec?”’ Allen recalls Sinclair saying, before going through their list with a critical, cost-conscious eye. ‘He said things like: “Well, we have got a positive keyboard”, and he waved the Sinclair Spectrum keyboard at us, which is a flexible rubber thing.’
The BBC didn’t respond well to the financial argument. One of its advisers was Mike McLean of the Electronic Times, who was a fan of Sinclair, but even he had to admit that some of the entrepreneur’s products had been tainted with a poor reputation for quality, and always because they had been engineered down to a price.
As for whether the Spectrum could have cut it as the BBC’s machine, Allen is unambiguous: ‘No. Not as we saw it. What he [Sinclair] might have developed it into is another matter. But the thing about Acorn is that they had a co-operative spirit: we’ll meet you, we’ll evolve our thing in your direction. That was quite important, I think.’
The BBC made its assessment in the following weeks based on a full analysis of the technology, its adherence to the specifications, and the manufacturers’ track records. As well as considering the two Cambridge companies, it had seen efforts from their neighbours Tangerine, and visited Dragon in Wales and Research Machines in Oxford. But the decision kept swinging towards Acorn.
It was hugely significant that Wilson’s BASIC could match the BBC’s needs, and that the Proton’s design allowed for plugging in a Z80 with which to run exotic American software such as CP/M – a popular operating system. It was similarly impressive when Acorn devised a way to build a Teletext decoder into the machine, meeting the BBC’s request to download software through the spare parts of a television signal. But perhaps what mattered most to the final decision was that, at the end of that first day of meeting all the manufacturers, the visiting BBC team had chosen to go to the pub with the Acorn team.
Then, the Newbrain reanimated.
On the day that David Allen’s team were to choose their manufacturer, Newbury arrived at the BBC with – at last – the final, working hardware. ‘Newbury turned up saying, “We did it! We’ve got this!”’ Allen recalls. ‘And they plugged it in, and it didn’t work. It was terribly tragic, it was very sad.’ And too late. Acorn had fulfilled every aspect of Allen’s dream, even as it had become more ambitious. Nothing else under consideration came close.
And so Acorn’s Proton became the BBC Micro and launched in late 1981. It had a large, beige case and a rock-steady keyboard. It was so reliable that in places such as railway stations and betting shops the machine remained in constant use for a decade. And when a government scheme called ‘Micros in Schools’ subsidised the education market, Acorn’s robust and incredibly highly specified design became the computer of choice in Britain’s classrooms.
And every BBC Micro came loaded with an incredible asset. If there is a single tool that opened up computing in Britain in the eighties, and that laid the foundations for its vibrant games scene, it is BBC BASIC. Wilson’s implementation of Coll’s specification was swift and elegant, and while the BBC Micro was rarer in people’s homes, most children had access to one at school. When first turned on, it had a formal feel, with a brief list of its credentials followed by the blinking cursor politely waiting for an instruction. To the uninitiated pupil, it could at first appear to be part of the elevated world of technology, as exciting or daunting as that could be.
In practice, it was a benign teacher: it repaid a small amount of effort with a huge amount of fun. The cursor was a prompt to enter a command in the BBC Micro’s default programming language, which was an unusually intuitive and friendly kind of BASIC. The computer came with a thick manual that could teach everything to the most interested pupils, but there were simpler tricks that everyone seemed to know. Typing the word PRINT followed by a message made the computer repeat that message on the following line:
> PRINT “I AM SKILL”
I AM SKILL
Already the computer had been pulled from science fiction to matter-of-fact. Pupils sitting in a classroom, who had only seen such devices on television, could control the BBC Micro simply by copying their friends. From there it was just a tiny step to writing a program through the addition of line numbers:
> 10 PRINT “I AM SKILL”
> 20 GOTO 10
Type RUN, and the screen would fill with your message:
I AM SKILL
I AM SKILL
I AM SKILL
I AM SKILL
And so it would repeat, until someone pressed the Escape key.
Within minutes, any child could have a first taste of the power of programming, and it seemed so easy. Soon they would add colours to their message, double its height, and invite other users to enter their own message and play with it. Later they might learn to turn on a graphics mode and draw pictures, pixel by pixel, or use the computer’s immensely fast – for its hardware – line-drawing routine to outline shapes. In a way that was extraordinarily close to its design ambitions, the BBC’s project had created a nation of lunchtime programmers.
As Curry had predicted, the BBC endorsement changed the fate of Acorn, helping it stand out as the market filled with a dozen rivals. Furber thinks it might even have saved the company: ‘Acorn was a small start-up that nobody had heard of, but if the BBC was going with it, then people had confidence that it wasn’t going to disappear overnight. The only other brand with this kind of visibility was Sinclair.’ It was effective marketing – the BBC Micro, in its various forms, sold one and a half million units.
The ZX82, however, became the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and Britain’s bestselling computer. At £125, or £175 for the top-end model, the ZX Spectrum was cheap – half the price of its rivals. It was a bargain for its market, and the cost-saving design was inspired, but the compromises showed. The ZX Spectrum came with its own version of BASIC, and although its creator Steve Vickers had done a good job, he was boxed in by the architecture of its ZX80 origins. It was cumbersome, and so slow that Computing Today magazine shortened its ‘benchmark’ speed tests for those readers who ‘might like to read the review before the Christmas holidays.’ Its keyboard was made of an odd rubber, widely but unkindly known as ‘dead flesh’, and it was physically unstable, especially the early models. Although the computer could display sixteen colours, only two could be shown in any small area of the screen – the resulting ‘colour clash’ saw overlapping objects glitchily flicking between colours as they moved around. Additional memory was fitted as an extra board ‘floating’ inside the original, and the power supply units were known for dying in a pop of smoke. When Sinclair had been making pocket gadgets for a technophile market, the compromises required for a compact design made sense, and high failure rates were tolerated by the consumers. For some reason, the same philosophy of shaving off millimetres in size was carried over to a computer that would sit on the floor of a living room, and quality paid the price. By the end of its life, the ZX Spectrum had sold five million units, but sometimes return rates had been as high as thirty per cent.
A story – recounted by Furber and whispered by others – about the ZX Spectrum’s cost-cutting went round the industry: ‘We became aware of the legend of the Sinclair blue spot return system,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if this is true, but the rumour was that if you sent back a Spectrum because it didn’t work, all they did was stick a blue spot on the bottom and send it out to another customer. And if it came back with a blue spot on, it got thrown in the bin.’
But none of the machine’s shortcomings mattered. The ZX Spectrum was for sale in every WH Smith across the land and at a price that made sense. Moreover, it would soon develop its biggest selling point: the largest selection of games for any machine in the world, bar none.
Meanwhile, as the BBC Micro became the home of educational software in Britain, inevitably some found that the medium came to reflect its message: safe programs that taught with the careful pace of a diligent school master and in the earnest primary colours of children’s books. The ZX Spectrum had a racier, even grungier, image – it was the people’s computer, where an educational package was a subterfuge for bringing a games machine into the home. It would shamelessly entertain, while the BBC Micro, with its backing from the national broadcaster and a natural place in schools and the homes of teachers, never shook off an aura of worthiness.
The market became divided between the cost-conscious gamers, and those who wanted a computer to teach, or to learn, or who took comfort in the respectable endorsement of the BBC. Other machines grabbed tens of per cent of market share, but for half a decade nothing knocked these two off the pole position of their respective markets, even while they were jostling with each other. Or, as on one infamous occasion, when they came to blows.
In the run up to Christmas 1984, Acorn ran a provocative advert that pointed out the high failure rate of the ZX Spectrum, and Clive Sinclair was infuriated. According to Michael Jeacock, a newspaper columnist who happened to be in the Baron of Beef pub in Cambridge at the time, the entrepreneur launched himself at Curry, allegedly shouting, ‘You fucking buggering shit-bucket!’ But in Curry’s version, told to technology journalist Ellie Seymour, the only real fight happened later, in the wine bar Shades across the road. ‘He came up behind me and put his hands round my face, his hand went in my eye and it made me see red. I spun round and swung him a light blow.’
The fight formed the denouement of Micro Men, a 2009 BBC drama about Sinclair’s rivalry with Acorn. Curry was a consultant on the script, although he chose not to watch it. ‘Poor Clive was made to look like a lunatic,’ he says. ‘Which he isn’t.’ The altercation didn’t appear to damage the pair’s friendship though – weeks later Curry was a guest at Sinclair’s New Year’s party.
Clive Sinclair was knighted for his ubiquitous computers. They owed their success to the games market, but like a rock star known for a single hit, Sinclair comes across as tired of being associated with this legacy. He rarely discusses the Spectrum now, and it seems that he never really forgave the BBC, or believed that its decision was fair. ‘The BBC had made up their minds before they spoke to us,’ he said in 1989. ‘I think that was one of the most outrageous steps in the whole home computer business. The BBC shouldn’t have given a contract to anybody, but if they did do it, it should have been an open bid, and it wasn’t. We said we could have made the machine that they wanted for half the price that Acorn did, and they just didn’t want to know. They were making a cut and that was that.’
Perhaps if Sinclair had won the BBC contract, or even if he had never split with Curry at all, Britain would have emerged from the eighties with a single, strong computer brand with real survival power. But the masters the two men served were so different – the value conscious mass market and teaching programming in schools – that a rapprochement would have involved too great a sacrifice. As it is, the BBC intervened just at the point when the technology was coalescing around a viable consumer product, one resistant to obsolescence. In the process, the Corporation, Sinclair and Acorn established the landscape for UK computing for nearly a decade, and trained a generation of the most influential games creators in the world.