THE ZX
SPECTRUM AT 40
There have been many significant days in the history of the UK games industry, but the launch of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was arguably the first of them. Richie Shoemaker went to meet two people that helped make it happen
C
an you remember where you were on the 23rd April 1982? No, neither can I, but unlike a number of you fine people reading this, I did at
the time exist in human form - albeit in the shape of an awkward pre-teenager. What I do remember vividly is what happened afterwards, because it was the day that the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was launched and the world was forever changed. True, it wasn’t the first home computer and it
certainly wasn’t the most capable, but with its synth- pop stylings the Spectrum looked like nothing else around. More importantly for the parents being badgered into purchasing one (on the pretext that it would facilitate the timely completion of school work), it was cheap. Not just cheaper than every other comparable computer, but the same price as the best-selling console, the Atari VCS, which had been on the market for four years already and thus considered obsolete.
70 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2022 The ZX Spectrum was of course the brainchild of the
late Clive Sinclair, the serial entrepreneur and inventor who came to prominence in 1972 with one of the world’s first - and by far its cheapest - pocket-sized calculators. He would later become infamous for the disastrous but prophetic C5 electric car. In 1982, however, his star was still in the ascendancy, having enjoyed considerable success with the ZX80 and ZX81 computers. Seeing the potential in the home computer market and
keen to outmanoeuvre rivals Acorn and Commodore - Acorn especially - Sinclair pushed to launch the ZX81’s successor within just ten months, a remarkable turnaround for the time, even without the fact that the Spectrum would be offer numerous upgrades - more memory (16k base model), colour graphics (15), sound capabilities (the ZX81 was mute) and a “proper” keyboard, to name but a few.
TECHNICIAN TED Chief among the team charged with developing the ZX Spectrum - designated the ZX82 - were Steve Vickers and Richard Altwasser. Vickers, fresh from having completed a PhD in algebra, admits to knowing nothing about Sinclair’s computers, but was offered a role at tech consultancy firm Nine Tiles, which had created the
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