It's more fun to compute

Captain Howdy: https://b3ta.com/board/11351222

Sir Clive Sinclair died last week – still best-known, perhaps despite his own intentions, for the burst of innovation that saw the production of a series of cheap, mass-produced computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It perhaps wasn’t clear at the time, and – if the BBC’s very good one-off drama, Micro Men, is any guide – it wasn’t clear to Sinclair himself just how much the transformation of computers from big, unseen presences to small machines that could sit in your house would then go on to transform the world.

I learned to program on a Sinclair QL, one of the two commercial flops that Sinclair Research tried to push in the mid-1980s that led to the company’s bankruptcy and its purchase by Alan Sugar’s Amstrad. (The other was the electric trike, the C5. Possibly this now looks ahead of its time; possibly not.) The QL was rushed to market well before the machines were ready to be sold, and its hardware was somewhat underpowered relative to the demanding software it came installed with – notably, the multitasking operating system and its implementation of the BASIC language. Its Motorola CPU was a version of the same chip later installed in the 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST, but with the external databus (the CPU’s link to the rest of the computer) restricted to 8 bits – a cost-saving measure, but which meant (in practice) that the QL was just a bit slow and flopped around.

To really complete the package, Sinclair Research spurned the standard floppy disk drives in favour of their proprietary Microdrives, which were slow, unreliable, had a (even by 1985 standards) derisory 100k of storage space, but which were cheap to manufacture. Likewise the peculiar membrane keyboard – a step up from the dead flesh feel of the ZX Spectrum’s rubber keys, but whose money-saving lack of responsiveness is probably today responsible for my attack-the-keys, smash-the-laptop approach to typing. Almost no-one bought the QL, which meant no-one wrote games for it – and in any case it wasn’t much good at them - so I had no choice but to learn to code, quite badly, before happily acquring a secondhand Spectrum. (My dad, displaying an uncanny technological sixth sense, later bought a Betamax video recorder.)

But as bat020 pointed out, it was at least possible, with the first