That is so right: my many hours with my Timex Sinclair 1000 (ZX 81 version with 2Kb of RAM, sometimes expanded with a 16Kb "RAM Pack") were all about coding! And when I bought the computer I really thought I could ask it questions: I was so happy when I saw that the keyboard had a question mark!!! I thought that meant I could make questions to my computer, such as what "the cure for cancer" was.
Hilarious how he explains that once families had a computer that the question arose: “what do we do with it?” I saw the first computer ever at my cousin’s a VIC20 the infamous basic two liner made such and impression on 8 year old me, that I wanted one. My dad was a systems analyst and he was like: “there’s no use for a computer at home.” So it took 2 years before my parents swayed and bought that VC20 from my cousin for my birthday, as he had moved on to a C64 - which later I got as well :) But the computer was nothing more like the electronics engineering kit my parents had gotten me. It was a learning tool. And now I see them as boring tools. But whenever I crawl behind my C64 or MSX I get that nostalgic feeling of wonder and careless times. Something a PC or Mac doesn’t give me at all.
"What if the internet had appeared at the same time as home computers?" If the web had appeared between 1979 and 1982, machines that were bad for web browsing would have died out a lot sooner. The C64 would probably have won, and all computers today would be based on that instead of the IBM PC. Even Acorn wouldn't have been stupid enough to try to market the Electron in that world, so maybe they would still be around and making 4GHz C64 clones like everyone else. Sinclair would still have made the same machines and also tried to make his own "internet" based on trained pigeons carrying around microdrive cartridges.
The Sinclair was such a terrible product that you have to conclude that it was a scam. At the time it was introduced, it couldn't even compete with machines like the TRS-80 which was already being discontinued by then because they were being obsoleted by next generation machines like the C-64.
The TRS-80 didn't have any traction in the UK. It was too expensive. Same with the Apple II. I think the PET did get some traction, but there were still Sinclair machines being marketed at the time the Commodore 64 came out, with a similar sort of rivalry between Sinclair and Commodore users that you later got between Amiga and Atari ST users, and now with Windows vs Linux vs Mac. (It also depends which "Sinclair" you mean - the three big ones were the ZX80, the ZX81 and the Spectrum - aka ZX82 in development -, all named for a combination of their use of the Z80 processor and the year they were released. Later ones weren't as successful, but many of them were still good, and cheap.) I suspect you'll find computer ownership during the eighties was much more widespread in the UK than in the US, as a percentage of the population, exactly because they were so cheap. Growing up, the only kids who I remember didn't have any sort of computer at all were basically the ones you couldn't have gifted them to. They're probably the kind of people who grew up to be technophobes and hoard their money under the mattress instead of keeping it in a bank. The fact that the Raspberry Pi Foundation - with a remit originally to reverse the decline of the popularity of computer science in education in the UK - began here and not elsewhere is probably due to the fact that computers in the early eighties were so ubiquitous - though by the time the Amiga, the Atari ST and the Archimedes came along the focus in "Computing" in schools had shifted to teaching kids how to use a word processor and database rather than programming. Eben Upton, who founded the RPi Foundation, for example, was born in '78 - like yours truly, coincidentally - and cut his programming teeth on the BBC, which was originally a rather upmarket computer for the UK market: £399 new as opposed to £99 for the ZX Spectrum; but by the time he got his hands on one, paid for with his own pocket money, it was obsolete, second-hand and he had to repair it. If the account in Micro Men is anywhere near accurate, Sir Clive Sinclair was well aware that the early Sinclairs had flaws - the original ZX80 for example would blank the screen every time a key was pressed. Still, it worked well enough and introduced thousands, if not millions, to programming. The Commodores weren't perfect, either. The year I got my first Amiga, although I don't remember this, apparently I had asked for an Atari ST. The guy in the shop convinced my parents that I wanted an Amiga instead - turned out he was right - but I suspect my choice of Atari had been influenced by the fact that I had seen Commodore BASIC - with its 'PRINT "weird-character"' for CLS and so on - and was not impressed. Of course the Amiga, the Atari, etc. were the beginnings of computers not having BASIC built in, though interestingly the Acorn Archimedes - Britain's answer to the Amiga - still had BBC BASIC in ROM. (The Amiga, incidentally, came to Commodore via what Amiga Format called "a rare fit of insight" on Commodore's part, whereby they purchased the cash-strapped company that originally developed it. Had they lost out, they would probably have developed something much more like the Atari ST - which Tramiel took with him when he left Commodore for Atari - which was inferior to the Amiga for just about everything except music.) I can't sign off without mentioning that Linus Torvalds cut his teeth on a Sinclair QL - released to compete with the Atari and Amiga but significantly less technically advanced - despite being based on the Motorola 68000. Since the computer was from Britain but he was from Finland he couldn't find any software for it, so he coded his own. It had a bad reputation for many reasons - the dodgy Microdrive tape system released as an alternative to still-expensive floppy disk drives, and the alleged propensity of the keys to fall out if you turned the computer upside down, for example - but it was evidently good enough that he managed to become an excellent programmer, and the first thing he coded with his 386 wasn't a game or anything simple, but a 386 task-switcher, which evolved to become Linux. There are countless programmers who wouldn't dare try to code an operating system.
@@jeffreyjoshuarollin9554 Those are all good points. I was writing from a very US point of view. I myself bought a C64 even though I could afford a Sinclair a year earlier because even being only 12 years old, I understood the difference in capability. I kept using my C64 for almost 8 years until college forced me to upgrade and I managed to leap frog past 286 PC clones to a 386! The C64 was one of the longest lived computers in my life and I don't regret waiting the extra time it took me to earn money for it.
That is so right: my many hours with my Timex Sinclair 1000 (ZX 81 version with 2Kb of RAM, sometimes expanded with a 16Kb "RAM Pack") were all about coding! And when I bought the computer I really thought I could ask it questions: I was so happy when I saw that the keyboard had a question mark!!! I thought that meant I could make questions to my computer, such as what "the cure for cancer" was.
Great. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Keep them coming. THKS
audio is good, but could you do mono on shots where there is one person shown?
Hilarious how he explains that once families had a computer that the question arose: “what do we do with it?”
I saw the first computer ever at my cousin’s a VIC20 the infamous basic two liner made such and impression on 8 year old me, that I wanted one.
My dad was a systems analyst and he was like: “there’s no use for a computer at home.” So it took 2 years before my parents swayed and bought that VC20 from my cousin for my birthday, as he had moved on to a C64 - which later I got as well :)
But the computer was nothing more like the electronics engineering kit my parents had gotten me. It was a learning tool. And now I see them as boring tools. But whenever I crawl behind my C64 or MSX I get that nostalgic feeling of wonder and careless times. Something a PC or Mac doesn’t give me at all.
"What if the internet had appeared at the same time as home computers?" If the web had appeared between 1979 and 1982, machines that were bad for web browsing would have died out a lot sooner. The C64 would probably have won, and all computers today would be based on that instead of the IBM PC. Even Acorn wouldn't have been stupid enough to try to market the Electron in that world, so maybe they would still be around and making 4GHz C64 clones like everyone else. Sinclair would still have made the same machines and also tried to make his own "internet" based on trained pigeons carrying around microdrive cartridges.
The WWW was originally text mode, so your answer is nonsense.
The Sinclair was such a terrible product that you have to conclude that it was a scam. At the time it was introduced, it couldn't even compete with machines like the TRS-80 which was already being discontinued by then because they were being obsoleted by next generation machines like the C-64.
The TRS-80 didn't have any traction in the UK. It was too expensive. Same with the Apple II. I think the PET did get some traction, but there were still Sinclair machines being marketed at the time the Commodore 64 came out, with a similar sort of rivalry between Sinclair and Commodore users that you later got between Amiga and Atari ST users, and now with Windows vs Linux vs Mac. (It also depends which "Sinclair" you mean - the three big ones were the ZX80, the ZX81 and the Spectrum - aka ZX82 in development -, all named for a combination of their use of the Z80 processor and the year they were released. Later ones weren't as successful, but many of them were still good, and cheap.)
I suspect you'll find computer ownership during the eighties was much more widespread in the UK than in the US, as a percentage of the population, exactly because they were so cheap. Growing up, the only kids who I remember didn't have any sort of computer at all were basically the ones you couldn't have gifted them to. They're probably the kind of people who grew up to be technophobes and hoard their money under the mattress instead of keeping it in a bank.
The fact that the Raspberry Pi Foundation - with a remit originally to reverse the decline of the popularity of computer science in education in the UK - began here and not elsewhere is probably due to the fact that computers in the early eighties were so ubiquitous - though by the time the Amiga, the Atari ST and the Archimedes came along the focus in "Computing" in schools had shifted to teaching kids how to use a word processor and database rather than programming. Eben Upton, who founded the RPi Foundation, for example, was born in '78 - like yours truly, coincidentally - and cut his programming teeth on the BBC, which was originally a rather upmarket computer for the UK market: £399 new as opposed to £99 for the ZX Spectrum; but by the time he got his hands on one, paid for with his own pocket money, it was obsolete, second-hand and he had to repair it.
If the account in Micro Men is anywhere near accurate, Sir Clive Sinclair was well aware that the early Sinclairs had flaws - the original ZX80 for example would blank the screen every time a key was pressed. Still, it worked well enough and introduced thousands, if not millions, to programming.
The Commodores weren't perfect, either. The year I got my first Amiga, although I don't remember this, apparently I had asked for an Atari ST. The guy in the shop convinced my parents that I wanted an Amiga instead - turned out he was right - but I suspect my choice of Atari had been influenced by the fact that I had seen Commodore BASIC - with its 'PRINT "weird-character"' for CLS and so on - and was not impressed. Of course the Amiga, the Atari, etc. were the beginnings of computers not having BASIC built in, though interestingly the Acorn Archimedes - Britain's answer to the Amiga - still had BBC BASIC in ROM. (The Amiga, incidentally, came to Commodore via what Amiga Format called "a rare fit of insight" on Commodore's part, whereby they purchased the cash-strapped company that originally developed it. Had they lost out, they would probably have developed something much more like the Atari ST - which Tramiel took with him when he left Commodore for Atari - which was inferior to the Amiga for just about everything except music.)
I can't sign off without mentioning that Linus Torvalds cut his teeth on a Sinclair QL - released to compete with the Atari and Amiga but significantly less technically advanced - despite being based on the Motorola 68000. Since the computer was from Britain but he was from Finland he couldn't find any software for it, so he coded his own. It had a bad reputation for many reasons - the dodgy Microdrive tape system released as an alternative to still-expensive floppy disk drives, and the alleged propensity of the keys to fall out if you turned the computer upside down, for example - but it was evidently good enough that he managed to become an excellent programmer, and the first thing he coded with his 386 wasn't a game or anything simple, but a 386 task-switcher, which evolved to become Linux. There are countless programmers who wouldn't dare try to code an operating system.
@@jeffreyjoshuarollin9554 Those are all good points. I was writing from a very US point of view. I myself bought a C64 even though I could afford a Sinclair a year earlier because even being only 12 years old, I understood the difference in capability. I kept using my C64 for almost 8 years until college forced me to upgrade and I managed to leap frog past 286 PC clones to a 386! The C64 was one of the longest lived computers in my life and I don't regret waiting the extra time it took me to earn money for it.
Reminds me of when the Wii came out, where it was underpowered compared to PS3 and 360. Both owe their luck to brand loyalty and quirky graphics.