Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (14 page)

Although much of the early success with home computers must be attributed to the company’s pricing policy, credit is also due to the advertising company that co-ordinated the ZX80 promotion. The Primary Contact agency was awarded the Radionics contract in 1971, and retained by each of the subsequent Sinclair corporations until March 1985. In the promotion of the ZX80, the company was faced with the problem of needing to seduce an essentially schizophrenic market; precisely the type of campaign justifiably dreaded by advertising executives. It must be remembered that Sinclair was quite clear that for the ZX80 to succeed the machine would have to gain the support of the hobbyists, while at the same time appeal to a new market of computer illiterates.

The approach adopted by the Primary Contact promotions concentrated on hooking the neophytes, and relied on the obsessional curiosity of the hobbyist to take care of the communication of technical information to those who would understand it. It used flashy, full-colour displays to catch the eye of anyone turning a page, condensed its technical data into self-contained small print, and devoted the bulk of its copy to calming the anxieties of the masses. The idea was to lay the ghost of Big Brother and give birth to a New Image computing, one that you’d feel safe letting loose on the kids.

It is doubtful whether either Sinclair or the majority of his customers would ever admit it, but the benevolent presence of an avuncular boffin behind the early microcomputing products played a critical role in the defusion of the less seductive aspects of an intimidating technology. Although Guy Kewney, the Personal Computer World gossip columnist, is anxious to claim credit for the creation of the ‘Uncle Clive’ persona, it was Primary Contact that recognized the need to promote a ‘human face’ as the figurehead of a decidedly inhuman revolution in consumer electronics. Initially Sinclair was marketed as the maverick doyen of hi-tech, the lone entrepreneur with the vision to take on the Americans and the Japanese. The implication was that by supporting Sinclair the consumer was advancing the cause of British innovation in the face of the brute strength of foreign marketing might. David O’Reilly is one of the few journalists to have taken note of the personal emphasis of the early Sinclair campaigns:

By astute use of public relations, particularly playing up his image of a Briton taking on the world, Sinclair has become the best-known name in micros. (Microscope, October 1982.)

This shamelessly patriotic slant was complemented by a campaign that promoted the idea that computer literacy was no longer the intellectual bastion of an elite but the democratic right of the common man (if not yet the common woman). One of the major triumphs of the early years of the home-computer industry is that its promotional campaigns managed to avoid questions as to why the common man should be remotely interested in the technology. The implication was that only a neo-Luddite would need to question the need to become acquainted with the world of the micro. The computer as a symbol of progress was as undeniable as the relationship between a Rolls-Royce and wealth.

As David O’Reilly notes, Primary Contact went ‘single-mindedly for the user-friendly strategy’. One of the most successful slogans of the ZX80 campaign threatened ‘Inside a day you’ll be talking to it like an old friend’. Why you were talking to the machine at all and what the ZX80 was offering in return were questions best answered by experience. However, on one of the rare occasions Sir Clive was inspired to discuss the role of computers in society, he revealed an abstract yet refreshingly homely vision of computers which is satisfyingly reminiscent of Primary Contact’s sloganizing:

‘Another thing I’d like to do is make robots ...’ he goes on, pooh-poohing the existing industrial kind. ‘I mean the ones you can talk to and leave to look after granny. It’s going to come.’ (Computer Weekly, 23 August 1983.)

Chris Fawkes of Primary Contact was quite clear about the thrust of his company’s campaign: ‘
We brought personal computers to the mass market by showing that you didn’t have to be a whizzkid to use one
’ (Microscope, October 1982). Overnight, the creative imagination of Primary Contact had managed to elevate the ‘use’ of a computer to an application in its own right! Along with the ‘common man’, the all-purpose ‘businessman’ was particularly susceptible to the necessary good of computing. Absurd thought it might seem today, the glossy double-page spreads advertising the ZX80 suggested that the machine could play a role in ‘managing a business’. In spite of the fact that the ZX80 could deal only in whole numbers and offered barely enough memory to deal with the financial consequences of its own acquisition, the fear of ‘falling behind the times’ would soon prove to be a far more compelling consideration than any concern about application. Although few knew or especially cared what they were going to do with it, the home computer would soon become an essential acquisition for every businessman. Although in 1980 the industry’s marketing machine was still in its infancy, the principles behind the early strategies pioneered by Primary Contact were to prove sound for years to come.

In recognition of the new thrust of the company, and with hopes of more of the same profitability to come, Clive renamed his company Sinclair Computers Ltd in November 1980...

[6] THE ZX81: BEGINNING OF THE BOOM

In March 1981 Sir Clive changed the name of his company from Sinclair Computers Ltd to Sinclair Research Ltd, and at the same time launched the successor to the ZX80. Like the earlier machine, the ZX81 was available both as a kit, at £49.95, and in a fully manufactured form at £69.95. Although eclipsed by the ZX Spectrum in the memories of both commentators and consumers, the ZX81 microcomputer is undoubtedly the most important product to emerge from the Sinclair stable. Tony Tebby, who was responsible for the QL’s QDOS operating system, is full of praise for the machine:

Technologically, the ZX81 was something really quite special. It had a very small component count. It was a real computer, you could do calculations, it was programmable, you could do lots of things with it - it was in every way a real computer at a very low price. (Interview, 24 October 1985.)

While the ZX80 was a significant success, its role in the establishment and delineation of a new area of consumer electronics was, as we have noted, that of a bridge between the hobbyist and a broader-based, non-specialist market. Commercially speaking, in the months during which the ZX81 was being developed, there were two interest groups that had to be satisfied if the ZX80’s successor was fully to exploit the new market. In many ways, it’s unfortunate for Sinclair that he discovered one before the other.

The months following the launch of the ZX80 confirmed the wisdom of Sinclair’s recognition of the microcomputer as a product capable of generating a significant return for a modest outlay. The promotion of the machine also enabled Primary Contact to provide its clients with the experience of developing a marketing stance that both informed the converted and preached to the leading edge of the consumer-electronics fetishists. Such experience was to play a major role in sustaining Sinclair’s domination of the home-computer market in the years to come.

According to Dave Tebbutt of Personal Computer World, the arrival on the UK market of home computers like the Nascom, the UK 101 and Sinclair’s MK14 created an interest group that was large enough to justify the production of a specialist magazine. The sales of early issues of PCW vindicate such an assessment, although their tone and format have more in common with an electronics magazine supplement than the celebration of a newly accessible technology. The arrival and success of Sinclair’s ZX80 offered the early computing magazines an opportunity significantly to expand their readership, but to do so required a subtle but critical shift in editorial policy. That the early issues of PCW resembled the magazines of the electronics hobbyist is both inevitable and an accurate reflection of the nature of the fascination of the early products for the people who bought them. The focus of interest in machines like the MK14 was hardware design and its potential, not the methods by which man could communicate with machines. The success of the ZX80 and the Acorn Atom precipitated a dilution of the technically solid but relentlessly dull hobbyist approach to computing, and forced the magazines to devote as much space to man-machine communication as to the minutiae of hardware design.

The computer kits that provided the focus for the early computer magazines could usually be controlled only with ‘machine-language’ programs, interminable sequences of hexadecimal numbers, which were the only form of communication from the user that the machine could understand and act on. Given that a ‘hobbyist’ is often a polite description of an obsessive, it’s safe to assume that, far from throwing up their hands in despair, the owners of the early kits relished the challenge of struggling with the tedium and frustration of machine-code programming. However, computers and computer programming would become attractive to lesser mortals only if communication with the machines could be made simpler. One of the features of the ZX80 was that it could be programmed using a version of the Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - the BASIC computer language. This method of programming involves the use of instructions that are very similar to their English-language equivalents. As we mentioned in the last chapter, although today many experts question the value of BASIC as a learning language, its popularity among US hobbyists in the late 1970s made it a natural choice for Sinclair. As we saw in the case of the MK14, the development of microcomputers in the US was a major influence on the creation of the Sinclair line. Norman Hewett, the Radionics MD, confirms that Sir Clive had his eye on the American computer markets as early as 1977:

[Clive] and I were both in Las Vegas in 1977 at the Electronics Fair. Apple was there, I think for the first or second time, and of course he spent most of his time going round looking at Apple and the other computer firms, with a view to doing the same thing himself. (Interview, 16 October 1985.)

The BASIC used in the ZX80 was essentially a partial implementation of ANSI Minimal BASIC. As its name suggests, even in a full implementation this dialect was of little use other than as a tool for learning the principles of programming, since it lacked many of the functions required for serious applications. Taking note of the criticisms of the ZX80 which appeared in the computer press, Sinclair set John Grant and his team to work on an upgrade of the machine’s BASIC. That Sinclair had his priorities right, and Nine Tiles carried out their modifications with skill and imagination, is evident from the early reviews of the new machine:

The personal-computer industry may have greeted the launch of the Sinclair ZX80 dismissively, but it will have to take the ZX81 seriously. Not only does it eliminate many of the initial limitations of the ZX80 - the lack of such features as memory expansion, floating-point arithmetic and continuous screen display - but it is also 30 per cent cheaper. (Infomatics, 16 March 1981.)

That the new Sinclair product offered a massively improved version of BASIC and was considerably cheaper than the ZX80 was one of the shrewdest marketing decisions made by a Sinclair company. In an ecstatic bench test of the machine in Personal Computer World (April 1981), Dave Tebbutt drew the following conclusions:

He’s done it again! Uncle Clive has come up with a lovely product which will have enormous appeal to people wanting to find out more about computers, but without it costing them an arm and a leg. The idea of producing a superior machine to the ZX80 and selling it for a lower price is wonderful. I’m full of admiration for the man. Most people would have upped the spec and held the price ... or even increased it slightly. The product is clearly aimed at the home market and I’m sure it will do extremely well there, far better in fact than the ZX80. And that’s rapidly becoming the biggest selling micro in the world!

It seems that as early as September 1979 Sinclair had sufficient confidence in the commercial potential of the ZX80 to set Jim Westwood to work on the hardware of its successor. One of the motivations behind the new development programme had its roots in Sinclair’s determination to keep the component costs of his products to an absolute minimum. In the case of the ZX80, it was difficult to maximize profits by paring manufacturing costs since the machine’s design made use of twenty-two relatively expensive ‘off-the-shelf’ chips. Westwood’s brief was to come up with an improved hardware design for the ZX80 - one that, if nothing else, minimized the infamous screen flicker - and to do so quickly enough to give Sinclair the time to solve the problem of the high component count. According to Steven Vickers, Westwood worked miracles on his improvement of the video display, ‘coming up with a technical dodge using non-maskable interrupts’ to solve the flicker problems.

Once a working circuit for what would become the ZX81 was up and running, Sinclair was able to address himself to manufacturing economies. In this aspect of the micro’s development process, Sinclair proved himself to be as successful as his hardware engineer. Recent commercial-chip innovations enabled Sinclair to go to electronics giant Ferranti with a view to incorporating a number of the ZX80’s chips on a general-purpose chip known as an uncommitted logic array or ULA. The use of ULAs gives micro manufacturers the freedom to reprogram an existing chip according to their specific requirements, without going to the expense of developing a fully customized chip. A contemporary report summarizes the result of Sinclair’s deal with Ferranti:

The secret... of the lower price and improved performance of the ZX81 over the ZX80 is a new bipolar chip designed by Sinclair and made for the company by Ferranti. The single integrated circuit concentrates 18 of the 21 chips of the ZX80, so that the ZX81 comes with only four chips... The new chip incorporates additional circuitry which eliminates the need for the processor to drive the TV display, thus causing the screen to go blank whenever processing was being done. The ZX81 processes in two modes: normal, where the display is constantly on, and fast, where processing takes place at four times the speed but data is only displayed either at the completion of a program, when input data is awaited, or during a pause. (Infomatics, 16 March 1981.)