A lengthy interview with the later great Rick Dickinson, product designer of basically every Sinclair computer, who sadly died of cancer on Tuesday.
https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/an-interview-with-rick-dickinson-3fea60537338 He not only did the ZX 80, ZX 81, ZX Spectrum and the QL, but also the Z88, the Spectrum Next and others -- along with a lot of other stuff. I know this is a rather USA-centric list, so probably most of you started off with things like the Apple II, the first sub-$1000 home computer. But in Britain and Europe back then, we were a lot poorer, and $1000 was an impossibly large amount of money -- many months of pay in a good job. I think in my early home-computer days, I never saw a single Apple II -- they were exotic, expensive foreign machines. I have only seen them in recent years, as collectible antiques. In the UK, the revolution was the first sub-£100 home computer, the ZX 81. I first used a Commodore PET. Later, a few of my richer friends had Commodore 64s. The super-wealthy might have a BBC Micro. In either case, a working setup with mass storage -- floppy drives -- was nearing £1000. Nobody owned a _monitor_ -- they were exotica for professionals. Whereas a Spectrum with a Microdrive was a quarter of that and a highly usable system, with tens of thousands of games, plus mutiple programming languages, word processors, databases and more. I think if you ask virtually any British person in their late 30s, 40s or 50s, in anything connected with IT, what their first computer was, the answer would be a ZX 81 or a ZX Spectrum. It was the single range of machines that drove the entire computer revolution over here, and also in the form of a myriad clones in the Communist Bloc. Later, imitators came along -- the Oric (6502) and Dragon (6809) ranges, for instance. And of course there were many machines that aspired to be better: Memotech. Camputers Lynx, Elan Enterprise, etc. All flopped to some degree. The only thing that displaced Sinclair was Amstrad, who made more expensive computers but with much better specifications -- an integrated tape drive, or floppies, even a printer, and a real monitor. They cost more but still less than Commodore or Acorn: you got a lot for your money. Amstrad eventually bought Sinclair's models and name, and later still, it launched the first _cheap_ PC clones and kick-started the IBM-compatible industry over here. But it did it standing on Sinclair's shoulders. Part of the joy of Sinclair machines (like Apple and Commodore) was their very distinctive look -- black, slablike, with tiny discrete bits of colour, unlike the grey or beige boxes of virtually all the competition. And that was down to Rick Dickinson, who only discovered years later how he had inspired whole generations of people. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
