Sir Clive a computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair: “I don’t use a computer at all” | Technology | The Observer
Ah yes, I was lucky not to be able to afford one of these and didn’t get a computer of my own until the PC. My first Linux computer was a 386 with 40MB of memory. But then I had access to departmental and work Unix computers all along, and even the predecessor of the Internet, the Arpanet. So I missed a lot of the PEEKing and POKEing (sound rude, don’t they) that BASIC enthusiasts were writing to do things that were not supposed to be possible.
ken yap wrote:
> Ah yes, I was lucky not to be able to afford one of these
i’m happy to learn from the article “Sinclair helped transform
Cambridge into the computing capital of the world”…because i had no
idea it WAS the computing capital of the world…as by the time i had
heard of the Sinclair ZX80 i’d already done (in the '70s) a good bit
of terminal work connected to one of several IBM mainframes in the
building–doing ‘strategic mission area analysis’ on a military base
in Omaha Nebraska…which absolutely was not the computing capital
of the world but certainly with the several mainframes, HP and other
mini-computers and other magic around i’d guess that base had more raw
computing power that Cambridge and London combined…
but, never mind…i bought a ZX81…the best thing about it was the
hype that sold it…it was pure worthless…total waste of
money…for me, that is…
> didn’t get a computer of my own until the PC. My first Linux
> computer was a 386 with 40MB of memory.
that is a typo right (4MB of memory)? i ask because my first machine
was a 33 mhz 486 with 4MB of RAM and a 100MB hard disk…it had four
memory slots and came new with four 1MB sticks i bought 4 sticks of
4MB each and paid a LOT for them (sorry, i don’t remember how much,
maybe $200 USD each stick, or $50 per meg) i do remember that i had
more RAM than anyone i knew at the time that had their own machine
(this was about '92 i guess)…
mine was far superior to what i had in the office, a 8088 with 1MB
total memory, and a 40MB hard disk…which ran WordPerfect 5.1 (for
DOS) fast as lightening!!
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I never owned one either, but the novelty hooked a lot of young customers. Don’t forget this article was recalling a new pioneering concept - the affordable home computer. In that context and from a popular journalistic point of view, Cambridge could have been seen as the home computing capital of the world at the time. After all, there wasn’t anything else competing at the price. Nobody I knew in the computer industry bought one unless they gave in to their children whose friend had got one.
IIRC, Sinclair went from hero to zero when he became obsessed with his invention of the electric C5 car. Imagine driving that on the road next to a large truck or bus - you would soon find out what it’s like to be a hedgehog or other small wildlife on the road, i.e. unseen and splat!
Never had one either, started too late. My first was a 8086 at a turbo speed of 25Mhz, it had 640 KB, no hdd, a “real floppy” drive and a green and black monitor. Historical remark: “So DOS loaded OK, but now what?”.
Sinclair can claim to have created the atmosphere in which it was possible for ARM to develop but he wasn’t the only pioneer entrepreneur not to be able to use a computer. Alan Sugar, who was responsible for marketing the Amstrad computers which pioneered the use of generic rather than specific chips and led to a major drop in the price of personal computers, did not use a computer. His business was destroyed by the disaster of MS-DOS 4, compared with which the launch of Vista was extremely smooth and unproblematic.
No, no typo, I came rather late to the Linux game because I had access to Unix at work so this would have been the mid-90s. I seem to remember that I scrounged a couple of 16MB sticks from somewhere and had a couple of 4MB sticks. Then I bought a 386DX40 mobo. Or maybe it was only 32MB. But certainly not 4MB. I was rather lucky to have that RAM. Then I got a second hand SCSI CD burner which worked quite well with an Adaptec 1542 again from sales. Spent too much time hanging around disposal sales. These days anything you pick off the shelf is way overpowered. lol!
ken yap wrote:
> But certainly not 4MB. I was rather lucky to have that RAM
i’ll say! that much in the early to mid-90s was quite expensive…
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In 1990 the unix machine I administered, an NCR Tower 650 with external disk cabinet, needed an exta 4 MB of RAM. The service guy came from Amsterdam with a 4 MB memory module board, in -15°C. His car heater had stopped working, his hands were freezing off, so he asked me to take the module out of the package. We saw a spark flying as soon as he had his hand near it. His comment: “$ 23.800 gone”.
BTW the thing ran upto 2001 with only 16MB of RAM, 30 users connected !
Back in 1980 did a drapery manufacturer software on a TI-PC with 256KB ram and it did well until a break-in in the mid 1980’s. They decided they didn’t want to replace the whole machine just upgrade to 640KB ram and add a harddisk to replace the dual floppies. Where there were plenty of machines with 4MB to 16MB available and 20 harddisk for under $2000 the memory add-on module from TI for the TI-PC was still priced at $6500 for just another 512MB of which only 384MB would be accessible on the machine.
That was the old Guilder, which would have been about 2 to a €. no? Still, considering inflation over the years, quite a lot of money.
I recall the “Sinclair”, and it was one of the computers I first considered buying from December 1980 to April 1981 before I purchased my first computer. I was keen to obtain a computer, because of the mathematics required in the engineering field where I was working, and also because of a keen interest in computers since when I was an engineering student from 1972-1976.
Actually I had pretty well decided not to buy a PC back then, as the computer I wanted was an Apple-II+, and new they cost something like $4000 Canadian$ back then. Then in April 1981 a friend of my brother’s offered me their 6-month old Apple-II+ for $2500 Canadian$, and I could not resist. Thats incredibly expensive by todays prices.
What did I get for that price?
An Apple-II+ with its 6502 processor, 48KBytes of RAM, and two 8" !! floppy drives, each with 128KBytes of RAM storage. No monitor. I had to use an RF modulator to hook up the Apple-II+ to a TV. And frugal bachelor I was back then, I had to buy a TV since I did NOT own one. I was a book worm back then, and so I ended up reading less books and spending more time learning about computers. Of course Apple-DOS was not the best OS for that. And I still did NOT watch TV on that new TV (bought for the computer). My friends all thought me nuts! Maybe they were right. :\
My brother , who worked full time in VAX/VMS/Unix machines back then, told me that Apple had way more computing power than I would ever need ! rotfl!
In 1982 I upgraded the computer, by purchasing a Microsoft Z80 CP/M card, and an Epson (?) dot matrix printer. Printers were INCREDIBLY expensive in those days. The printer made a massive difference in the usability of the computer. In 1985 I joined Fidonet net (which had bridges to Internet), and was suddenly into email and mailing lists and connecting with people all over the world. I then played with CP/M until 1987 when my other brother gave me his used IBM PC (an old 8086). Looking back, buying that CP/M card was a smart move, as CP/M commands and CP/M structure is much closer to Unix/Linux than Apple DOS.
It was not until 1991 that I purchased my first new PC, which was a 486. MacIntoshes were far too expensive back then. I can’t remember how much RAM in that PC, but I do recall I also purchased an NEC 15" colour monitor and an HP-Laser Jet-2 (I may have model # wrong) laser printer. I also was hooked more directly into the Internet then through a local university. Suddenly, my computing was in a different league.
Despite this early PC introduction, it was not until 1998 that I finally moved to Linux. I’ve typically been very slow with these things.
I agree with you about CP/M; I used CP/M2.2 at work from 1980 but when I splashed out on my own computer in 1986 it came with CP/M3 which had come out just after PCs with MSDOS and so never made it into the business market.
When I was doing my computing course in 1986, what the lecturer said about the principles of computing made entire sense in terms of how CP/M3 worked and, when I first used Linux in 2000, the ease with which I could drop into the command line and do things immediately reminded me of how easy CP/M commands were. It felt like I was coming back to real computing!
I forgot to mention, the reason I moved from the Z80 CP/M to the IBM DOS (mostly the same as MS-DOS) on the old 8086 from the Z80 was because that 8086 PC had an 8087 arithmetic processor, making it faster in math than the Z80. Plus that 8086 IBM PC of my brother had a 10MByte hard drive, which was MUCH faster than using 128KB 8" floppies. So while I thought the IBM DOS was a step backward from CP/M, the faster arithmetic hardware with more storage (and faster storage) made a significant capability upgrade for me.
Computers changed so fast in those days. While changes are fast and furious today, I don’t think we see the same rapid changes today as we saw then.
I too have fond memories of CP/M.
I also forgot to mention that from 1985 to 1995, I was a user (not an admin, just a user) on Unix and VMS machines. That user experience, coupled with CP/M, made my Linux introduction in 1998 much smoother.
oldcpu wrote:
> My friends all thought me nuts!
you had some real smart friends, back then! 
<g,d & r>
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oldcpu wrote:
> because of a keen interest in computers since when I was an
> engineering student from 1972-1976
LOL! That coincides with the time I spent TEACHING those courses to EE
majors. I started with analog computers in the early 60s then was picked
(by the Air Force) for grad school when I returned from SE Asia - because I
had a computing background! I had never so much as punched a card when I
hit the campus but one learns… Anyway, after grad school I spent several
years on the faculty of the AF Academy teaching basic EE and computer
design - such as it was. Buying a personal computer was out of the
question as it was all I could do to convince the wife that an HP
calculator was necessary (and it cost nearly as much as current laptop).
Anyway, a part of the faculty assignment was designing the hardware and
course material to teach microprocessor design. That lead to other
assignments to design hardware for other AF operations, especially the
blast instrumentation programs. Started with the 4004, 4040, and 8008. We
had advance versions of the 8080 and used that to build our own machines -
it wasn’t a question of buying one as they essentially didn’t exist yet.
You might say I survived the birthing pains of the microprocessor - and
that meant not only designing the machines but doing the circuit layout,
prototype fabrication, and firmware development, all as a “second job” in
addition to classes. I left the AF at the end of that tour and spent a few
years still designing and building application specific machines. That was
a heady time since IBM had yet to exert its’ influence on the
microprocessor field. I think we went through every product from the Intel
8080 thru the Motorola, Mostek, TI, and even RCA product lines as well. It
was boon to me when IBM basically used sheer volume to finally establish
what became the de facto standard with the 5150 - although I still question
the choice of processor and consequent memory result. I preferred the
Motorola architecture for programming and the TI 9900 architecture for
realtime, interrupt driven programming but determined quickly that the best
choice was to go with the flow. Bought a used 5100 - no hard drive yet but
dual floppies - when a client went titsup and off we went. I think I spent
more time diddling with the hardware than actually USING the darned thing
but one contract needed more than DOS offered so a a sharp young tech
working for me talked me into one of the very early UNIX ports. He had
worked at Bell Labs for a couple of years and learned enough about UNIX to
get us to a working system in about 6 months.
After about 1990, microprocessor based machines began to approach commodity
status and I spent more and more time on the system aspect than on
hardware. Besides, programming paid more, especially with the Y2K panic.
Anymore, I hardly touch a soldering iron and I suspect that I would have
the security folks on my tail if I tried to buy the chemicals to produce my
own PCBs anymore. Since retiring (again), it’s all I can do to keep up but
I don’t think the relative rate of change has accelerated all that much -
we just build on a wider base. It’s been an interesting 50 years, to say
the least.
–
Will Honea
Fascinating !
I think many of us have such stories. … Of course cost and other factors in our lives dictated the direction we took, and sometimes using an old (or new) computer at a certain time only made sence in the context of the road of life in which we were following and were we were on the road at that time.
In terms of computer purchases, I don’t know if I would have done much different if I could go back today, except maybe:
- in 1981 fork out the $1000 Cdn or so (which is what it cost then) for a dot matrix printer (instead I waited until 1982);
- spend the “hefty amount” in 1987 to buy an 80287, instead of using the free 8086 based PC my brother gave me.
Had I done that I think my computer knowledge level in the 1988 to 1990 time frame would have been higher, which would have benefitted me tremendously at that time in my career, and possibly would have had a follow on beneficial effect from 1990 to 1998, and I may have had better job opportunities that I could obtain, and I may have moved to Linux sooner. But back then I was young, single, and I definitely had many many other higher priorities than computers and career.
But who knows. Doing historical “what if” views are all highly speculative.
The first computer I owned was an Amstrad PCW. Amstrad created dirt cheap machines that undercut everything else being sold in the UK at the time and eventually bought out Sinclair’s Computer division.
My first computing experiences were some years earlier in a physics lab. On the front end we had two Prime 500s (later 750) mini computers that were connected to to ICL 2976 mainframes. If that was enough you could submit programs to run on IBM 360 or a Cray super computer. We also had a PDP-11 we used for word processing! In a small locked office, if someone allowed you, you could get logon onto JANET and get access to ARPANET and various other networks.
According to Wikipedia the Prime 750 ran
at 1.0 MIPS, had 2-4MB of memory and 1200MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit.
. Back in the early 1980s that was a hot machine! Most people had just gotten off punch cards.
Amstrad was my first too, but the CPC rather than that crippled PCW. Good versatile CP/M machine, with nice 3.5in disks… As someone else mentioned, CP/M wasn’t miles away from Unix which I also used at work, but then I moved to an Atari ST - simply because of its GEM GUI which I needed for graphic design and typesetting, then the only affordable alternative to a Mac.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair. I had heard all of the amazing tings computers could do. But all that stupid thing did was display a flashing
_ . I went back to the store where I bought it and raised Cain. I was told that I had to write my own programs etc etc. . So I went and bought how to books but they all were on microsoft basic. the sinclair basic was a different animal. anyway I figured out how to translate the commands in the books. rewrite everything every time I rebooted. until I figured out how to use a tape deck. Think boot time is slow now. And that only loaded one program. If I wanted to write a program to solve a problem. I already had that problem solved by writing the program. by using the machine code for the Z80. I wrote myself a program that would convert a
command that would for example convert "ld ab nnnn to the proper binary code that the zilog could understand.
At the same time I was reading about C and C++ bould I couldn’t afford a computer that could handle that so I didn’t try. The Timex/ Sinclairs taught me the basics of computing . I did do a little fortran when I had my palm a few years back