Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (6 page)

Sinclair’s ZX80 was not named by combining the year of its launch with letters that sounded futuristic, although that impression was a happy one. The name was actually chosen by Rick
Dickinson and his team to convey that it was powered by a Z80 chip – with an extra, unknown ingredient.

For Clive Sinclair, that ingredient might as well have been success. He was back in the game, and his marketing was shameless. Adverts boasted that the ZX80 was ‘powerful
enough to run a nuclear power station’, which even then required a very indulgent analysis to accept. He also made sure that the public knew that his children had helped him test it. This was
a consumer product that looked smart in the home – it sat neatly under the family television as a tool, a conversation piece, or a mark of aspiration. For all that it invited hours of lying
on your stomach jabbing fiercely at keys, it also opened a portal to a new world.

Sinclair’s company had a secretive culture, so the team at Acorn found out about the unit at the same time as the rest of the country. By then, Curry and designer Nick Toop had been
developing Acorn’s own machine, called the Atom, which was much closer in appearance to the American ‘beige boxes’. This was Curry’s intention: ‘The Atom was in many
ways like the Apple II. It was smaller and cheaper, and had more bits to go with it as well.’

The Atom was a reduced version of the 6502 based System range of computers that Acorn had been selling to the hobbyist market, packaged into a consumer-friendly machine complete with
high-resolution graphics, colour and sound. It appealed particularly to schools: it was a tough unit with a full-sized keyboard, and, for the first time on a home computer, it could be networked
using technology that Acorn had devised for sending data around its own offices. The Atom cost more than twice as much as the ZX80, and the education market was still tiny, but some schools –
mainly fee-paying
– could justify the extra expense of a computer that looked as if it would withstand an onslaught of children, especially if the teacher could
manage all of the computers in the classroom. And for all Sinclair’s hype, even a cursory glance revealed that the Atom could do much more than its flickering, blocky rival.

Acorn arranged to launch its new computer at an electronics show in 1980. Two months earlier, Curry had secured a commitment from a supplier in Hong Kong to have the first cases ready within six
weeks – much faster than the twenty it would have taken in the UK. By the deadline, having heard nothing, he flew over only to discover that they hadn’t even started. Curry stayed in
Hong Kong and refused to leave until the cases were finished. They were ready just in time – he took the prototypes straight from the airport to the exhibition.

Sinclair Research and Acorn were now clear rivals. Both sold their products by mail order, as cost-saving soldering kits for enthusiasts, or ready-made for consumers. They looked to the same
home and schools markets, segmented by price but not much else. And vitally, each machine had a small version of the programming language BASIC built into its hardware. Sophie Wilson had written an
elegant, compact form for Acorn. Sinclair had outsourced the job to a company called Nine Tiles – which probably did the best job possible given the fierce deadline, although the end result
was still visibly compromised. BASIC was famously easy to program, but notoriously slow at running the code once written. On the Atom, this meant a more sluggish appearance. On the ZX80, you might
hear a faint buzz, the machine would be as hot as ever, and then the screen would switch off and ignore you altogether.

Sinclair often seemed to target price before quality, and the ZX80 was certainly prone to overheating – some apparent ventilation vents were in fact painted on. But the Atom also had
problems: a key component was designed to hang upside down in the case, and as it heated through normal use, it would slide gently out. And both companies were discovering that allowing
inexperienced consumers to build their machines from kits threw up huge numbers of support
issues. Furber recalls that one despairing customer wrote to Acorn to say that
they knew that chips were heat sensitive so they had glued them in instead, ‘and it still didn’t work!’

Acorn had also adopted Sinclair’s trick of using a cassette interface. Tapes were cheap and common, but incredibly frustrating: saving and loading took minutes and could still fail, while
finding the file on the tape meant listening for gaps in the computer’s recordings, which to the human ear sounded like ungodly screeches. But tapes could also be made at home and swapped and
sold, and for the first time computer manufacturers started to see a retail software industry grow around their products.

Steve Furber’s only published game was for the Atom. It was a clone of the arcade game
Asteroids
that he had written at home on a 6502 machine he had built himself. It was quickly
seized upon for the first ‘Games Pack’ tape released by a company called Acornsoft, which was run by the author of
Moon Lander
for the MK14, David Johnson-Davis. Founded with
Acorn’s blessing in 1979 to maintain a supply of software, Acornsoft would claim many obscure achievements – the country’s first ‘zombie’ game, for instance, which
appeared on its second Games Pack soon after the Atom’s launch.

Meanwhile, ZX80 coders had found ways to coax real-time graphics out of a machine that was already famous for blanking its users. Amongst these pioneers was a company called Macronics based in a
suburban Solihull house. By skipping BASIC and talking straight to the processor using machine code, Ken Macdonald and Ron Bissell developed intricate timing and hardware tricks that made gaming
possible. And they were interestingly open about their technology. ZX80 owners wanting to play Macronics’ primitive version of
Space Invaders
had a choice: it was available as a
pre-recorded cassette or, for a pound less, as a sheet of paper with a code listing for the user to type in.

Sinclair Research and Acorn were first into the consumer market, but by the end of 1980 other manufacturers were actively contemplating similar moves. It was an exciting, ultramodern industry,
which had only seen huge growth, and there was every expectation that a giant market remained untapped. Home computing hadn’t yet ‘broken out’ – it
was still a niche, mail-order speciality bubbling away in a corner of the public’s consciousness. So when the BBC announced that it would be choosing a single machine to use in a prime-time
television series to teach computing, both Chris Curry and Clive Sinclair leapt on the news as the biggest marketing opportunity their young industry had ever seen. And so did everybody else.

If the decade of strife fell upon Britain’s industries unevenly, it’s fair to say that the BBC was amongst the more insulated. Predominantly based in London, and
midway through the 10-year cycle for which its funding was set, it remained functionally independent of the wider, increasingly gloomy, economic climate. It was not untainted, though; for all its
belief in its own lack of bias, on some issues it felt a self-conscious need to lead the nation’s agenda. Having raised the question of the changes heralded by the microchip, the BBC felt
compelled to provide an answer.

So did the government. Soon after the
Horizon
programme, ITV had run its own series, called
The Mighty Micro
, which had delivered more optimistic predictions, and between them
the two broadcasters had spurred the Manpower Services Commission, an autonomous government-funded body, to fill the terrifying silence that Edward Goldwyn’s programme had pointed to.

Apparently, Goldwyn had been right about the government’s ignorance, because the MSC went straight back to the BBC to help it investigate. It gave the Corporation some money to help with
the budget, which arrived at the Continuing Education Department and fell into the hands of producers David Allen and Robert Albury, who put it to good use on a worldwide fact-finding tour.

If it was a junket, it was an effective one. Most developed countries turned out to have relationships with the microchip far in advance of the UK’s – not only in the United States
and Japan, but also Germany and Sweden. The BBC’s line changed from panic to ambition. Allen’s
conclusion was that the country needed a public awareness
campaign, not only about computers, but also how to program them. ‘If we wanted to democratise the technology, rather than be dominated by it as some people seemed to think, we needed people
to experience it and to control it,’ he says. ‘And in those days that meant programming. It was very much a hands-on philosophy.’

Fortunately, programming didn’t require an absurdly advanced display of computer literacy. Both the British machines, and most others from around the world, treated coding as the natural
first task of a computer owner. When you turned them on, the screen presented you with a few words of information and a blinking cursor – an invitation to write code.

Unless you were a fan of obscurities, there were two ways home computers could be programmed in 1980: the hardcore, ‘next to the metal’ language of machine code, sometimes called
‘assembler’ after the tool used to create it; and BASIC, which was the language of choice for the beginner. BASIC allowed simple tasks to be described in order, made repetition easy,
and enabled complexity to grow quickly from simple building blocks.

Following his tour of global computing, David Allen embarked on three projects. He made a thoughtful documentary series called
The Silicon Factor
, which eschewed doom-mongering and won
a prize at the New York Film Festival. He bought a TRS-80 – an American home computer – and began to learn BASIC, although he wasn’t particularly impressed with this version of
the language, or any other on the market. And he co-wrote a report for the BBC, the Manpower Services Commission, and ultimately, the Department of Trade and Industry, which recommended that the
BBC create a Computer Literacy Campaign, complete with all the books and courses that should go with it.

The report had been commissioned in the dying months of James Callaghan’s embattled Labour government, and was first read by outgoing MPs before the 1979 general election. But the new
Conservative administration and its far-sightedly titled Minister for
Information Technology, Kenneth Baker, received it surprisingly favourably. Perhaps because the
involvement of the BBC seemed to be minimal at this stage, the parties least interested were the manufacturers.

Allen had asked John Coll, an electronics whiz teaching at Oundle School in the Midlands, to help explore the requirements for an educational computer. Principal among these was an invention
Coll called ‘Adopted BASIC for Computers’, an idealised, utopian and very powerful version of the language. The manufacturers, who were invited to talk to the DTI at the BBC, proved
more than resistant, as Allen found: ‘We said: “Can you implement this?” And they said: “Woah, given a
lot
of money!”’ Some weren’t interested at
all – why should they spend this money and resource on something that would help their rivals?

It was a false start, but one that would be overcome via the application of a rather unfashionable idea: state intervention. It was decided that the BBC should sponsor an entirely new computer
as part of the course. Both the Corporation and the government were sensitive about backing a commercial enterprise, but the DTI broke the deadlock. After all, Britain had a thriving young computer
industry – why not take advantage of its expertise? And one machine that had emerged from the East Anglian hotbed of genius appeared to be the perfect candidate.

The Newbrain.

After the breakup of Sinclair Radionics, the NEB had sold the viable businesses, and spun-off research projects of varying degrees of credibility into independent companies.
The Newbrain, Sinclair’s first attempt at entering the home computer market, had been given to Newbury Laboratories where, with delicious synchronicity, it became the Newbury Newbrain. Freed
from Clive Sinclair’s energetic urgings, work had continued at an unhurried pace under designers Mike Wakefield and Basil Smith. And, as Newbury was still largely publicly funded, the DTI was
comfortable that promoting its version of the
Newbrain would avoid the charge that the government was giving preferential treatment to any one of the new technology
entrepreneurs.

Chris Curry found out about the BBC’s new computer on the BBC news. It was a
fait accompli
– this was the way the Corporation was going and, for a short while, it pulled him
and the rest of the industry warily together. ‘I rang Clive, who was now a competitor, of course, and said, “What do you know of this?”’ Curry recalls. ‘He said he had
never heard of it. I said, “Well a television programme is the biggest advertising campaign you could possibly get – something has to be done.”’

In fact, the deal was less assured than was being reported. John Coll’s specifications far outstripped Newbury’s plans, as they had those of every other manufacturer approached. But
by now all the parties were committed. And crucially, the BBC had started developing its courses and programmes, which, with the certainty of a national broadcaster, it had scheduled for the
following year.

Winter arrived – but the Newbrain didn’t.

Curry visited London on a fact-finding mission: ‘I went off to the Department of Trade and Industry to find out what was going on, and then to the BBC . . . There was clearly some mixed
feelings at the BBC, because the Newbury Newbrain didn’t appear to do a lot of the things they wanted to do with it, and it wasn’t ready, and wasn’t ideal in various
ways.’

Then and there, Curry told them to open the project out to other computer makers, but the BBC was in the driving seat, and it was still optimistic. For six months it pursued the Newbrain, but
the designers couldn’t bring it up to the BBC’s specification, or down to its price point.

Allen remembers the period as one of desperation and despondency. Between Christmas and New Year, he and his team gave up on Newbury Laboratories, and drew up a brand-new specification to pass
around other manufacturers. In the face of this setback they consoled themselves with the thought that, since the manufacturing run would be no more than ten or twelve thousand, at least the BBC
Continuing Education Department wouldn’t be making anyone rich.