ACE Flashback!(story from Ace 01-90 )
Before 1980 if you had a computer in your house, you would have built it yourself, and you would have thought of yourself as an electronics whiz, not a computer enthusiast. If you had a microcomputer at work, you would be in a specialist, electronics/science-orientated profession, and the micro would in all likelihood be a Commodore PET. Your home computer would have taken days hunched over a hot soldering iron to assemble and you wouldn't be thinking of playing games with it. For that there were dedicated Atari consoles from the States.
And it was in the US where people were buying Apple IIs in hundreds of thousands, and the new Atari 400/800 machines. While the Atari's, like their VCS predecessors, were very much games machines, the Apple IIs were used for serious applications as well for games. American computer users tended to be older, with more money to spend on serious commercial software.
It is more than likely that we in the UK would have gone on to follow the American market slavishly, and rely solely on American imports, were it not for one company - Sinclair Research. The ZX80, which sold to those electronics enthusiasts and the ZX81, which brought home computing to the non-specialist, gave the UK a distinct, 'techie' flavour of its own.
By 1980, it was clear that 'off-the-peg' computers would sell into the home sooner rather than later. Already some of the burning issues of the day bore an uncanny resemblance to debates which will carry on into the nineties. For example, in August 1980, an article in Personal Computer World discussed three issues: a) "does existing legislation cover electronic media"; b) "Is digitised pornography on a disk actionable"; c) "what is the correct intellectual property to afford to [software] to protect it from bootleggers and pirates?"
By 1981, Motorola was offering its new 68000 processor as a chip for the 80s, the Z80 and 6502 were already well established, and IBM was introducing its first 8088-based PC. The chances are that your computer uses one of these and yet they are all at least nine years old. What has dramatically changed computers into the colourful, fast, sophisticated machines of today are the advances made in terms of graphic processing, of dedicated graphics and sound chips, such as the early examples in the Commodore 64 to those of the Amiga today. Faster, bigger data storage systems have led to much bigger, multi-level programs. Devices can now be made much smaller: slimline monitors, disk drives tucked into the keyboard - machines of a size which can be accommodated easily into the home. And finally, memory chip prices have tumbled, so that all the technology that was available in theory eight or nine years ago is now affordable and mass-produced.
More evolution than revolution, really.
1980
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
The Sinclair ZX80 - first shown to the public in February - was the first sub-100 'computer'. Available for GBP79.95 in kit form and GBP99.95 ready-built, the ZX80 was a flat slab of white plastic. Those cooling vents along the top back are actually painted black lines - an optical illusion which was commented on in more than one press review. It had a touch-sensitive keyboard, 1K RAM, an NEC 780-1 processor, which was a 'copy' of the Z80, and built-in Sinclair Basic. Graphics? Not produced until 1981. Sound? Forget it. Software? You had to write it yourself - indeed, that was the whole idea of the ZX80.
Another kit-form computer launched this year was the Acorn Atom, for GBP125 as a kit and GBP150 readybuilt. The Atom claimed to be 3-5 times faster than Apple Integer BASIC, "and it has the unique feature of including an assembler in the interpreter". But the Acorn Atom boasted graphics as well: a screen with a high resolution of 256 x 192, five graphics modes and 192 graphics characters.
Acorn suffered from production problems with the Atom, so much so that one retailer, described in Personal Computer World as the "incorrigible" manager of Lasky's Microdigital chain announced to all and sundry that he would not include the Atom in his next catalogue because he was too uncertain of receiving any stock from Acorn. That manager's name was Bruce Everiss; the computer industry was to hear quite a bit more from him.
Atari had no UK division in those days; instead the Atari 400/800 machines were imported by lngersoll, at initial prices of GBP395 for the 16K model 400, GBP695 for the 48K 800.
EVENTS
If you visited WH Smith's outlet in Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London, you could witness a curious 'experiment. Market development manager John Rowland was putting together the first 'Computer Know-how' unit. A Commodore PET borrowed from a local dealer, a few copies of Byte magazine and a small range of books, "which were actually all about calculators because we couldn't find any computer books," says John, made up the display. The crush of interested customers around the stand was so great that it had to be roped off.
The success of the Brent Cross venture led John to ask Clive Sinclair in September about selling the mail-order only ZX80 in WH Smith. "Clive suggested that rather than take on the ZX80, I should wait for his new product, then still unnamed," he remembers. "By Christmas 1980, it was officially the ZX81, and we were wrangling over how many units we thought we could sell. We thought somewhere between 15-30,000 would be about right, and gave Clive an order for 18,000 to put in 15 branches. We ended up selling 450,000 - in the two years of the ZX81's life."
The third PCW show moved to the Cunard International Hotel (now the Novotel) in September. This was the last wholly business/hobbyist PCW show, before the games began to take over.
The "third wave" of arcade games - Galaxians, Scramble, Defender, Donkey Kong and Pacman - appeared as Space Invaders burnt itself out (the "first wave" of Ping Pong and BreakOut had taken the arcades by storm in the early to mid-70s). A year or so later, crude variants of these titles formed the raw beginnings of the games we know today.
1981
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
The Commodore Vic 20 was shown publicly for the very first time at the January Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, and was launched in the UK in June. It wasn't the first colour computer, but it was the first to sell for under $300, at $299.95. The Vic 20 had 5K RAM, a full-size keyboard which was later used in the Commodore 64, and its own custom chip, Vic (Video Interface Chip). It went on sell over two million units worldwide over the next three years.
The first UK-produced Vic 20 game appeared in September. Published by Mr Micro at 16, it was entitled Gold Rush, and the first person to complete it would win a bag of 22 carat gold.
The Sinclair ZX80 got its first games and Clive Sinclair was reportedly "tickled pink" that programmers had produced graphics on the computer. The program was Space Intruders and readers of Tim Hartnell's book Making the Most of Your ZX80 could either type it in, or order a ready-made tape from Ken MacDonald of Solihull.
In March, the Sinclair ZX81 was announced by the newly rechristened Sinclair Research, and given an ecstatic welcome by computer enthusiasts. Still with just 1 K RAM, and still with that flat touch-sensitive keyboard, it was nevertheless a great leap beyond the ZX80, and furthermore, less expensive, at 49.95 in kit -form and 69.95 ready built. It had a much lower chip count, thanks to its own custom chip designed by Sinclair and built by Ferranti, it had a much improved screen display, it could produce graphics, it could do floating point arithmetic - in short it was genuinely useful as a computer rather than the electronic assembly exercise which is how buyers tended to treat the ZX80.
The more the market grew, the more it became only a matter of time before the mighty conglomerate IBM launched its microcomputer. The PC may have been behind-hand compared to companies like Apple and Commodore who were forging ahead in the new industry, but its solid, unexciting specification - Intel's 8088 running at 4.77MHz, a single disk drive, 16K RAM, but all expandible - and an equally solid price of $3,000, plus the IBM name ensured plenty of corporate sales.
1981 saw the first of the truly commercial software houses, i.e. those with full-time staff, proper offices and advertising budgets. Psion, Bug Byte and Quicksilvia led the way out of the back bedrooms, the last-named run by Nick Lambert and John Hollis, who later took on a certain Rod Cousens to look after the company finances, and indeed, run the company.
Quicksilvia produced the first ever Spectrum game, Space Intruders at GBP5.95, In 1982. Bug Byte spin-off companies such as Software Projects and Imagine went to achieve success of their own (see 1983). Eventually both Bug Byte and Quicksilvia went on to become labels of Grandslam Entertainments, while Psion evolved quite differently.
EVENTS
The ZX81 finally made it into WH Smith, the centre piece of a display which included books, magazines and software. The demand was so staggering that WH Smith had to put 500 staff on a crash course to train them to switch it on and run a small program to demonstrate the machine to customers. This was the computer's first real entry into the high street multiples, and it gave home computing some much needed credibility as a leisure pursuit.
On September 26, the first ZX Microfair threw open its doors to the public. Held at the Central Hall in Westminster it was attended by several hundred Sinclair devotees. Entry was free of charge. Over in the US, lnfocom launched the first Zork adventure for the Apple II.
STORIES
Sinclair suffered its first serious setback when the ZX81 was rejected by the BBC. Initially, the BBC had selected the Newbury Electronics' NewBrain as the nucleus of its forthcoming series on computing; this machine had started life as a Sinclair Radionics project in 1978. Newbury, rather to everyone's surprise, turned the BBC down and the way was left clear for Acorn headed by ex-Sinclair employee Chris Curry, promoting the Atom successor, the Proton, and Sinclair itself, pushing the successor to the ZX81, to compete for the contract.
There simply isn't space here to detail all the backstabbing, foot-shooting and press speculation that accompanied the award of the BBC contract. As everyone knows, the BBC chose Acorn, and the Proton became the BBC Model A micro.
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURES
Everyone wanted to jump on to the home computer bandwagon in 1982. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, launched in April, led the pack and heralded the beginning of games computing in the UK. Those machines that followed in its wake had nothing like the brand loyalty that Sinclair had built up from ZX81 days; and most did not noticeably improve on Sinclair's appalling disregard for production schedules.
In comparison, the Commodore 64 could have come from another planet. Its specification, which doesn't look too terrible today, was way ahead of its time, and made visitors to the Third International Commodore Computer show in June, where it was previewed, gasp in astonishment. The 64K memory really was huge at that time, its proper keyboard compared very favourably with the rubber-keyed Spectrum, it had 16 colours and no attribute clash problem, as the Spectrum did, sprite graphics, a 40 column screen and the SID - Sound Interface Chip - built in. But, to begin with, you paid for all that mighty technology: the C64 was launched at GBP350 at the end of 1982. And no C2N, joysticks or software included, either.
In the UK the Commodore quickly joined the Spectrum as a first choice computer for buyers, without ever outselling it. In the rest of the world it was a different story. The C64 became the world's best-selling computer; in the US it cleaned up. Aggressive price cutting by Commodore, headed by Jack Tramiel, led to a price war and near financial ruin for rival Atari. The Dragon 32, was launched in July and sold in Boots on terms similar to WH Smith's exclusive contract with the Spectrum. Its 32K RAM, graphics and Basic all compared favourably to Sir Clive's beast. The NewBrain, finally saw the light of day, produced by Grundy Business Systems, which had bought the project from Newbury Electronics.
The first Japanese home computer to be sold in the UK was the Sord M5, which was really a computer/console hybrid. And let's hear it for the Oric 1, bugs and all, rubber keyboard and 16K RAM. The Lynx was a Z80-based machine, with some impressively large memory configurations and high resolution graphics, which simply never made it into the high street stores in great enough number to sell. Finally, there was the curious Jupiter Ace, developed by Steven Vickers and Richard Aftwasser, who had both been on the Sinclair Spectrum design team. It was another Z80 derivative machine, which is chiefly remembered today as the only home computer to sport Forth as its in-built language. This proved to be its downfall.
EVENTS
In November, Sony launched the 3.5 inch disk drive in the UK. Those of you with 1.44Mb versions may care to note that Sony's original single density drives stored 218K, the double density a 'massive' 437K. Starting price was GBP235.
January - and the second ZX Microfair. Bursting at the seams with arcade clones, visitors could try out and buy ZX81 titles such as Invaders and 1K Break Out from flourishing Liverpool publisher Bug Byte, Defender, Invaders, QS Scramble, Asteroids and Galaxians from Quicksilvia, Monkey Bizness from Artic, or 3D Monster Maze from J Graye Software. No prizes for guessing which of these were based on Space Invaders, Pacman, Galaxians, Scramble and Defender.
1983
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
Plenty of new micros lined up at the starting blocks in 1983. The Acorn Electron was announced in January with a scheduled release date in March. It finally rolled out of Acorn over a year later. In May, Memotech, previously a Spectrum alternative keyboard supplier, showed off its Z80-based micro, the Memotech MTX. Mattel announced that the age of its Aquarius would dawn in September. IBM dipped a corporate toe into the home computer market with the PC Jr, 128K RAM and a 5.25" disk drive for $1269. The Coleco Adam was dubbed the 'star' of June's Consumer Electronics show in Chicago, but by Christmas, Coleco was having so many problems with shortages and reports of faulty machines, that it was glad to have the Cabbage Patch doll to fall back on.
A game called Valhalla caught everyone's imagination. Publisher Legend Software claimed it was the "first computer movie", a Norse scenario peopled with 'independent' characters in which the outcome could be different every time. And at GBP14.95, it was a nice little earner for Legend.
In 1983, software, which had hitherto been dominated by unofficial versions of arcade games, began to diversify. Adventure games like The Hobbit, by Melbourne House, and Level 9's Colossal Adventure and Snowball had significantly improved parsers. Gilsoft's Quill became available towards the end of 1983, and led to a thriving cottage industry of 'homemade' adventures. It was a good time for UK adventure writers, since lnfocom titles, such as the famous Zork series, and adventures by Scott Adams, were not easily available in the UK, and certainly weren't converted for any home-grown machines like the spectrum.
EVENTS
The PCW show was again at the Barbican, and was the first of the all-screaming whizz- bang games-fests that became the PCW show of the late 80s. Star turns by Imagine and Liamasoft.
Bug Byte, one of the largest and most well-known of the software houses which had grown up around the ZX81 and Spectrum, was going through turbulent times. In January, its head programmer Eugene Evans, and senior staff David Lawson and Mark Butler broke away from the company to form Imagine Software, and its first game, Arcadia, for the Spectrum and Vic 20, became available shortly afterward. At first, it appeared that Imagine could do no wrong. Arcadia sold strongly and the company presented a flamboyant, affluent lifestyle. It appointed Bruce Everiss, that "incorrigible" Microdigital boss from 1980, to head its marketing, there were tales of fast cars and fast lifestyles, and Imagine finished 1983 on a high. In November, Bug Byte lost its second,batch of personnel when Alan Maton and Matthew Smith, programmer of the hit Manic Miner, left to form Software Projects, Smith with the Manic Miner sequel underway.
Atari US axed nearly a quarter of its total staff - about 1,700 people - after posting "disastrous" financial results, despite announcing a new 1200XL computer with 64K RAM, and cutting the price of the 800XL from GBP499.95 to GBP399.99. By the end of the year, Warner Communications was looking for a buyer for the ailing games company.
Clive Sinclair, 42 years old, was named The Guardian Young Businessman of the Year in March. In June, he received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours.
STORIES
In the summer, Samurai Computers changed its name to Elan Computers, and sparked off one of home computing's longest running sagas of missed release dates, name changes and confusion with the ever-entertaining tale of the Enterprise.
The Elan Enterprise, we were told would be a computer 'with obsolescence built out". Dedicated chips handling graphics and sound (the 'Nick' and 'Dave' chips, if you will), large memory, expansion potential, the Enterprise had it all... on paper. When it eventually appeared at the end of 1984, it was maybe not obsolete, but certainly nothing groundbreaking any more.
Where are they now? Commodore Max, Ultimax and Vic 10
Actually these are all one and the same computer, intended as successors to the Vic 20 in the starter computer market. All three incarnations were announced and previewed at shows. The Ultimax version was notable for offering a flat membrane keyboard like that of the ZX81, while the Commodore Max (the latest version) had 2K RAM, and could produce 16 colours on a 320 x 200 screen. It never arrived, and was shortly superseded by prototypes of a 116 and 264, which eventually became the C16 and Plus/4.
Many of the pictures on this page are taken, with permission, from the homepage of Kevan Heydon. Why not take a look at his brilliant homepage with lots of great pictures of classic (home)computers at http://www.heydon.org/kevan/collection/index.html .