How long did the early Sinclair computers take to develop? The Z80 took about nine months from start to finish. One of my sons had been using a Tandy Radio Shack TRS80, which he really loved. I could see how exciting these were for young people but the cost of them was very prohibitive. I felt sure that if a working computer could be made for a reasonable price, then there was potentially a mass market for it. We had to come up with some neat tricks to reduce the costs such as using a TV display instead of a separate monitor and having a tape-recorder in place of a floppy disk drive. Instead of having a video chip and video memory, I used the Z80 processor chip to do everything. I also used the main memory as the only memory.
Are people today incredulous of how impressive 1K Ram was back then? It really is hard to believe how memory is squandered now and how much was achieved with so little in the past. I find it sad that the modern PC is so cumbersome and that such a monopoly exists in the operating system, which allows the monopolist to be less than perfect - to put it mildly. Effectively every secretary is being given a computer worth £1,000 to do the job of a typewriter.
Why did the Cambridge Z88 fail to capture the public's affection in the same way as the Spectrum? By the time of the Z88 the IBM-style PC had become such a standard that it may well have affected our sales. The small display was also a negative feature. In the calculator days, we were caught out because we didn't make the components for the chips and displays. Japan stole the march on Europe with that and we could not buy the components as cheaply as the Japanese manufacturers, so we lost out.
What are you working on? The next product Sinclair Research will be launching is an electric wheelchair drive, which we developed because a lot of people asked when we brought out the Zeta bicycle drive if we could adapt similar, low cost, technology to work for wheelchairs. Other long-term projects include a low-cost, ultra-lightweight, bicycle and an electric vehicle - I am afraid I can't go into detail about it!
Favourite gadgets? I am not enormously into gadgets. I don't even really use a computer on a day-to-day basis. I use a Casio Scientific pocket calculator and my Swiss Army penknife.
Does the UK games industry owe the Spectrum a large debt? I am quite sure that the dominant position of the UK games industry stemmed from the Spectrum. I often have games programmers coming up to me telling me how they started on the Spectrum. It is very pleasing that the early computers triggered such interest.
Visit: www.sinclair-research.co.uk
