“and so the myth of Clive coming in and looking over an engineer’s shoulder and asking him, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, ‘So what would happen if that component was removed?’ was very real. And it kept us engineers on our toes. So we had to make compromises in order to meet the £125 take-home price.” One of which was the
colour graphics scheme would only allow one attribute byte per character to define foreground, background colour, flashing and highlighting - which resulted in the Spectrum’s distinctive attribute clash; hideous to behold in many early games, but which over time programmers learnt to get around and use to their advantage. Altwasser is not at all defensive about the Spectrum’s
graphical shortcoming, and indeed remains rather proud of the economy that was maintained: “People have said, why didn’t we have true high resolution colour, where you
RICHARD ALTWASSER ON CLIVE SINCLAIR
“He cultivated this public persona of being a slightly eccentric inventor and one of his often repeated statements was that Sinclair Research exists to invent and the only reason that Sinclair Research sells products was to fund the research. This helped to build up his persona and so a lot was written about him. “People wanted to know what he was going to say and wanted to know what his next products were going to be. So you know, one could perhaps compare him with Elon Musk today; he says something that has absolutely no relevance at all to any of his business interests, but everybody publishes it. “Now, certainly with some of my colleagues, that brought some criticism. People would say ‘the man is egocentric’, ‘he talks about himself’, ‘he’s building up his own image’, ‘he should be talking about the product’, but I think those criticisms missed the subtlety. He created this public persona and people were interested to hear about what he had to say to write about it. And of course, in a very subtle way, that promoted the company and promoted the products.
“I’d also say that he was very demanding. We would expect to hear the sharp end of his tongue, but he was also a generous man.”
could individually address the colour of each individual pixel on the screen? Or why didn’t we have hardware sprites moving about the screen? Of course, we could have all of those things. The technology was available and we knew how to do it. But we had a price point to hit.”
LORDS OF MIDNIGHT Another compromise of the Spectrum’s design was its ‘full-size moving-key keyboard’, which was quickly characterised as feeling like dead flesh, despite being a vast improvement on the membrane keyboards of the ZX80 and 81. Part of the problem was that each key had up to five context-sensitive commands attributed to it, which made learning BASIC as much a battle with the keyboard as with programming itself. Although, for those that spent their days typing in game listings from magazines, muscle memory soon kicked in. The outward appearance of the original ZX Spectrum
was for all its limitations and frustrations an inspired piece of work - one of the many award-winning designs of the late Rick Dickinson, who after Sinclair Research went on to design the Gizmondo and the recently remodelled Spectrum Next. However, before its fans could get to appreciate his work in turning the Spectrum’s shortcomings into timeless distinctions, there was the small matter of having the machine ready for launch, which in the early spring of 1982 was by no means assured. “It was certainly no more than a week before the launch
that we had to start the production line,” remembers Altwasser, who was sent to Cambridge airport with Sinclair’s engineering team to board Sir Clive’s private jet. “We flew down to the Isle of Wight, picked up some keyboards, flew up to Dundee to the Timex factory, then we helped assemble as many computers as we thought would fit in this small aircraft and flew back to Cambridge ready to take them to the Computer Fair.”
72 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2022
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