Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (10 page)

We should emphasize that Ian Williamson’s project, although inspired, was hardly fuelled by a heartfelt desire to bring the wonders of technology to the masses. As we shall see, philanthropists were pretty thin on the ground in the Cambridge of the 1970s. In the summer of 1977, Williamson had already made up his mind to quit Cambridge Consultants Ltd, and had been offered a secure and lucrative post at Leyland Vehicles. In his spare time, he had developed the working design for a cheap microcomputer, or more accurately a microprocessor trainer, for which he saw a promising commercial future. The machine was created from an imaginative mutation of components found in a Sinclair calculator blended with a few others. However, for Williamson the project seemed like a case of bad timing, since the impending job with Leyland precluded the possibility of marketing the product himself. Williamson maintains that at the time the only way to make a success of a new-wave consumer electronics product was by setting up with one of the Cambridge cliques, impossible unless he decided to pass up his move to Coventry. In the event, he chose the safer of the two options and, given Sinclair Radionics’ association with Cambridge Consultants and the origin of the prototype’s components, it was natural that he should have taken his idea to Chris Curry and Clive Sinclair, as well as a couple of other Cambridge-based companies. Since everyone was aware that Radionics was sinking fast, it was also understandable that the veteran entrepreneurs should be approached by way of their new commercial identity, then known as Sinclair Instruments.

As we have seen, in the autumn of 1977 Sinclair was preoccupied with the battle between Radionics and the NEB, or rather between Clive and the short-sighted bureaucrats. Sinclair’s endgame tactics included the formulation of corporate and commercial strategies that would ensure his personal survival after what by now he regarded as his inevitable departure. Certainly it was an open secret that Sinclair Instruments was to serve as a corporate ‘lifeboat’ for Sinclair and those loyal to his cause. Sinclair encouraged Chris Curry’s departure from the corporate mire that was Sinclair Radionics shortly after the NEB took control, and from this point on his trusty henchman was able to devote his full attention to the development of the new enterprise. Thus, although he never officially resigned from Radionics, the termination of relations between Curry and the company presumably became clear to the NEB when he borrowed some money and rented offices for the new company in King’s Parade, Cambridge. John Pemberton remembers the new company as ‘
a hobby for Clive. Clive was operating it and Chris Curry was dealing with the problems of it.
’ (Interview, 23 October 1985.)

It is important to remember that at this time one of the main bones of contention between Sinclair and his NEB partners centred around the latter’s problems in marketing the Microvision. The miniature television, even in its early manifestations, can be regarded as one of a handful of products whose development and public acceptance were (and remained so until recently) critical to Sinclair’s image of himself as an innovator, new-wave entrepreneur and hi-tech prophet. For Sinclair, the sole value of the shell that was Sinclair Instruments was as a money-spinner that would generate the R&D funding for the creation of the products that would confound his critics. In effect, Sinclair Instruments would continue the work of Radionics and its interim products were simply the means to a well-defined end. Avoiding the crippling burden of Radionics’ debts and the galling position of being ultimately under the control of others was one reason why the new company became increasingly important for Sinclair. The other associated motivation for wanting to get Sinclair Instruments on the road is likely to have been the desire to get the first computer products that fell within the beloved consumer electronics ethos on to the market. Certainly the NEB-funded Radionics computer project was directed towards mainstream computing, of the Apple variety, rather than cut-price consumerism, although doubtless valuable to Sinclair in terms of the research and development knowledge it produced.

By the time Ian Williamson enters our story, Chris Curry had initiated the first Sinclair Instruments product, setting the company on its path towards a realization of Sinclair’s vision. In retrospect, given the company’s lofty aims, it’s mildly depressing to record the form in which the new age was heralded. The beast in question was known as the Wrist Calculator and, when it appeared, boasted a design that could charitably be described as an eyesore in black plastic. To be fair to John Pemberton, the moonlighting Radionics designer who must take responsibility for the appearance of this unfortunate creation, the calculator was rushed out at top speed and was probably the best that could be done with the components at hand. Sinclair Instruments was set up as a last-ditch sanctuary for a desperate team whose futures depended on their ability rapidly to generate a healthy cash flow from meagre resources. A return to the earlier user base of the mail-order hobbyist product, based on the Radionics calculator design experience, was in order.

Curiously, in spite of its aesthetic and technical shortcomings, the infamous Wrist Calculator fulfilled its role admirably. Incredible though it might seem today (an incredulity that one suspects must have been experienced at the time by the calculator’s creators), more than 10,000 kits were ordered by masochistic hobbyists from all parts of the globe. Contemporary reviews of the kit suggest that its construction demanded much the same dedication required for the solution of a Rubik’s Cube. It was extraordinarily tricky to assemble and, once completed, there was only a fair to middling chance of it working. John Pemberton recalled that it was designed to ‘minimal tolerances’, which meant that only if you were lucky enough to get a set of parts all of which were at or below the mean size of the prototype’s components could you get it to fit within the case. So, against the odds, Sinclair Instruments had kicked off to a profitable start. By way of celebration, in July 1977 the company name was changed yet again, this time to Science of Cambridge.

It seems unlikely that anyone would have derived much of a sense of security from the knowledge that his or her livelihood depended on the earning power of a dodgy calculator. If the company was to have a future, its dependants were going to have to come up with reliable and innovative products. And, if the Wrist Calculator is anything to go by, in the early days of Science of Cambridge good ideas were pretty thin on the ground. A partial explanation for this paucity of creative drive is that the Sinclair team had come to rely on Clive to mastermind the direction of product development. At this time, although Sinclair’s heart may have been with the new venture, his working day was devoted to keeping track of events at Radionics as the company slipped from his control. Constantly on the defensive and increasingly forced to live with the consequences of other people’s decisions (a situation he has repeatedly described as intolerable), Sinclair was hardly in any shape to fulfil his customary role as tireless innovator. Furthermore, a year of substantial state funding had encouraged him to think big when looking to the future, and the decidedly limited financial resources of Science of Cambridge would undoubtedly have cramped his creative style. In short, at a time when the new company desperately needed a breadwinning product, Sinclair’s mind was still preoccupied with the dreams of the past and distracted by the corporate crises of a decidedly unpalatable present.

Away from the boardroom intrigues and Titanic spirit that marked Sinclair’s final year at Radionics, Chris Curry was in a far better position to appraise the market and make the kind of decisions that would secure a viable future for Science of Cambridge. Thus, when Ian Williamson turned up on his doorstep with the idea of marketing a cut-price computer kit, Curry immediately saw a chance to jump ahead of the competition in the world of hobbyist electronics, while at the same time sticking with a market and a technology with which the company was familiar. Curry has always insisted that at the time Sinclair was totally uninterested in computers, and it was only his own commitment to the project that finally persuaded Clive to give Williamson the chance to put his theory into practice. As we saw in the last chapter, this seems unlikely, in the light of Sinclair’s declared R&D objectives over at Radionics.

Whether Sinclair was behind the project or not, the fact of the matter is that soon after Williamson’s demonstration of his initial creation, Curry was sufficiently impressed to provide the engineer with the necessary resources for the construction of a prototype suitable for production in terms of, surprisingly enough, defunct Radionics calculators. Williamson recalls:

You see, they wanted to do it on the cheap. They had a lot of redundant components from obsolete Oxfords and Cambridges [Radionics’ calculator lines] and Curry wanted me to see if I could come up with the same sort of thing as my prototype using different components. (Telephone interview, 28 October 1985.)

Why it should be of any advantage to Science of Cambridge to use the same components that formed part of the defunct stock-in-trade of an entirely separate and state-owned company is not apparent. Perhaps Sinclair was going to bid for the crippled calculators from which recyclable parts could be extracted, in line with his old scavenger inclinations, or perhaps an unfortunate confusion had arisen concerning who was working on what, and for whom. Some light is perhaps shed on the state of affairs by Norman Hewett’s comments when asked if Chris Curry had been engaged on Radionics work during his tenure:

While I was there, I occasionally had an emissary come up from the stores and places like that, saying Chris Curry is around again, at the stores, and wanted to take out so-and-so. I said, ‘Who is this fellow?’ and they’d say that he had worked for us. My response was, ‘So what’s he doing in our stores then? Tell him he’s not welcome, and if he wants anything he must come to see me.’ As far as I know, he certainly wasn’t working for Sinclair Radionics Ltd, but whether he was quietly working with or for Clive and using Sinclair Radionics components I don’t know. He wasn’t in our stores for his health! Certainly Clive didn’t give the impression that Curry was working for Sinclair Radionics - he had no comment about my chucking him out of the stores. (Interview, 16 October 1985.)

Component source and ownership aside, it’s worth emphasizing that Williamson worked on the design of the kit in his own time, and that the computer was never intended as an item to be marketed by Cambridge Consultants. Indeed, as far as one can tell, Williamson’s employers knew nothing of the project at the time; the idea was simply to make a little pin money out of the Cambridge scene before the move to Coventry. The engineer finally managed to cobble together a working prototype, and judging from its inventor’s disarmingly modest description, it seems that the electronic equivalent of a silk purse somehow emerged from a heap of silicon junk whose equation to a sow’s ear would constitute an insult to pigs: ‘
I made the original prototype based around a Sinclair Cambridge [calculator] that I bought in a shop somewhere.
’ (Telephone interview, 28 October 1985.)

As we have seen, Williamson set about hisR&D with low cost as one of the central considerations determining his design, which was further constrained by the decision to limit the choice of components (other than the microprocessor chip, and memory) to those which could be found in existing Sinclair Radionics products. One of the most impressive results of Williamson’s labours was that he managed to create a computer that accepted hexadecimal input entered via a standard calculator keyboard. Without going into details, this involved basing the machine’s software around octal notation, which, even today, the self-effacing Williamson concedes is an achievement of which he is proud.

In retrospect, it’s tempting to conclude that ironically it was the chip choice that, despite the prototype’s imaginative design and, even by today’s standards, extremely clever software, explains why Ian Williamson’s name is unlikely to crop up in any account of the early development of microcomputing in the UK. Like the American kits that provided Williamson with the original inspiration for his project, the enterprising engineer used what was known as a ‘Scamp’ chip (the National Semiconductor Microprocessor or National SC/MP) at the centre of his system. Designed and originally marketed in the States, this interesting little chip never really caught on with manufacturers on either side of the Atlantic. However, if we assess Williamson’s choice of chip in the context of the era in which the product was being developed, the wisdom of opting for a Scamp-based design soon becomes apparent. For a start, the chip already had a proven track record as the centrepiece of comparable US products and by the standards of the day was unusually low-priced. In addition, the Scamp boasted an incredibly simple architecture for an 8-bit microprocessor of the 1970s, and thus for the novice was encouragingly easy to use and program. In short, and in the words of a contemporary assessment of the chip, ‘
For the homebrew enthusiast, the SC/MP is a good choice.
’ (Byte, July 1978.)

It should be stressed that the machine Williamson demonstrated to Curry would appear incredibly primitive if placed alongside even the simplest of today’s home computers. Readers familiar with the units by which a computer’s memory is measured will be amused to learn that the commercial implementation of Williamson’s idea proudly boasted 256 bytes of RAM (random-access memory)! For the uninitiated, suffice it to say that today’s home micros specify memory size in units of just over 1000 bytes (K), and that no self- respecting hobbyist would even consider a product offering less than 49,152 bytes (48K) of memory.

Following the example of the designers of the US computer kits, Williamson deliberately restricted his machine’s capabilities in an effort to keep down the price. It is quite clear that this early micro was never intended to be much more than an educational aid. Certainly Williamson’s book about the machine emphasized its value as a tool for learning about the way microprocessors work, and never claimed that it offered a computing power that was of any practical use.