It's easy to quibble about some aspects of the Speccy - the rubber keyboard or the limited BASIC for example - but the key thing is that it offered an awful lot for the price - starting at £125 in the UK when the cheapest BBC Micro was £300. This made computing with colour and enough memory to write programs that were substantial and interesting available to a much wider group than before. Sir Clive Sinclair had a unique genius for designing and then marketing products that caught the public imagination. Sadly, he seemed to lose interest in building on his success and quickly moved on to the next project. Famously the C5 electric "car" but also wafer scale memory! [1] If anyone hasn't seen Micro Men, on the Sinclair vs Acorn rivalry, its definitely worth a watch: [link] And seeing some of the participants watch it and recall their own versions of the story is good too: ▶ this video [1] [link]
in “ZX Spectrum at 40: a look back” · View on HN