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Authors: Rebecca Levene
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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
copyingtheir 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 abargain 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
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
copyingtheir 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 abargain 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
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