The Influence of Sinclair Computers on My Life and Career

I've always been fascinated by Sinclair computers, particularly the ZX81 and Spectrum, which had a profound impact on my life and career. These machines were not only innovative but also ingenious, as seen in the electric bike, which was a classic example of Clive Sinclair's vision for the future. The ZX81, with its 1KB RAM pack, was a game-changer, allowing me to experience the world of computing at a young age. I remember being about seven or eight years old when I first laid eyes on a Sinclair ZX81, and it sparked my interest in computing.

The ZX81 was a groundbreaking machine that introduced me to the concept of programming. At the time, I had never seen anything like it before. Outside of arcades, where we would play Atari and other games, there were no other computers in our home. But with the ZX81, I could write my own code and experiment with different programs. The thrill of typing in a new program, hoping it would work, was exhilarating. And when it didn't, I'd tweak it and try again, learning from my mistakes. This hands-on approach to programming taught me valuable skills that have stayed with me throughout my career.

The ZX81 was also an essential tool for supplementing my university education. With the help of a friend, we created a debugger, which we sold through university. The money generated by this venture allowed me to pay for my beer money, as well as covering some of the costs associated with pursuing my studies. This experience not only helped me financially but also taught me about entrepreneurship and the importance of coding in problem-solving.

In retrospect, I believe that coding is essential for anyone interested in physics or any other field. Mathematics and physics are built on algorithms and computational models, making coding an indispensable skill. In fact, I often find myself wondering if there's a way to code a solution to a particular problem before delving into the mathematical aspects of it. This approach has served me well throughout my academic and professional career.

Clive Sinclair's legacy extends beyond his innovative computers. He was a visionary who saw the potential for technology to transform lives. His work on the electric bike, which has become an iconic symbol of innovation, demonstrates his commitment to pushing boundaries and challenging conventional thinking. Similarly, the ZX81 and Spectrum, despite being relatively simple machines by today's standards, represented a major leap forward in computing history.

The Sinclair ZX80 and Spectrum played a significant role in my undergraduate years and PhD research. They allowed me to explore complex problems and develop creative solutions using code. The ability to visualize and simulate complex systems using programming was essential for my work in physics. In fact, I often found myself pondering how to approach a problem by asking, "Can I code this?" or "Is there a way to code this?" This mindset has become second nature to me over the years.

Throughout my career, I've remained passionate about coding and its applications in physics. In fact, I believe that coding is more important than mathematics and physics combined. The ability to write efficient algorithms, model complex systems, and visualize results can revolutionize our understanding of the world. As someone who's had the privilege of working with Sinclair computers from a young age, I'm reminded of the power of innovation and creativity in shaping our understanding of the world.

In conclusion, my experience with Sinclair computers has been nothing short of transformative. From introducing me to the world of computing at a young age to providing me with a means of supplementing my university education, these machines have had a lasting impact on my life and career. As I look back on my journey, I'm grateful for the lessons learned from programming, problem-solving, and innovation that Clive Sinclair's computers instilled in me. These values continue to guide me as I navigate the complexities of physics and computational modeling, and I'm excited to see how coding will shape our understanding of the world in the years to come.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmy childhood is the first two words that come into mind when i was one of those nerd kids in the 80s who who spent their kind of all their time in a darkened bedroom hacking away on games jetpack there was my misspent youth playing jetpack over i can't remember somewhere 8485 something like that probably c5 the beauty of them was that you could you could understand the entire computer you could understand the entire computer the operating system the basic language that was built in and and so on the best time i ever had as a computer scientist was when i was programming the spectrum age 16 or 17. loading screens failed loading turning tapes over banging them or something like that this video is brought to you by the letter z and x and the number 81. i'm just collecting a few memories of people who've been on computer file who've memories of sinclair and the one thing i thought you could perhaps bring to the table is is a bit of a memory of the man himself because we've talked about his machines before you and i on computer file what was cyclive like i have to say probably before we even start i'm probably a little bit of a fraud on that school because a lot of my memories have survived of other people's memories right i've spoken to enough people that i you know i feel i know the guy well but i you know i met him once and and so so from my point of view my personal memories um is the guy who was an absolute gentleman you know and he was engaging um he was interested in what we were doing then there's interviews that i've done with a lot of people that have either worked for him or worked with him and that sort of thing and there's two sides of the coin as there always is you know um and the biggest question i get is about micro men you know was he really like he's portrayed in micro men for viewers who perhaps aren't aware of this maybe viewers in the states this is a tv movie which may or may not be available on youtube i shall not uh um if you were to search for micromain you may come across it you look back at the the 1980s or the late 1970s we're at a time where computers were quite scary right there were these big expensive things um and so clive sinclair came in and broke through made the first big mass market mass appeal cheap computers that people are able to program and create their own things on started with the zx80 in 1980 a year later created the zx81 and then the year after that created the famous zx spectrum as well which is kind of the cornerstone for a lot of the the british kind of uk software and video game development industry well i changed my life completely i'm sure many many people are going to say the same thing i mean i wouldn't be a computer scientist and sitting here today in a computer science department if it wasn't for clive sinclair so as many people started about the age of 14 one of my friends got a zx81 and i was very envious and we spent all our spare time at his house typing in games from magazines and in those days the magazines came out every week and they had machine code games and in hexadecimal which you had to type in very very carefully if you made one single mistake everything crashed and you had to start from scratch so we got very good typing in these games and that's kind of got me what got me started in uh in the sinclair machines in the media they're sort of made out almost there's an element of making them out to almost be a joke in in some forms that the little zx80 with this white case and and the extra memory pack you had to put on the back and how it would always wobble and you needed to cool it down with a pint and milk tetra pack of milk and the little plastic keys it's actually fantastic design i mean so absolutely ingenious is one word which comes to my mind that it was actually an incredibly skillful piece of engineering and an incredibly creative piece of engineering i started off with the zx81 loved it and then graduated the zx spectrum and i have a vivid memory the zx spectrum bringing it home plugging it into the tv putting the cassette in and it making it noises and then in color color up comes a rainbow on the screen line by line it's got how we've entered the 21st century now it was just amazing you have uh a starring role in micro men the film yeah well that's yeah no i don't have a starring role i i played a silly bit part um and looked like a muppet but we did do all the computers for it and supplied the tech and and advised on various aspects from a technical point of view as did clive actually and as many other people when people find out that we were involved with it um it is a film that's gone down really well with everybody seems to to have anyway um and and it's great that we played our part in it but a big question we get is you know was the club really you know like he was in the film because he was extremely shouty and sweary and um you know was he really like that uh and the answer that i can best judge from the conversations i've had um is absolutely he was um however however um the film is at a time when he had his back against the wall you know he was um uh trying to get the contract for the the bbc computer um and he didn't get it and things were um not going well for him and in those situations yes um he was like that um and in fact various people have said he was underplayed on that front you know um it sometimes wasn't suitable for tv we got a zx 81 for christmas not this one this one i picked up off someone a few years ago it still works apart from a few keys on the keyboard but we got a zx81 at home and then about nine months after that we upgraded to a zx spectrum as did my granddad he got one as well so sinclair computers were around all the time as i was growing up until i graduated to the atari st and things the british video game industry would not look like how it looks today without the efforts of of clive sinclair and you know the zx spectrum dma design based up in dundee started as a zx spectrum coding club right and then they eventually went and made lemmings and developed a certain game called grand theft auto that obviously has been been taken now and it's grown to this huge kind of uh behemoth um but also loads of loads of video game studios started off programming on things like the zx spectrum um and the z structure made possible um ultimate play of the game which you now know as rare started creating games for the zx spectrum but also i've seen the commodore 64 as well um and because the zx spectrum was so cheap and was so mass market it allowed anybody really um to just get in and start making their own things so you know it definitely forms the foundations of what we know as the british games industry you literally have to say okay i can move little sprites around the screen and i'm only going to be able to have like eight or so sprites on the screen what game could i come up with which like will you use that you had to design the games around the technical ability of the computer so you had to look at what it could do and how it would work and how much memory and then design your game according to it whereas as computer technologies got better you design your game first and the computer has to fit it it's cheap so if you look at the price of the spectrum computers i mean they're ridiculously cheap for the time i mean i i was looking as recently and working out how much to be how much they'd cost nowadays and it was you know like 200 300 quid or something like that which is amazingly low low price especially for something that's uh you know at the forefront effectively of home computing at the time eventually after much pestering i managed to persuade my parents to buy me a sinclair spectrum and i think i had a paper run for about two years to help fund that as well and that's when i really started getting into the programming side of things with the sinclair machines and what got me really hooked and this is my oldest book programming the z80 by rodney zacks and the z80 processor is what powered all the sinclair machines and i learned z80 machine code about the age of 16 or and i started programming my own games and that's what really got me hooked on on computer science and that's how i became a computer science professor in the end he was a very very clever guy let's not forget that he was um you know a member of mensah and he chaired mensa for many years right so um he was a very clever guy and if you didn't have the skills uh to be able to talk on his level then he could quite easily become uh a bit shouty you know but just very very dismissive however uh on the other side of the coin um i know people work with him said he was incredibly generous um with um he you know in in many ways one with kind of things like christmas um uh presence uh for staff fortner and mason hampers when things were going well for for all the staff regardless of the level uh that they played in the company um uh huge parties you know kind of um well can only be described as um you know glitterati kind of parties and that and they and they had people there from all walks of life um and they were extravagant and they were fantastic and people really enjoyed them um so much so that a lot of people can't remember them uh you know so he was very very generous and he was a really nice guy even somebody that cuts his grasp or him you know would be given a a sinclair spectrum yeah here's this for the kids you know enjoy it sort of thing this is one of the games uh which i wrote um 37 years ago when i was 16. and it's a game called hyperbole which actually sold managed to get this running on an emulator a few years ago so this is my youngest son tom and this is him playing the game i think he was about 12 at the time so it's a little shoot em up game it's not very not very fancy game um but yeah when i when i look back at this i'm quite surprised that a 16 year old could write something like that this is one of the nice things about the sinclair machines even as a kid you could understand absolutely everything about them and actually for me the main challenge was doing the graphics we used to get bits of graph paper and just color color the squares in to make the little characters and that was writing the program wasn't very difficult for me but doing the graphics and making it look good um was was the difficult part obviously there were faults with it i i did i had a z8 z8 zx80 the original white one with the original 1k memory and then as i earned a bit more money i got the memory for the i've got the money for the uh for the 16k expansion pack and you stuck it on the back and it would if it became a bit wobbly and then it would it would break and the the computer would go down because you'd lost your extra 16k of ram and then you could say you could find that you could tilt it and put a weight on it to get the connections were better i didn't have a color monitor so i had to go into one of the shops in one of the computer shops in my hometown of glasgow and play my games on the color monitors to make sure the the graphics were all right and then to tweak the graphics and then take them home and then sell the games a friend of mine had a zx spectrum i myself i had already a patch 2001 which was 6502 based yeah so i wasn't so much involved at this point i was so much involved with z80 or sinclair or anything but i i i did program that 80 and that was when i worked in my first job for company next of microprocessor engineering and there i i did lots of z80 assembly programming so i i know i know so a9 is load accumulator to memory i know still some of the op quotes it was fun i mean it had what's called a mouse piano where every bit you could set and everything was in hex so it was real you had your fingers on on on the real machine at the time it was real real uh computing and not this fake stuff you don't know this we had a um a spectrum 128k plus 2 which had a built-in tape recorder what kind of springs to mind is just hearing the sound of binary essentially data that turned into an audio signal it's just such a distinctive thing that's what a lot of people talk about when they when they remember the spectrum and other sorts of um machines of that time that era i think that's a kind of it's a really really striking striking thing to be able to hear the sound of digital information i had a zx81 that was my second computer um and i didn't i didn't particularly want it but i could actually i'd ordered um a bbc micro and the but the waiting lists were like i know six months or something when it first came out so um in the end i fairly briefly had a a secondhand zx81 just to sort of tied me over till the bbc was delivered the zx81 i was kind of you know very small quite sort of plasticky with the the weird sort of film keyboard every key did about five or six different things so you'd end up doing this a vulcan mine grip to type in the character you wanted the website has every item that we have in the collection listed on it all the sinclair's products of a computing nature anyway that people can go and have a look at this information about clyde there's a timeline for his products and their history and things like that so yeah it's all on the website so it gets ridiculed because it had a number of drawbacks uh and deficiencies but nothing else touched it on price okay this was the first machine you could really go out to the high street and buy from somebody like boots or w.a smiths and that was a big deal so it's no longer looking in the backs of electronics magazines this was walking down the high street oh look there's a home computer should we buy one um and people did they bought a lot of them i mean actually in the sort of early 80s 82 83 84 you could walk into wh smith's which was a news agents in the uk and you'd go upstairs or to the back of the thing and they would have as zx spectrums on stale they'd have oryx they'd have bbc micros they'd have commodore 64s and things on sale they would sell them they would sell the games for them the hardware the accessories from them and so you'd walk in there but it wasn't just um sort of but it wasn't just wh smith that sold that you could walk into boots which is a chemist a pharmacy in the uk quite a famous one headquartered here in nottingham and they would be selling computers i remember going upstairs to boots in beeston and you'd have a zx spectrum an acorn electron and so on on display hooked up to tvs and people would walk in and type 10 print hello world 20 go to 10 and often a ruder uh kind of phrase than hello world but yes not in the areas i lived in sure i don't know what happened where you lived it's easy to forget now that it was this was delivering a computer for a hundred pounds to someone like me i was i was a 16 year old we had a computer at school a microprocessor system which was a big thing and it was um but that was absolutely fantastic because that was a machine that you could use uh then and there in front of you and we started programming that and it was based on the z80 the in the zylok z80 chip so having this computer that you actually had a keyboard and you could type on and you could program it that was a massive step forward and that was like oh my gosh i can use a computer i've got a computer in front of me one of the nice things about um there's about all computers at that point is that they were computing wasn't just something that you used it was something that you're going to sort of program with you were going to hook it up to automate your house and do things so they all had some sort of expansion capability something like the bbc micro it was dead easy to do things with you had a user port on the bottom you could connect that up to some relays and things with a few transistors and you could start controlling your model train set or whatever it is you want to do which is what i did but you could do the same on the zx spectrum you have the edge connector here the edge connector is basically the processor buses from the z80 cpu which powers the spectrum so you've got the address bus you've got the data bus you've got the i o and the memory select signals and if you want to hook it up to control something you have to decode all that yourself now i was five or six at the time we were doing this i didn't understand it all but it certainly set me on the road to understanding how the hardware worked how you have to decode the addresses that were coming out of the cpu so that you knew that this was actually going to something that you wanted to control and then you'd have to feed that into latches or flip-flops so that you could control it so why it was much harder to do something like control a model train set or link this into sensors and things and you will say that bbc micro uh behind me you actually learned a whole lot more about how a computer worked by doing it here the bbc micro is like sort of driving the gpios on a raspberry pi you just set an address in memory and you turn the pins on and off and you can control something most people bought this they weren't going to do that so why are you paying for that extra bit you still got to have a bigger motherboard that's going to cost more you've got more fiberglass forming it you've still got to sort of decode the addresses leave space for the chips and things if people aren't going to use that most of the time why put it on the machine well i was obviously at school and i was working as a pot washer in a local restaurant to earn five pounds a week or something like this and uh i was reading the electronic magazines these computers you start build buying them and they were still hundreds and hundreds of pounds five hundred pounds eight hundred pounds this sort of thing and then suddenly this sinclair zx80 came out and it was 79.95 or something if you could solder it yourself and i thought i can't solder i'm not an electronic engineer and but 99.99 or whatever it was 99.95 at 100 pounds and that was a computer that i could have in my house and it's like well that's fantastic so i bought this thing and i got it home and i remember the excitement of unpacking this thing the realization that it was based on the on the z80 chip which was the same as the um this school computer and so therefore at home i could have something which used the same chip as this computer i got in school sinclair was huge in terms of getting me interested in coding i really dilly dallied over whether to do a physics degree or a computer science degree sinclair had a massive role to play in that computer science no no actually getting me into coding and of course with the zx81 i started off with the the 1k version like everybody did there's not a lot you can do in 1k unless you get into an assembly language and as a means of learning assembly it was absolutely fantastic i also remember writing some um really simple games like it was just a like a v that you had to scroll back and forth and there was a scrolling background with little star with asterisks as asteroids and you had to move use the arrow keys to move back and forth and avoid as much i wrote that up and i sent it to one of the listings magazines i can't remember which one but they accepted it and i published it and i got a check for i believe 25 quid which to a 13 year old back in 1981 or 82 was like oh god i'm rich um so yeah so this is like the magazines used to have a list of code you copied out you did and you had to sit there and type it in and then you'd save it onto your cassette um and then when you graduated from the 1k to the 16gb version and you had your ram pack at the bot the back and the classic ram pack wobble issue that you'd be typing away you'd have got you know 90 lines or 90 pages out of 102 pages and then suddenly your ram pack wobbles and it's all gone so um happy days happy times yes i think there was something like 2 4 or 8k of rom which contained the complete operating system of the computer and then what happened was the operating system booted up and ran and then the operating system itself used out of the 1k of memory you ended up with 760 bytes of memory that you could actually use what sinclair was trying to do was engineer this down to a price because this came out in 1981 uh and cost around 80 pounds 100 pounds we bought it assembled whereas other computers at the time were costing more like a thousand pounds or that sort of so that sort of order of magnitude and different in price so this really made computers available for the home user particularly in britain where there wasn't that much uh money available and things people could go and buy one of these they could start to experiment they could start to learn how to program and things where even something like the bbc micro which came out a couple of years after this sort of late 82 early 83 was costing three four hundred pounds this was a hundred quid you could get one of these you could play with it and things set it up but used your tv used a standard cassette player as its storage device and you could start to experience what computing was like of course it was limited down to price every time you press the key the screen flashes because it's using the cpu to just drive or using one aspect of the cpu to drive the display as well as to process the instructions to run the program so every time it's processing instructions it can't draw things on the display every time it's drawing things on the display it can't um process instructions and so you have to sort of balance between the two despite that people managed to produce some really quite impressive software for the machine something like 3d monster maze is a classic example you sort of got almost a i won't call it a first person shooter maybe it's a first person maze game and so on drawings or 3d mazes in the dinosaur it had this built-in basic language that that could allow you to program in basic that was fantastic but i had actually learnt machine code on the z80 in this school computer and the sinclair used the same z80 so it used the same machine code the school computer had this disassembler and i i worked with the disassembler it has had a debugger and a disassembler so disassembler turns the machine code numbers you know the the the raw machine code numbers into a sort of the text which sort of uh makes it a sort of human readable form of the machine code and i got this running i took the school stuff and adapted it and worked it and got it working on the zx80 and then i could disassemble the entire uh operating system it was absolutely ingenious it was absolutely fantastic it sort of realization again that what it was doing was it would interrupt the processor every 50 milliseconds or something and 50 times a second and put a picture onto the screen and it was sort of so the processor was writing the the the image to the screen on a and this is in the days before um lcd screens this is this is you know scanning televisions and so it had this interrupting process which interrupted the operating system and or interrupted the the program and drew the pictures onto the screen and so then when it started running a program it would disable the interrupts and the screen would go blank so you had the screen going blank whilst the program was running and then when it stopped running it the screen would reappear i remember as you as you read it and understood it and then that could and then worked out i worked out how the basic language had been coded into the system as well so somewhere in this process i wrote the machine code debugger and disassembler for it and sold it commercially started selling this commercially unless you've programmed in machine code realizing why you need a single step debugger but you're trying to program stuff on a computer like this and so yeah i i created this machine code debugger and then we yeah sold it commercially bringing me income when i was a student i went by this time i'd gone to university but in 1981 or something my machine code debugger was being sold by a company and so they wanted me to update it from the zx80 to the zx81 so i did that and then we got spectrum and i did the same without ported it to the spectrum and each time the machines got a little bit more sophisticated the zx81 was was obviously more sophisticated than 80 and the spectrum was a step up again but they were still yeah absolutely ingenious sinclair in the end was what got me into computing i mean uh he was a visionary i think he's probably a good one he's a visionary he was an inventor he had i mean the electric bike is a classic example there electric scooters are everywhere now sinclair tried to produce on with the c5 he had the zeit i think it was called a few years later he introduced a portable computer the z88 was a lovely machine that he produced which was sort of like a i think was a six or seven line 80 column lcd display with a keyboard in a machine about the size of a piece of a4 paper and probably not much thicker than that which you could throw in a bag that had a rubber keyboard so it was resilient and things and you had a portable machine that you could hook up and sort of take around the battery life was ages it came with the word processor it actually came with bbc basic on there it had a richard russell's version of bbc basic for the z80 on there and he was definitely a visionary i think perhaps my only disappointment is that the only time i saw a sinclair c5 i wasn't able to go in it because my legs weren't long enough at that age to pedal it and then the fact that i wrote this debugger and so on and sold it through university was then uh supplementing my student income through university so in many ways the sinclair zx 8081 and spectrum got me through university in more ways than one i ended up paying for my beer money as well as sparking my interest in computing i'm a very keen advocate for as much coding as possible in physics courses i would almost say that well i would definitely say that coding is as important as mathematics and physics courses i'm almost of the opinion now that coding is even more important than mathematics and physics courses and um yeah so it's been with me since a very very early age i when i think about a physics problem and certainly during my undergraduate years during my phd and even now it says can i code this and if or see a way to code it and if i can't code it or see a way to code it i know i don't understand it if i can't think of the algorithm then i don't understand that particular piece of physics and you know that all goes all the way back to the zx81 sitting in that room with the ram pack wobbling all over the place and uh typing in that stuff and it's it was character building let's put it that way sean i must have been about seven or eight and the first computer i ever laid eyes on knowingly or that i knew was a computer was a sinclair zx81 we were playing out in the street some friends some neighbours and somebody said that one of our neighbours had this computer and we all were all allowed to come in and look at it so we all kind of filed into this room and i don't know to this day what he was doing on the computer probably loading a game or something because it didn't seem like much happened we hadn't seen anything like it before i mean outside of the arcades you in your home atari was about as far as it went we've done videos on the atari vcs to 2600 it was kind of like that but you could write different games yourself you would get these magazines and there'd be a list of code and you'd type that code in as faithfully as you could and if you weren't faithful enough it didn't work so you had to be pretty faithful um and then you might tweak it and you go oh actually it says there enter press any keys i'm going to type something different there let's see what happens so i know i remember yeah a lot of fun memories of messing around with these things it's been a while since i've played this a good amount of beer money shall we say i mean you know we're talking in through my university career i mean this is a 1980 to well i was at university 81 to 84. i was probably making hundreds of pounds a term let's say hundreds of pounds a term so over the course of the university maybe a few thousand pounds you know this didn't make me a billionaire this didn't make me a steve jobs but it paid for me this was a time when my dad became unemployed and i my mum and dad couldn't give me any money and i was having to pay for my own way through university and it was it was the money from the sinclair zx80 and 81 and spectrum that uh basically paid my way for me through university so in many ways i've got a lot to i owe to the clive sinclair so youmy childhood is the first two words that come into mind when i was one of those nerd kids in the 80s who who spent their kind of all their time in a darkened bedroom hacking away on games jetpack there was my misspent youth playing jetpack over i can't remember somewhere 8485 something like that probably c5 the beauty of them was that you could you could understand the entire computer you could understand the entire computer the operating system the basic language that was built in and and so on the best time i ever had as a computer scientist was when i was programming the spectrum age 16 or 17. loading screens failed loading turning tapes over banging them or something like that this video is brought to you by the letter z and x and the number 81. i'm just collecting a few memories of people who've been on computer file who've memories of sinclair and the one thing i thought you could perhaps bring to the table is is a bit of a memory of the man himself because we've talked about his machines before you and i on computer file what was cyclive like i have to say probably before we even start i'm probably a little bit of a fraud on that school because a lot of my memories have survived of other people's memories right i've spoken to enough people that i you know i feel i know the guy well but i you know i met him once and and so so from my point of view my personal memories um is the guy who was an absolute gentleman you know and he was engaging um he was interested in what we were doing then there's interviews that i've done with a lot of people that have either worked for him or worked with him and that sort of thing and there's two sides of the coin as there always is you know um and the biggest question i get is about micro men you know was he really like he's portrayed in micro men for viewers who perhaps aren't aware of this maybe viewers in the states this is a tv movie which may or may not be available on youtube i shall not uh um if you were to search for micromain you may come across it you look back at the the 1980s or the late 1970s we're at a time where computers were quite scary right there were these big expensive things um and so clive sinclair came in and broke through made the first big mass market mass appeal cheap computers that people are able to program and create their own things on started with the zx80 in 1980 a year later created the zx81 and then the year after that created the famous zx spectrum as well which is kind of the cornerstone for a lot of the the british kind of uk software and video game development industry well i changed my life completely i'm sure many many people are going to say the same thing i mean i wouldn't be a computer scientist and sitting here today in a computer science department if it wasn't for clive sinclair so as many people started about the age of 14 one of my friends got a zx81 and i was very envious and we spent all our spare time at his house typing in games from magazines and in those days the magazines came out every week and they had machine code games and in hexadecimal which you had to type in very very carefully if you made one single mistake everything crashed and you had to start from scratch so we got very good typing in these games and that's kind of got me what got me started in uh in the sinclair machines in the media they're sort of made out almost there's an element of making them out to almost be a joke in in some forms that the little zx80 with this white case and and the extra memory pack you had to put on the back and how it would always wobble and you needed to cool it down with a pint and milk tetra pack of milk and the little plastic keys it's actually fantastic design i mean so absolutely ingenious is one word which comes to my mind that it was actually an incredibly skillful piece of engineering and an incredibly creative piece of engineering i started off with the zx81 loved it and then graduated the zx spectrum and i have a vivid memory the zx spectrum bringing it home plugging it into the tv putting the cassette in and it making it noises and then in color color up comes a rainbow on the screen line by line it's got how we've entered the 21st century now it was just amazing you have uh a starring role in micro men the film yeah well that's yeah no i don't have a starring role i i played a silly bit part um and looked like a muppet but we did do all the computers for it and supplied the tech and and advised on various aspects from a technical point of view as did clive actually and as many other people when people find out that we were involved with it um it is a film that's gone down really well with everybody seems to to have anyway um and and it's great that we played our part in it but a big question we get is you know was the club really you know like he was in the film because he was extremely shouty and sweary and um you know was he really like that uh and the answer that i can best judge from the conversations i've had um is absolutely he was um however however um the film is at a time when he had his back against the wall you know he was um uh trying to get the contract for the the bbc computer um and he didn't get it and things were um not going well for him and in those situations yes um he was like that um and in fact various people have said he was underplayed on that front you know um it sometimes wasn't suitable for tv we got a zx 81 for christmas not this one this one i picked up off someone a few years ago it still works apart from a few keys on the keyboard but we got a zx81 at home and then about nine months after that we upgraded to a zx spectrum as did my granddad he got one as well so sinclair computers were around all the time as i was growing up until i graduated to the atari st and things the british video game industry would not look like how it looks today without the efforts of of clive sinclair and you know the zx spectrum dma design based up in dundee started as a zx spectrum coding club right and then they eventually went and made lemmings and developed a certain game called grand theft auto that obviously has been been taken now and it's grown to this huge kind of uh behemoth um but also loads of loads of video game studios started off programming on things like the zx spectrum um and the z structure made possible um ultimate play of the game which you now know as rare started creating games for the zx spectrum but also i've seen the commodore 64 as well um and because the zx spectrum was so cheap and was so mass market it allowed anybody really um to just get in and start making their own things so you know it definitely forms the foundations of what we know as the british games industry you literally have to say okay i can move little sprites around the screen and i'm only going to be able to have like eight or so sprites on the screen what game could i come up with which like will you use that you had to design the games around the technical ability of the computer so you had to look at what it could do and how it would work and how much memory and then design your game according to it whereas as computer technologies got better you design your game first and the computer has to fit it it's cheap so if you look at the price of the spectrum computers i mean they're ridiculously cheap for the time i mean i i was looking as recently and working out how much to be how much they'd cost nowadays and it was you know like 200 300 quid or something like that which is amazingly low low price especially for something that's uh you know at the forefront effectively of home computing at the time eventually after much pestering i managed to persuade my parents to buy me a sinclair spectrum and i think i had a paper run for about two years to help fund that as well and that's when i really started getting into the programming side of things with the sinclair machines and what got me really hooked and this is my oldest book programming the z80 by rodney zacks and the z80 processor is what powered all the sinclair machines and i learned z80 machine code about the age of 16 or and i started programming my own games and that's what really got me hooked on on computer science and that's how i became a computer science professor in the end he was a very very clever guy let's not forget that he was um you know a member of mensah and he chaired mensa for many years right so um he was a very clever guy and if you didn't have the skills uh to be able to talk on his level then he could quite easily become uh a bit shouty you know but just very very dismissive however uh on the other side of the coin um i know people work with him said he was incredibly generous um with um he you know in in many ways one with kind of things like christmas um uh presence uh for staff fortner and mason hampers when things were going well for for all the staff regardless of the level uh that they played in the company um uh huge parties you know kind of um well can only be described as um you know glitterati kind of parties and that and they and they had people there from all walks of life um and they were extravagant and they were fantastic and people really enjoyed them um so much so that a lot of people can't remember them uh you know so he was very very generous and he was a really nice guy even somebody that cuts his grasp or him you know would be given a a sinclair spectrum yeah here's this for the kids you know enjoy it sort of thing this is one of the games uh which i wrote um 37 years ago when i was 16. and it's a game called hyperbole which actually sold managed to get this running on an emulator a few years ago so this is my youngest son tom and this is him playing the game i think he was about 12 at the time so it's a little shoot em up game it's not very not very fancy game um but yeah when i when i look back at this i'm quite surprised that a 16 year old could write something like that this is one of the nice things about the sinclair machines even as a kid you could understand absolutely everything about them and actually for me the main challenge was doing the graphics we used to get bits of graph paper and just color color the squares in to make the little characters and that was writing the program wasn't very difficult for me but doing the graphics and making it look good um was was the difficult part obviously there were faults with it i i did i had a z8 z8 zx80 the original white one with the original 1k memory and then as i earned a bit more money i got the memory for the i've got the money for the uh for the 16k expansion pack and you stuck it on the back and it would if it became a bit wobbly and then it would it would break and the the computer would go down because you'd lost your extra 16k of ram and then you could say you could find that you could tilt it and put a weight on it to get the connections were better i didn't have a color monitor so i had to go into one of the shops in one of the computer shops in my hometown of glasgow and play my games on the color monitors to make sure the the graphics were all right and then to tweak the graphics and then take them home and then sell the games a friend of mine had a zx spectrum i myself i had already a patch 2001 which was 6502 based yeah so i wasn't so much involved at this point i was so much involved with z80 or sinclair or anything but i i i did program that 80 and that was when i worked in my first job for company next of microprocessor engineering and there i i did lots of z80 assembly programming so i i know i know so a9 is load accumulator to memory i know still some of the op quotes it was fun i mean it had what's called a mouse piano where every bit you could set and everything was in hex so it was real you had your fingers on on on the real machine at the time it was real real uh computing and not this fake stuff you don't know this we had a um a spectrum 128k plus 2 which had a built-in tape recorder what kind of springs to mind is just hearing the sound of binary essentially data that turned into an audio signal it's just such a distinctive thing that's what a lot of people talk about when they when they remember the spectrum and other sorts of um machines of that time that era i think that's a kind of it's a really really striking striking thing to be able to hear the sound of digital information i had a zx81 that was my second computer um and i didn't i didn't particularly want it but i could actually i'd ordered um a bbc micro and the but the waiting lists were like i know six months or something when it first came out so um in the end i fairly briefly had a a secondhand zx81 just to sort of tied me over till the bbc was delivered the zx81 i was kind of you know very small quite sort of plasticky with the the weird sort of film keyboard every key did about five or six different things so you'd end up doing this a vulcan mine grip to type in the character you wanted the website has every item that we have in the collection listed on it all the sinclair's products of a computing nature anyway that people can go and have a look at this information about clyde there's a timeline for his products and their history and things like that so yeah it's all on the website so it gets ridiculed because it had a number of drawbacks uh and deficiencies but nothing else touched it on price okay this was the first machine you could really go out to the high street and buy from somebody like boots or w.a smiths and that was a big deal so it's no longer looking in the backs of electronics magazines this was walking down the high street oh look there's a home computer should we buy one um and people did they bought a lot of them i mean actually in the sort of early 80s 82 83 84 you could walk into wh smith's which was a news agents in the uk and you'd go upstairs or to the back of the thing and they would have as zx spectrums on stale they'd have oryx they'd have bbc micros they'd have commodore 64s and things on sale they would sell them they would sell the games for them the hardware the accessories from them and so you'd walk in there but it wasn't just um sort of but it wasn't just wh smith that sold that you could walk into boots which is a chemist a pharmacy in the uk quite a famous one headquartered here in nottingham and they would be selling computers i remember going upstairs to boots in beeston and you'd have a zx spectrum an acorn electron and so on on display hooked up to tvs and people would walk in and type 10 print hello world 20 go to 10 and often a ruder uh kind of phrase than hello world but yes not in the areas i lived in sure i don't know what happened where you lived it's easy to forget now that it was this was delivering a computer for a hundred pounds to someone like me i was i was a 16 year old we had a computer at school a microprocessor system which was a big thing and it was um but that was absolutely fantastic because that was a machine that you could use uh then and there in front of you and we started programming that and it was based on the z80 the in the zylok z80 chip so having this computer that you actually had a keyboard and you could type on and you could program it that was a massive step forward and that was like oh my gosh i can use a computer i've got a computer in front of me one of the nice things about um there's about all computers at that point is that they were computing wasn't just something that you used it was something that you're going to sort of program with you were going to hook it up to automate your house and do things so they all had some sort of expansion capability something like the bbc micro it was dead easy to do things with you had a user port on the bottom you could connect that up to some relays and things with a few transistors and you could start controlling your model train set or whatever it is you want to do which is what i did but you could do the same on the zx spectrum you have the edge connector here the edge connector is basically the processor buses from the z80 cpu which powers the spectrum so you've got the address bus you've got the data bus you've got the i o and the memory select signals and if you want to hook it up to control something you have to decode all that yourself now i was five or six at the time we were doing this i didn't understand it all but it certainly set me on the road to understanding how the hardware worked how you have to decode the addresses that were coming out of the cpu so that you knew that this was actually going to something that you wanted to control and then you'd have to feed that into latches or flip-flops so that you could control it so why it was much harder to do something like control a model train set or link this into sensors and things and you will say that bbc micro uh behind me you actually learned a whole lot more about how a computer worked by doing it here the bbc micro is like sort of driving the gpios on a raspberry pi you just set an address in memory and you turn the pins on and off and you can control something most people bought this they weren't going to do that so why are you paying for that extra bit you still got to have a bigger motherboard that's going to cost more you've got more fiberglass forming it you've still got to sort of decode the addresses leave space for the chips and things if people aren't going to use that most of the time why put it on the machine well i was obviously at school and i was working as a pot washer in a local restaurant to earn five pounds a week or something like this and uh i was reading the electronic magazines these computers you start build buying them and they were still hundreds and hundreds of pounds five hundred pounds eight hundred pounds this sort of thing and then suddenly this sinclair zx80 came out and it was 79.95 or something if you could solder it yourself and i thought i can't solder i'm not an electronic engineer and but 99.99 or whatever it was 99.95 at 100 pounds and that was a computer that i could have in my house and it's like well that's fantastic so i bought this thing and i got it home and i remember the excitement of unpacking this thing the realization that it was based on the on the z80 chip which was the same as the um this school computer and so therefore at home i could have something which used the same chip as this computer i got in school sinclair was huge in terms of getting me interested in coding i really dilly dallied over whether to do a physics degree or a computer science degree sinclair had a massive role to play in that computer science no no actually getting me into coding and of course with the zx81 i started off with the the 1k version like everybody did there's not a lot you can do in 1k unless you get into an assembly language and as a means of learning assembly it was absolutely fantastic i also remember writing some um really simple games like it was just a like a v that you had to scroll back and forth and there was a scrolling background with little star with asterisks as asteroids and you had to move use the arrow keys to move back and forth and avoid as much i wrote that up and i sent it to one of the listings magazines i can't remember which one but they accepted it and i published it and i got a check for i believe 25 quid which to a 13 year old back in 1981 or 82 was like oh god i'm rich um so yeah so this is like the magazines used to have a list of code you copied out you did and you had to sit there and type it in and then you'd save it onto your cassette um and then when you graduated from the 1k to the 16gb version and you had your ram pack at the bot the back and the classic ram pack wobble issue that you'd be typing away you'd have got you know 90 lines or 90 pages out of 102 pages and then suddenly your ram pack wobbles and it's all gone so um happy days happy times yes i think there was something like 2 4 or 8k of rom which contained the complete operating system of the computer and then what happened was the operating system booted up and ran and then the operating system itself used out of the 1k of memory you ended up with 760 bytes of memory that you could actually use what sinclair was trying to do was engineer this down to a price because this came out in 1981 uh and cost around 80 pounds 100 pounds we bought it assembled whereas other computers at the time were costing more like a thousand pounds or that sort of so that sort of order of magnitude and different in price so this really made computers available for the home user particularly in britain where there wasn't that much uh money available and things people could go and buy one of these they could start to experiment they could start to learn how to program and things where even something like the bbc micro which came out a couple of years after this sort of late 82 early 83 was costing three four hundred pounds this was a hundred quid you could get one of these you could play with it and things set it up but used your tv used a standard cassette player as its storage device and you could start to experience what computing was like of course it was limited down to price every time you press the key the screen flashes because it's using the cpu to just drive or using one aspect of the cpu to drive the display as well as to process the instructions to run the program so every time it's processing instructions it can't draw things on the display every time it's drawing things on the display it can't um process instructions and so you have to sort of balance between the two despite that people managed to produce some really quite impressive software for the machine something like 3d monster maze is a classic example you sort of got almost a i won't call it a first person shooter maybe it's a first person maze game and so on drawings or 3d mazes in the dinosaur it had this built-in basic language that that could allow you to program in basic that was fantastic but i had actually learnt machine code on the z80 in this school computer and the sinclair used the same z80 so it used the same machine code the school computer had this disassembler and i i worked with the disassembler it has had a debugger and a disassembler so disassembler turns the machine code numbers you know the the the raw machine code numbers into a sort of the text which sort of uh makes it a sort of human readable form of the machine code and i got this running i took the school stuff and adapted it and worked it and got it working on the zx80 and then i could disassemble the entire uh operating system it was absolutely ingenious it was absolutely fantastic it sort of realization again that what it was doing was it would interrupt the processor every 50 milliseconds or something and 50 times a second and put a picture onto the screen and it was sort of so the processor was writing the the the image to the screen on a and this is in the days before um lcd screens this is this is you know scanning televisions and so it had this interrupting process which interrupted the operating system and or interrupted the the program and drew the pictures onto the screen and so then when it started running a program it would disable the interrupts and the screen would go blank so you had the screen going blank whilst the program was running and then when it stopped running it the screen would reappear i remember as you as you read it and understood it and then that could and then worked out i worked out how the basic language had been coded into the system as well so somewhere in this process i wrote the machine code debugger and disassembler for it and sold it commercially started selling this commercially unless you've programmed in machine code realizing why you need a single step debugger but you're trying to program stuff on a computer like this and so yeah i i created this machine code debugger and then we yeah sold it commercially bringing me income when i was a student i went by this time i'd gone to university but in 1981 or something my machine code debugger was being sold by a company and so they wanted me to update it from the zx80 to the zx81 so i did that and then we got spectrum and i did the same without ported it to the spectrum and each time the machines got a little bit more sophisticated the zx81 was was obviously more sophisticated than 80 and the spectrum was a step up again but they were still yeah absolutely ingenious sinclair in the end was what got me into computing i mean uh he was a visionary i think he's probably a good one he's a visionary he was an inventor he had i mean the electric bike is a classic example there electric scooters are everywhere now sinclair tried to produce on with the c5 he had the zeit i think it was called a few years later he introduced a portable computer the z88 was a lovely machine that he produced which was sort of like a i think was a six or seven line 80 column lcd display with a keyboard in a machine about the size of a piece of a4 paper and probably not much thicker than that which you could throw in a bag that had a rubber keyboard so it was resilient and things and you had a portable machine that you could hook up and sort of take around the battery life was ages it came with the word processor it actually came with bbc basic on there it had a richard russell's version of bbc basic for the z80 on there and he was definitely a visionary i think perhaps my only disappointment is that the only time i saw a sinclair c5 i wasn't able to go in it because my legs weren't long enough at that age to pedal it and then the fact that i wrote this debugger and so on and sold it through university was then uh supplementing my student income through university so in many ways the sinclair zx 8081 and spectrum got me through university in more ways than one i ended up paying for my beer money as well as sparking my interest in computing i'm a very keen advocate for as much coding as possible in physics courses i would almost say that well i would definitely say that coding is as important as mathematics and physics courses i'm almost of the opinion now that coding is even more important than mathematics and physics courses and um yeah so it's been with me since a very very early age i when i think about a physics problem and certainly during my undergraduate years during my phd and even now it says can i code this and if or see a way to code it and if i can't code it or see a way to code it i know i don't understand it if i can't think of the algorithm then i don't understand that particular piece of physics and you know that all goes all the way back to the zx81 sitting in that room with the ram pack wobbling all over the place and uh typing in that stuff and it's it was character building let's put it that way sean i must have been about seven or eight and the first computer i ever laid eyes on knowingly or that i knew was a computer was a sinclair zx81 we were playing out in the street some friends some neighbours and somebody said that one of our neighbours had this computer and we all were all allowed to come in and look at it so we all kind of filed into this room and i don't know to this day what he was doing on the computer probably loading a game or something because it didn't seem like much happened we hadn't seen anything like it before i mean outside of the arcades you in your home atari was about as far as it went we've done videos on the atari vcs to 2600 it was kind of like that but you could write different games yourself you would get these magazines and there'd be a list of code and you'd type that code in as faithfully as you could and if you weren't faithful enough it didn't work so you had to be pretty faithful um and then you might tweak it and you go oh actually it says there enter press any keys i'm going to type something different there let's see what happens so i know i remember yeah a lot of fun memories of messing around with these things it's been a while since i've played this a good amount of beer money shall we say i mean you know we're talking in through my university career i mean this is a 1980 to well i was at university 81 to 84. i was probably making hundreds of pounds a term let's say hundreds of pounds a term so over the course of the university maybe a few thousand pounds you know this didn't make me a billionaire this didn't make me a steve jobs but it paid for me this was a time when my dad became unemployed and i my mum and dad couldn't give me any money and i was having to pay for my own way through university and it was it was the money from the sinclair zx80 and 81 and spectrum that uh basically paid my way for me through university so in many ways i've got a lot to i owe to the clive sinclair so you\n"