Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (7 page)

Curry and Sinclair had each seen the way the computer market had jumped in size with every new appeal to the consumer sector, and both men knew that a computer endorsed by
‘Auntie Beeb’ would win the confidence of parents and teachers. The computer the BBC chose could be very profitable.

They each had a machine that they thought could do the job. In 1981, Sinclair Research updated the ZX80. The designers had considered calling the new machine the Series B or Series II, but
eventually embraced their accidental nomenclature and released the jet-black ZX81. It represented only a small refinement; the forthcoming ZX82 would be the real leap forward, a graphics
powerhouse, with a sound chip and a massive 48 kilobytes of memory. And this time, a keyboard with moving keys.

Acorn was also in the early stages of designing a ‘professional Atom’, which, with a brand consistency that would appeal to its science-aware market, was christened the
‘Proton’. But the name was almost the only decision that had been made about it. There were divisions throughout Acorn over the form the machine should take – the technology, the
specifications, and even the target market. Again Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber were tasked with designing the Proton, but they found themselves juggling the different demands of those advocating
‘super workstations, super home computers, and everything in between’. Even the core question of the processor was up for grabs. The 6502 had worked fine, but Acorn was a hive of
technologists endlessly buzzing with alternative opinions.

Wilson literally engineered a truce. The new computer would have the reliable 6502 at the core, but also include a ‘tube’ that could hook in other – yet to be decided –
processors, so the two could work in harmony. It was both a compromise and an inspiration, and another ‘butterfly effect’ decision that would contribute to creating a tsunami in the
wider technology world.

Early in 1981, Acorn and Sinclair Research officially learned the
industry’s open secret – that the Newbrain had faltered and any and every computer
manufacturer with a British headquarters was now in the running to replace it. Allen and Coll’s specification was sent out to anyone who wanted it. Slender but specific, in two pages of
bullet points it described a utopian machine of state-of-the-art power and myriad features: full positive keyboard, high-resolution colour graphics, sophisticated sound, both cassette and floppy
disc drive interfaces, ports for controlling every conceivable peripheral device – it was easy to see why Newbury had found itself falling short of the BBC’s vision. Most important of
all, the chosen machine would need to handle Coll’s souped-up ABC BASIC.

Nobody had a design that matched the aspiration but, in their different ways, the companies tried to satisfy it. Sinclair looked at the cost of building this Platonic form of computer, and was
convinced that he could bend the BBC’s will to his. As well as having advanced plans, he had another, powerful weapon: he had secured the industry’s first deal with a retail chain,
striking up a relationship with WH Smith, which was looking to diversify from books and magazines. Soon, ZX81s would be available for £69.99 at shops throughout the country, and the same
could be true for a Sinclair BBC.

Acorn, on the other hand, had no demonstrable hardware at all. The spec had arrived a few days ahead of a visit from Allen and his team and, as it seemed to Curry and Hauser, all they had with
which to greet him was conversation.

There is a legend in the British computer industry about what happened next. Hermann Hauser rang Steve Furber and asked him if what Allen wanted was possible. The answer was a firm
‘no’. So, he rang Sophie Wilson with the same question, and received the same answer. Then he rang Furber back with a simple lie: that Wilson had said it was plausible. Furber rose to
the bait and promised it could be done. Hauser then passed this news on to Wilson, who decided that if Furber could do it, so could she. The design race was afoot.

The story is more or less accurate. Hauser enjoys recounting it, but Curry is more circumspect: ‘It was fairly common practice, yes
it’s true,’ he
admits. ‘And people knew that it was being done to them. It was not enormously crafty on that occasion . . . it did happen, but it happened all the time, actually.’

Working around the clock, Furber, Wilson and the team managed to construct an embryonic Proton ready for the BBC’s visit. Allen’s team arrived fresh from seeing a company called
Tangerine, where they had seen the innards of a computer that two years later would become the Oric 1. Then, at the vital moment of the BBC’s arrival, Acorn’s newborn device stopped
working.

It’s another mythic event from the birth of the industry, but this time even Curry concedes the truth contained real drama: ‘That was quite a nail biter when the BBC came to look at
it, but everything was met.’ Not working though. It was Hauser who, in desperation or for lack of any other choice, cut the earth wire to the machine. The wire protected their electronics
from overload, and severing it could have been a fatal moment for their equipment, but instead it sprang to life. In retrospect, Curry can afford to be sanguine about this nerve-racking moment.
‘We had a deadline, and nothing was working until the last possible moment, which was all true, but then that’s the nature of things. It’s always the case,’ he says.

The BBC liked the machine, and Allen’s team liked Acorn. The company had the atmosphere of a PhD lab with commercial energy: Hauser an inspirational ideas guy, Wilson evidently brilliant.
‘They were,’ says Allen, ‘an impressive outfit. Quite a high-powered group of university people. It was very much “above the shop in the centre of Cambridge”. We were
pretty green, but they seemed to be a nice bunch. They were very open to ideas, and very enthusiastic.’

After lunch, Allen’s team visited Sinclair Research. Unlike at Acorn, they didn’t get to meet the designers. Instead, they were faced with the famous and fired-up managing director,
full of passion for his new machine, but, from Allen’s perspective, with rather less respect for his visitors’ efforts. ‘“Call this a spec?”’ Allen recalls
Sinclair saying, before going through their list with a critical, cost-conscious eye. ‘He said things like: “Well, we have got a positive
keyboard”, and
he waved the Sinclair Spectrum keyboard at us, which is a flexible rubber thing.’

The BBC didn’t respond well to the financial argument. One of its advisers was Mike McLean of the
Electronic Times
, who was a fan of Sinclair, but even he had to admit that some
of the entrepreneur’s products had been tainted with a poor reputation for quality, and always because they had been engineered down to a price.

As for whether the Spectrum could have cut it as the BBC’s machine, Allen is unambiguous: ‘No. Not as we saw it. What he [Sinclair] might have developed it into is another matter.
But the thing about Acorn is that they had a co-operative spirit: we’ll meet you, we’ll evolve our thing in your direction. That was quite important, I think.’

The BBC made its assessment in the following weeks based on a full analysis of the technology, its adherence to the specifications, and the manufacturers’ track records. As well as
considering the two Cambridge companies, it had seen efforts from their neighbours Tangerine, and visited Dragon in Wales and Research Machines in Oxford. But the decision kept swinging towards
Acorn.

It was hugely significant that Wilson’s BASIC could match the BBC’s needs, and that the Proton’s design allowed for plugging in a Z80 with which to run exotic American software
such as CP/M – a popular operating system. It was similarly impressive when Acorn devised a way to build a Teletext decoder into the machine, meeting the BBC’s request to download
software through the spare parts of a television signal. But perhaps what mattered most to the final decision was that, at the end of that first day of meeting all the manufacturers, the visiting
BBC team had chosen to go to the pub with the Acorn team.

Then, the Newbrain reanimated.

On the day that David Allen’s team were to choose their manufacturer, Newbury arrived at the BBC with – at last – the final, working hardware. ‘Newbury turned up saying,
“We did it! We’ve got this!”’ Allen recalls. ‘And they plugged it in, and it didn’t work. It was terribly tragic, it was very sad.’ And too late. Acorn had
fulfilled every
aspect of Allen’s dream, even as it had become more ambitious. Nothing else under consideration came close.

And so Acorn’s Proton became the BBC Micro and launched in late 1981. It had a large, beige case and a rock-steady keyboard. It was so reliable that in places such as railway stations and
betting shops the machine remained in constant use for a decade. And when a government scheme called ‘Micros in Schools’ subsidised the education market, Acorn’s robust and
incredibly highly specified design became the computer of choice in Britain’s classrooms.

And every BBC Micro came loaded with an incredible asset. If there is a single tool that opened up computing in Britain in the eighties, and that laid the foundations for its vibrant games
scene, it is BBC BASIC. Wilson’s implementation of Coll’s specification was swift and elegant, and while the BBC Micro was rarer in people’s homes, most children had access to one
at school. When first turned on, it had a formal feel, with a brief list of its credentials followed by the blinking cursor politely waiting for an instruction. To the uninitiated pupil, it could
at first appear to be part of the elevated world of technology, as exciting or daunting as that could be.

In practice, it was a benign teacher: it repaid a small amount of effort with a huge amount of fun. The cursor was a prompt to enter a command in the BBC Micro’s default programming
language, which was an unusually intuitive and friendly kind of BASIC. The computer came with a thick manual that could teach everything to the most interested pupils, but there were simpler tricks
that everyone seemed to know. Typing the word PRINT followed by a message made the computer repeat that message on the following line:

Already the computer had been pulled from science fiction to matter-of-fact. Pupils sitting in a classroom, who had only seen such devices on television, could control the BBC Micro simply by
copying
their friends. From there it was just a tiny step to writing a program through the addition of line numbers:

Type RUN, and the screen would fill with your message:

And so it would repeat, until someone pressed the Escape key.

Within minutes, any child could have a first taste of the power of programming, and it seemed so easy. Soon they would add colours to their message, double its height, and invite other users to
enter their own message and play with it. Later they might learn to turn on a graphics mode and draw pictures, pixel by pixel, or use the computer’s immensely fast – for its hardware
– line-drawing routine to outline shapes. In a way that was extraordinarily close to its design ambitions, the BBC’s project had created a nation of lunchtime programmers.

As Curry had predicted, the BBC endorsement changed the fate of Acorn, helping it stand out as the market filled with a dozen rivals. Furber thinks it might even have saved the company:
‘Acorn was a small start-up that nobody had heard of, but if the BBC was going with it, then people had confidence that it wasn’t going to disappear overnight. The only other brand with
this kind of visibility was Sinclair.’ It was effective marketing – the BBC Micro, in its various forms, sold one and a half million units.

The ZX82, however, became the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and Britain’s bestselling computer. At £125, or £175 for the top-end model, the ZX Spectrum was cheap – half the price
of its rivals. It was a
bargain for its market, and the cost-saving design was inspired, but the compromises showed. The ZX Spectrum came with its own version of BASIC, and
although its creator Steve Vickers had done a good job, he was boxed in by the architecture of its ZX80 origins. It was cumbersome, and so slow that
Computing Today
magazine shortened its
‘benchmark’ speed tests for those readers who ‘might like to read the review before the Christmas holidays.’ Its keyboard was made of an odd rubber, widely but unkindly
known as ‘dead flesh’, and it was physically unstable, especially the early models. Although the computer could display sixteen colours, only two could be shown in any small area of the
screen – the resulting ‘colour clash’ saw overlapping objects glitchily flicking between colours as they moved around. Additional memory was fitted as an extra board
‘floating’ inside the original, and the power supply units were known for dying in a pop of smoke. When Sinclair had been making pocket gadgets for a technophile market, the compromises
required for a compact design made sense, and high failure rates were tolerated by the consumers. For some reason, the same philosophy of shaving off millimetres in size was carried over to a
computer that would sit on the floor of a living room, and quality paid the price. By the end of its life, the ZX Spectrum had sold five million units, but sometimes return rates had been as high
as thirty per cent.

A story – recounted by Furber and whispered by others – about the ZX Spectrum’s cost-cutting went round the industry: ‘We became aware of the legend of the Sinclair blue
spot return system,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if this is true, but the rumour was that if you sent back a Spectrum because it didn’t work, all they did was stick a blue spot
on the bottom and send it out to another customer. And if it came back with a blue spot on, it got thrown in the bin.’

But none of the machine’s shortcomings mattered. The ZX Spectrum was for sale in every WH Smith across the land and at a price that made sense. Moreover, it would soon develop its biggest
selling point: the largest selection of games for any machine in the world, bar none.