Year: April 1982 Manufacturer: Sinclair Original Cost: £125-175 (dependent on size of memory included)
Clive Sinclair, known affectionately as Uncle Clive by his fans and followers, was the embodiment of the British boffin inventor with his bald pate, thin-rimmed spectacles, tidy ginger beard and his determination to retain freedom of action and choice. He built his company and reputation in the 1960s, by reverse engineering the latest, most expensive consumer electronics and releasing his own versions at a fraction of the cost of the originals.
By the early 1980s he’d enjoyed a rich mixture of successes and failures: while his pocket calculators had turned an exclusive technology into a ubiquitous one, his digital Black Watch had almost brought about bankruptcy through defective returns. Sinclair’s approach to business was that of the purebred inventor, with his ambition for each invention straining no further than hoping to fund the next.
It was from the ashes of another of Sinclair’s failures that his greatest success was born, one that kick-started the British video game industry and inspired the first generation of so-called bedroom coders. By the early 1980s Sinclair was no stranger to home computing. His ZX80 machine, with its extraordinarily low price point of £99.95 (£79.99 if the consumer opted
for the kit version, which they could solder together themselves), had brought computing to the masses, fast becoming the UK’s biggest-selling home computer. While the Commodore PET and Apple II were still prohibitively expensive, the ZX80 and its more powerful successor the ZX81 were affordable to most households, and the first British-developed games began to appear.
In 1981 the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation put out a tender to computer manufacturers inviting pitches to build a standardized computer platform for the country. Sinclair pitched for the contract to build the BBC’s machine but lost out to rival Acorn Computers, a computer firm founded by former Sinclair employee Chris Curry. This failure only steeled Uncle Clive’s resolve and he launched a savage attack on the corporation, saying: “[The BBC] should not be making computers, any more than they should be making BBC cars or BBC toothpaste.”
But Sinclair had more than mere words for a response. Fuelled by disappointment, he started work on the ZX Spectrum, a computer he wanted to release at a fraction of the size and cost of the rival BBC Micro. Released in April 1982 at a starting cost of £125, the Spectrum fast outsold both the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro. It was even singled out by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as an example of the UK’s technological pre-eminence during a visit from the Japanese premier.
Sinclair’s intention was for the spectrum to be an affordable multipurpose computer in the home. However, thanks to its architecture and the ease with which games could be programmed, it was soon defined by interactive entertainment. 226 British-made Spectrum games launched in the console’s first 8 months, with no fewer than 1,188 released in 1983.
Almost overnight, the Spectrum spawned the British video game industry, with 95 new game studios opening in 1982, a figure that expanded to 458 in 1983.
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