Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (22 page)

The Spectrum 128K is everything the Spectrum+ should have been. With its enlarged memory capacity, a new sound chip, significantly improved keyboard with numeric keypad and RS232 and video output facilities, the machine looked distinctly competitive at around £175. Far too competitive as far as Dixons was concerned. Sinclair Research made it clear that only after stocks of the Spectrum+ had been significantly reduced would the Spanish development be launched on the UK market.

The UK version of the 128K Spectrum arrived in February 1986, priced at £179.95. It lacked the numeric keypad of the Spanish model, this being an extra £19.95 accessory for the unfortunate British enthusiast. Criticized for its lack of a joystick port, and lacking also the new software to take advantage of the extra memory, it aroused little enthusiasm. As an upgrade it offered better sound (played through the television loudspeaker) and the annoying ‘dot crawl’ on the display was cured. It enabled a VDU monitor to be connected and incorporated a non-standard RS232 communications port. All this was a welcome improvement on a dated machine, but it was launched at the wrong time of the year for new sales and provided no compelling reasons for the existing Spectrum user to upgrade and manifestly failed to revitalize the Sinclair image, as either innovator or provider of cheap machines.

Having tidied up the tail end of the Spectrum story, we must now return to the events of 1983 and chronicle the extraordinary saga of Sinclair’s abortive attempt to make a killing in the business market.

However, before we forget - as did most of the population - a few words on the fate of the flat-screen pocket TV are in order. Apart from those gadgeteers who couldn’t resist a new toy, most people didn’t feel the need for such a life-style accessory. The sales curve remained as flat as the screen. The reasons for this are adequately summarized by W. H. Smith’s John Rowland, normally a firm supporter of Clive’s products:

I think you have to be perfectly clear about the distinction between a gizmo and a market. I say its a gizmo ... the constraints of a 2-inch screen and its limitations on sensitivity I think makes it a gizmo. I don’t think it has the functionality you need for a TV. I mean, you need to see the picture, and you need to hear the sound, and you need it to work! (Interview, 18 October 1985.)

[8] THE QUANTUM LEAP: TO WHERE?

The massive success of the ZX81 and the Spectrum had given Sinclair Research the top sellers in a rapidly expanding market. The rewards for such success, allied to Sir Clive’s cost-cutting expertise and the massive percentage mark-up that mail-order sales provide, are apparent in the profit figures, the year ending March 1983 producing profits of nearly £14m on a turnover of just over £54m March 1984 showed a lower percentage profit, reflecting the Micro-vision costs and retail merchandising, with the increased turnover of £77m providing only the same profit. However, in anyone’s terms this was good business. Rothschild and Sons placed 10 per cent of the company equity with a group of financial institutions in January of 1983 for a price of £13.6m at the same time, it was announced that the company would seek a share placement, either on the unlisted securities market or on the Stock Exchange, some time in 1984.

As well as rewarding himself with a £1m bonus on top of his salary for the year ending March 1982 (he needed the money for his £400,000 Knightsbridge mansion), Sinclair had now cashed in some of his corporate chips, at what in hindsight looks like a very well-chosen point. The notional value of £136m that this gave Sinclair Research was not a realistic assessment, based as it was on a rapidly saturating market in the UK. The rise of Sinclair as a household name had gone together with the micro mania that had produced the highest percentage of homes with micros in the world. In 1982 over 500,000 home computers were sold in the UK, 220,000 of them ZX81s, and 75,000 of them Spectrums. While the 1983 market was estimated at 600,000 machines, sustainable growth in the computer market would require new products. While Sinclair, secure in his visionary zeal, undoubtedly believed that the latest version of the pocket television would sell ‘zillions’, despite the decidedly lukewarm reception previous incarnations had met with, few shared his faith in this as the replacement cash generator for Sinclair Research.

Sinclair had defined the new wonder product that would keep the computers rolling off the lines, and the contortions of his team as they struggled to flesh out the contours of his vision are the main focus of this chapter. Although it owed little to any activity on the part of Sinclair himself, it owed much to the legacy of his hand-picked team as they followed in the master’s footsteps.

The supposed Quantum Leap in computing power after which the Sinclair QL was named apparently had more to do with the chaos of quantum unpredictability than the orderly behaviour of large numbers of particles. The QL - ‘sheer professional power in the special Sinclair style’ as the glossy brochure had it - was ‘launched’ in January of 1984. Expectations in the computer press were high, with persistent rumours about the ‘ZX83’ having been circulating more or less since the Spectrum appeared. When it finally arrived, having become the ‘ZX84’ in the meantime, the assembled hacks were informed of its manifold virtues by the recently knighted Sir Clive, and MD Nigel Searle, dazzled by pre-programmed displays on the monitors, prevented from playing with the bolted-down QL, but allowed to book review machines. Searle, with that intriguing blend of Mensa mental might and ingénue honesty we have come to expect, delivered the firm managerial policy: ‘When we introduced the Spectrum we didn’t know what we’d do next... and now we’ve launched the QL, we don’t know what direction the machine will take us.’

The cream of the technical press then staggered out into the winter sunlight, having plied themselves with free sparkling wine, clutching the glossy blurbs, press releases and a copy of the Super BASIC manual firmly stamped provisional on every page. They then informed their eager readers in no uncertain terms that a new age had dawned for British computer power, and that Sinclair had done it again. The general tone in the computer press was much as Practical Computing (March 1984) had it:

Each of Sinclair’s new machines has been more amazing than the one before, but this time he has really excelled himself. The QL fully deserves the initials, which stand for Quantum Leap, it is so far ahead of everything else at the same price.

Most reports didn’t strike the realistic notes and qualifications that Practical’s previewer stuck in, though:

On past performance, the QL should be well made, but there will be supply problems due to demand. There will also be bugs, and some features of the QL will turn out to have unforeseen and possibly unwanted consequences.

... Four software packages are supplied with the QL ... Extravagant claims have been made for these packages: ‘They outperform the software for all existing micros.’ On demonstration they looked fast, attractive and user-friendly - but then, it would be a poor demonstration if they did not.

Sir Clive himself said the QL was:

Sinclair’s most important contribution to personal computing since breaking the £100 barrier with the ZX80. It should set new industry standards for value, performance, quality and user-friendliness. (Financial Times, 13 January 1984.)

Orders flooded in for this new wonder micro, but when nothing trickled out it became apparent over the next few months that what had been done was to set new industry standards for launching a machine prematurely. It is an all too frequent occurrence in the industry to announce new machines before completion, but only Sinclair Research follows the mail-order merchandising policy such that both legally and ethically, the announcement should imply that a new product will actually be available. The theory is, as Sinclair expressed it in an interview with Martin Hayman back in 1982:

‘Professionalism is very important. We have very professional people and we do everything on time, to very tight schedules and with a great deal of commitment. We just are not amateur...’

Did he include in the amateur category the common practice of ‘kite-flying’ - announcing a product with a stupendous specification for delivery ‘next month’?

‘Yes, there is far too much of that and it is very silly. It mucks up the marketplace at the time but it rebounds on the company eventually ... If we announce a product now, it is because it is ready for production.’ (Practical Computing, July 1982.)

Quite apart from the fact that he was talking about the Spectrum at the time, and guilty of terminological inaccuracy in respect of that product, the vaunted ‘professionalism’ of Sinclair Research would seem to have taken a turn for the worse in the intervening years.

The astonishing thing is that at the time the QL was launched there did not exist a complete working prototype of the machine. (Astonishing, that is, unless one has followed the Sinclair story thus far, and hence might predict the culmination of the Sinclair Research style at just such a nadir.) Note that this is not a case of ‘vapourware’, as the trade calls software announced before writing the code is finished, nor yet a case where the hardware design was finished, albeit not geared up to production, nor even a bug-ridden machine. It was simply the announcement of a machine, for delivery in ‘28 days’, of which a complete working example had never been seen, even within Sinclair Research’s labs! When the QL did finally arrive, it turned out to have many of the faults new machines tend to have, and not a few unique ones, but by then the initial tide of enthusiasm had long ebbed, leaving the QL a long crawl back to the littoral of profitability.

The reasons for this deplorable debacle - the attempted marketing of a machine so far from completion, but still with the ludicrous promise of delivery within a month - are buried within the attitudes and management of Sinclair Research. When Sir Clive sold off 10 per cent of Sinclair Research, one of the conditions imposed by the financial institutions that bought the shares was that a proper board of directors should run the company. Several Sinclair staff members found themselves now directors - for example, Jim Westwood, after some twenty years of faithful service to Sinclair’s concepts. This condition did not suit Sir Clive, as ever resistant to any control of his activities, and he moved out of the Willis Road premises two weeks after the enhanced board was formed. From this point on he took no part in the day-to-day running of the company and the QL project apart from attending directors’ meetings. Sir Clive was pursuing another obsession, electric vehicles, into which he sank a large part of the funds he derived from the share sale. This tale will be told later.

It fell to the directors, under MD Nigel Searle, to follow through on realizing the ZX83 design concept, eventually to become the QL. The original design, much as presented in various leaks to the computer press in mid-1983, was for a portable, battery-powered machine with the famous flat-screen display, using twin microdrives for storage, and incorporating a modem for communication via the telephone system. Following the lead provided by the conceptual, if not financial, success of the Osborne 1 and subsequent ‘portables’ it was to have a ‘bundled’ package of business software - spreadsheet, wordprocessor, database and communications. The flat screen and Microdrives offered good size and weight savings over the first generation of such machines, which with standard disc drives and built-in monitor screens were sewing-machine-sized computers for which the trade coined the term ‘luggables’. The ZX83 was to take Sinclair Research up-market, into a proven market for serious business computers, and away from entry-level computers and the games syndrome. The concept was Sir Clive’s, although the execution was not. As Steven Vickers observed:

One of the things he has always wanted to produce is a business machine - or he’s always wanted to put his machines across as business machines - even the ZX81. (Interview, 24 September 1985.)

As far as the abstract idea was concerned, it was fine, and constituted effectively a portable and telephoneless version of the ICL One-Per-Desk workstation machine, or OPD, also known as the British Telecom Merlin Tonto. This was supposed to emerge from the collaboration deal that Sinclair made with his old friend Robb Wilmot (from whom he bought chips when Wilmot was at Texas Instruments before moving to ICL as MD) in December 1981. ICL did indeed bring out the OPD in February 1985, but it owed little to the Sinclair effort in its final form. However, the deal with ICL presumably marks the genesis of the concept. Unfortunately the prenatal development process within Sinclair was flawed, producing a malformed offspring.

The ICL deal presumably sounded good to Wilmot, since ICL was to put up something in the region of £1m for development and give Sinclair royalties on top. It must certainly have sounded good to Sir Clive, offering the chance of funding a large part of Sinclair’s R&D on the new project, with no overlap in the markets for the two versions. At the time ICL was doing quite well with software for the ZX81, and the concept was fine, but one can’t help suspecting that it was another case of Sir Clive’s renowned powers of persuasion. As Norman Hewett said:

The trouble with a guy like that is that he can get away with things because he can hoodwink by his presentation, earnestness and technical forcefulness, his apparent mastery of his subject... It’s entirely people talking. There’s no product yet, by definition. They’re backing the man, as they cheerfully say. (Interview, 16 October 1985.)

The Sinclair Research labs at the time could probably show a 2-inch flat-screen display of some kind, and a guy named Ben Cheese who was working on the Microdrives (as he had been for a year), but for the rest ICL was putting up a lot of hard cash on faith. As it turned out, it was unwarranted. The first signs of disquiet in ICL may well have appeared when Sinclair Research failed to tell the company when it decided to change the main processing chip from the good old Z80 of the Spectrum. The delay in informing ICL would not have mattered much if they had not, in the three months or so that the news took to travel from Cambridge, bought in Z80 development kits in order to start work on their own bits of the project!