Acorn vs Sinclair - An Epic '80s Computer Rivalry | Nostalgia Nerd

hello and welcome to a new series but I'll be calling tech you men trees that is to say a documentary based around technology I will eye-fuck is just a documentary to begin this story we have to go way back to the 25th of July 1961 when a corn didn't exist and Clive Sinclair had just formed his first company Sinclair radionics after borrowing 50 pounds and raising finance through article writing at practical wireless magazine Radio X began by developing hi-fi equipment such as the micro amplifier and selling by mail-order all of Sinclair's products would have the ethos of miniaturization at their core alongside elegance and style this very ethos would often take the place of reliability and stability with the company facing large numbers of faulty equipment returns numberless Sinclair's innovation would lead the company on with Chris Curie who would later go on to form acorn joining radionics in 1966 curry quickly became integral to radionics operation and would help launch their first electronic calculator in 1972 and the Black Watch in 1975 but further technical issues and poor sales led to the National Enterprise Board buying a forty three percent stake in radionics in 1976 which would quickly increase under the anyb Sinclair would launch the world's first pocket TV and begin development on the new brain computer designed by Mike Wakefield in 1978 the new brain was intended to be a rival for the recently released Apple 2 but didn't really fit into Sinclair's vision of an inexpensive home Micro and so under the any B's guidance was sold after Newbury laboratories who the anyb also had ownership over shortly after this vieni be renamed Sinclair radionics to Sinclair Electronics Limited and later fanda Electronics Limited which continues in form to this day Clive was subsequently sent packing along with a nice golden handshake and various in development technologies including the c5 electric car handily Clive had saw most of his coming and in 1975 had sent Chris Kerry off to run another company called sing Claire instrument Limited which under his guidance produced a calculator watch and in 1977 the mk14 a microcomputer kit sold through mail order after the business rebranded to science of Cambridge limited climb up the cross in 1978 but Curie frustrated by Clive's unwillingness to further develop the mk14 resigned and with his friend Hermann Hauser who was just finishing up a doctorate at Cambridge University founded Cambridge processor unit limited abbreviated to CPU you can see what they did there in reality they had founded the business whilst Curie was still working for sinclair and they actually started out by rather cheekily borrowing a room at Clive's science of Cambridge premises to provide consultancy their first customer was a scoyne equipment limited who required fruit machine controller hardware they would carry on serving various other businesses in this way until 1979 when they founded acorn computers limited with the name intended to depict a growing company whilst also appearing above Apple in the phonebook and remember this was the 1970s and like this was important back then under this brand they would launch the a corn system one based on an automated cow feeder designed by undergraduate recruit Roger Wilson who is now known as Sophie Wilson it was in many respects like the mk14 featuring a small keypad and LED display acorn would go on to log into the system two and three in rapid succession but these were really rack based euro card systems designed mainly for laboratory and industrial use whilst this was going on Clive on realizing the success of Curry's MK 14 had dreamt up the idea of the cynics 80 a low-cost personal computer that would break the 100-pound price point and demonstrate to the world that computers were for everybody and not just professionals and businesses these NX 80 was released in early 1980 and true to its word became the first affordable home micro featuring one kilobyte of ram and a z80 cpu which also generated vida Alpert causing the screen to blank out whilst registering key presses the Machine also had a rather limited sinclair basic but lacked a floating-point so it's arguably not really a true computer vision xat had beaten acorn in launching a low-cost home my crew but they were hot on their heels recruiting Steve Furber again from Cambridge to work on hardware only a few months later they released the Acorn atom based on best system three hardware it boasted a full stroke keyboard obtained on the cheap double the memory of the zx80 and made use of a new NTSC video chip obtained from the States which was tweaked to allow black and white output on Powell televisions the atom was clearly a superior machine but priced 120 pounds in kick form and 170 pounds assembled was respectively 40 pounds and 70 pounds and more expensive than Sinclair's machine this led to the zx80 selling approximately 100,000 units compared to the atoms 10,000 but still this was above acorns anticipated numbers and was therefore a commercial success with both companies that boosted by their initial successes plans for further machines quickly went into production this was alongside a rather heated rivalry between the companies this was in part due to the fractious final working years between Curie and Sinclair with both parties wanting to show the other they were taking the best path Sinclair quickly followed up their success with the even cheaper zx81 released in 1981 priced at 69 pound 95 fully assembled and offering a number of improvements over the 80 including a larger ROM a slow mode which cut out the display flicker and even floating-point ability it sold over 1.5 million units and really was the first machines had become dominant in behold it's got a keyboard a manual and computer written on it it'll sell it wasn't without his problems though still retaining the dead feeling membrane keyboard and this time shipping with a ROM bug in its square root calculations Carrie and Houser had been trumped yet again they had an ace a best sleeve remember the new brain machine I mentioned earlier well in 1980 the BBC began the initial roots of the BBC computer literacy project partly encouraged itself by a rivalry where the ITV showed the documentary about the mighty micro and B impending revolution in with bring they therefore wanted a branded machine to feature in the new TV show Newbury were the first ones to pick up the tab despite Clive trying to rally objection even from curry himself at the lack of a fair selection process but in any case they were unable to develop the new brain enough to meet production targets the BBC again put out a tender to other UK computer brands for a fairer competition Sinclair put out a proposal as the tangerine and Dragon data but it was acorn who clinched the deal reworking they're already in development proton machine at late notice to fit the BBC specifications and Willis a late notice I mean it Kari headed down to the BBC's offices in London and confidently told the beef board they had an ideal machine ready and waiting desperate for a machine ASAP the BBC arranged a visit but following week of course the only problem was the machine that wasn't ready waiting or indeed even remotely built to be required specs what followed was a famous telephone exchange where Houser convinced both Ferber and Wilson for each other had agreed to the short time frame Roger Pearlman I have a question for you can you adapt the new machine for the BBC spec we've got a week I understand he says it cannot be done so I ask you Steve you think it can be done no I'm surprised when you tell me this oh because Roger told me that he thought it was possible to do it in a few days and so it began five days to produce a working prototype the team worked day and night with the machine only coming to life a very morning the BBC were due to visit however but BBC was suitably impressed for a Khan to get the contract almost immediately in February 1981 and by June the BBC micro was conceived and priced up by December 1981 the Beeb was fully unveiled and was an immediate commercial success mainly in schools but also in homes because afford the 299 and 399 pounds price tag for the model a and B respectively with parents willing to cash in on both the entertainment and educational value the a was essentially a cut-down version of a B with less expansion ports and 16 kilobytes compared to 32 kilobytes but wake on surprise almost all sales were for the model B the BBC micro was a powerful machine hosting the 6502 processor and an array of expandability including an additional z80 processor to meet the BBC's requirements of a CPM compatible machine a call expected sales in the region of 10 to 20,000 but the B would eventually sell a whopping 1.5 million unit allowing a Khan to expand considerably over the next few years you can imagine Clive's face at this point o but rage the bitter insurmountable rage but really the rage was misplaced because by April 1982 Sinclair would launch a machine not only designed to smash me acorns home market success but to completely dominate the home market in glorious rainbow coloring the Sinclair spectrum now it's hard to overestimate the impact which mist machine made on not only the UK computer market but the global market as well with another low-cost entry point essentially half that of the bead at a hundred and seventy nine pounds for the 48k model and 129 pounds for the 16 k model this rubber key beauty would sell over five million units with almost every household with an average occupant age of under 40 owning one the Commodore 64 wasn't due on the scene for another couple of months and in a case it was a lot more expensive so in the majority of cases verse Becky was the personal computer of choice what should be realized is that all those companies together all of them throughout Japan make fewer computers and Sinclair research on its own at the moment Bush packing another did 80 processor but this time with a lot more memory than is Linux models an internal speaker 15 colors and the keyboard which at least had some tactile feel it would Herald the peak of Sinclair's fame and fortune at this point I'd say that Sinclair had a slight edge over a core and both had established markets one in the educational sector and one in the home gaming market both were lucrative enough for each business to succeed if they made the right next steps steps which weren't driven by rivalry ego or narrow mindedness but you can guess where this is going right a number of business decisions followed the first was by acorn to expand their company and involved going public and offering shares on the stock exchange this was ultimately a success and provided finance for acorn to expand and continue their operation however icon would also attempt to break into the American market under acorn Computer Corporation but would ultimately fail spending much of the money raised Sinclair also sought expansion and unwilling to relinquish control of his business like he had suffered under the anyb tried to expand into foreign markets including Spain and America Sinclair's affiliation with Timex in the States was designed to cash in on the people who were currently importing spectrums to the states in their current UK form however the Timex Sinclair machines were mostly incompatible with the existing library of spectrum soft and hardware and so failed to make a significant impact penetration into Spain was more convincing but the main bulk of sales would remain in the UK so we've continued rivalry in mind Sinclair was also keen to break into more professional marketplaces and Akon wanted the slice of that huge juicy gaining market so rather than pushing onwards and upwards some double stepping and divergence would follow from a corns perspective its market increasing solution was to develop a lower cost cut down version of ability micro marketed at the home and games markets and designed to go head-to-head with the spectrum this decision contradicted a number of voices within acorn such as Ferber and Wilson who were looking into improving the Beeb and 32-bit processor design but after a provisional order from WH Smiths of 120,000 units acorn would go ahead where it's cut down plans and produced the electron for August 1983 utilising ula circuitry which would pack the Beeb's 102 chips into twelve cut-down versions most of the BBC requested specs would also be emitted the plan was to ship 100,000 of the 175 pound machines by Christmas but production problems meant the machines didn't hit the stores until February 1984 or despite the positive hardware reviews this crucial miss of the Christmas period coupled with a slowdown in the home computer market member orders were canceled an acorn was left of a warehouse of unwanted machines around the exact same time Sinclair would launch 4ql machine a hastily put together design which was intended to break into the professional and business markets or both Clive or Sir Clive by this point had created some confusion with the head of Sinclair computers Nigel Searle over whether this machine would be more suited as an upgraded spectrum for the home or was really intended to break into business use in any case even boba hardware was fairly advanced with a motor over six eight ten CPU the advertising campaign failed along with poor reviews on the keyboard and compatibility of its new micro drive units coupled with this when machine wasn't compatible with the spectrums library of software meaning it would also fail in the home markets like the Timex machines did in the States the electron sold adequate numbers to ensure software houses would support it into the early 90s and the existing back catalog of stock would be cleared in due course thanks in part by Dixon's agreeing to ship them out and less from cost price but in the immediate term it was nowhere near enough to make up for acorns debts the QL would sell 150,000 units but was still deemed a commercial failure Myers wanted their home machines to be compatible with the ones at work Clive's ql wasn't and it failed to sell unable to make a dent in any market which were quickly becoming saturated with ever powerful machines further marketing campaigns would lead to the infamous showdown in the Baron of beef Cambridge pub where Clive filled with rage from acorns campaign slating Sinclair's reliability would stride in advert in hand and proceeded to donk curry in the face both were booted out with their professional lives soon to follow a similar path Sinclair would go back to the spectrum line and in 1986 launch be marvelous spectrum 128 K plus machine the first Sinclair computer to support a dedicated sound chip and be backwards compatible with the rest of the spectrum range meanwhile Akon would also launch an upgraded mic wrote in the shape of the BBC master also featuring 128 K of RAM both these machines would be successful in their respective markets but ultimately the financial damage had been done Sinclair's computer brand was bought out by Allen sugar in 1986 he swiftly halted the QL production and relaunched the spectrum range in a more fitting tribute to his recently released easy-to-use and cheap Amstrad CPC line which itself would sell three million units a cons debts meant it would be bought out by Italian computer company Olivetti in late 1985 the Acorn brand would continue successfully and go on to launch V Archimedes range of machines and the associated risk arm processor which would form the basis for the most popular range of processors in today's world while Amstrad Sinclair machines will also sell reasonably well into the 90s but as probably rivalry well from that point it was pretty much done is to teach you a lesson that's funny because everything I learned I learned from you the exciting era of the early 80s heralding a new wave of microcomputers was over and consigned to a beautiful part of history which is worth revisiting at every opportunity you get like this one both Sinclair and acorn would leave lasting legacies with acorn introducing be risk chips and introducing computers into the schools in the UK and Sinclair introducing a whole wealth of children to the home computer market in the early 80s which heralded a new wave of development and creativity so there's no real winner here well there is and it's us thank you for watching my documentary on a corn versus Sinclair I've got plenty of other videos in my back catalogue and plenty more to come in time click one below contribute to my patreon if you wish to keep a channel going or just leave in any case thank you very much for watching and good night Oh

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 75,568

Keywords: clive sinclair, chris curry, herman hauser, acorn computers, sinclair research, acorn, sinclair, sinclair spectrum, acorn electron, bbc micro, zx spectrum, acorn proton, acorn atom, zx80, zx81, acorn vs sinclair, 80s computers, british computers, 1980s, tech tales, micro men, 8 bit computers, newbury, newbrain, uk, britain, british inventors, sinclair c5

Id: DcZfWZQ9ZS0

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2016