So the rampant wobble is legendary and as with a lot of legends. They're not always entirely true
The RAM pack is now on there
So it takes a little bit longer than now to to power up
Then you go in there's the cursor so we could type in our program again 10:00 print. Let's do a hello this time
Took a little bit longer to enter it into the memory go to 10 so there's our program
But as you can see the machine itself kind of wobbles a little bit as you're typing in code
And if that rampant one was too much. We lose the data, but actually our one and we haven't done anything
Clever here, this is just a standard old Ram pack, but actually if we wobble it
Move the Machine around a little bit
Actually if we now type run
It's still working. Okay, so you know the RAM pack wobble?
The classic one that everybody talks about is the blue tech
allegedly recommended by Sir Clive himself
And you would put a piece of blue tape between
The case and the RAM pack and that would just stop the moving
I think in reality that doesn't necessarily work that well. How strong is blue tech. You know
But we've had some brilliant
resolutions to this so quite often
We've probably had two or three machines as xat ones and they donated on a piece of white melamine chip board
And there's a bloomin great big ugly metal aluminium bracket that holds that so the piece of wood
And then there's another aluminium bracket that holds the RIMPAC down as well
They look really ugly
But actually when we laughed about this we plugged the enemy tried it
Actually if you still messed around with and soo much it would still
Lose that memory this one's particularly good connections for whatever reason. I don't know that it's just good
They actually made it worse
Because as the machine the connections tarnished a little bit that got in the way and the connections and that you know caused more problems
But the one that I did which was a bit harsh. I admit is to take my machine out of the case completely and
Chop the wires that hold this connector in place and in solder it directly to the back of machine itself
That was harsh, but it worked
And I ended up and I really regret this taking a machine that I had at the tone called a tangerine micro 1065
It's actually a really quite a sought-after machine now there weren't many of them
But just gracefully I took the keyboard off it because I hadn't I particularly used for that machine
and I took all the tracks off the back of the keyboard and rewired the matrix so it matched the
Zajonc 81 and I had a proper zelich's 81 with improper keyboard, and I've sold it on RAM pack, so it was absolutely
Yeah, I'm a completely reliable so what sort of programs, would you write on your?
oh
Saw some random stuff. I mean I had a go at writing games. I grand visions of writing these amazing games
I wrote these kind of well. I mentioned the game called piece of Kroll that I've seen on the NASSCOM
Some years before and I wrote a version of that which I've called crystal
Castle or caves, I don't know
And I never did finish it
It was probably rubbish anyway
But I did you know
Adding up things you know kind of bank accounts. I was 11 or so so
The thing is what the most important thing about this machine is the thoughts of what you could do with it not
Necessarily for a lot of us what we actually did with it
But that's just as valid
Because then later on you know you'd have that drive things go and do it on machines that you know would have more use to
you later on a
lot of the time I was loading in things like lunar landing and and
And some of the games I was bought the the maths pack the mind
This is the junior education pack
But Dad
You know I wanted to meet to learn so obviously bought me the mass spec and I'd become a mathematician
At some point which still it's not happened
so it's not managed to get them to buy me the games take I think these are about four ninety ninety three ninety nine I
remember having I
Think two of these and these hold a lot of affection for me because they've just the look of them I had two of these
One was games one was the mass spec and I had
Another game, which I think might have been an analogue?
Game, maybe a Kong type copy or smoke I remember now
But again I've had three original tapes for it
There's a real branding thing there I go well Sinclair
I think was really really cute on this side of things
He was very very much about the aesthetics and the look and the presentation those products and again
Although they take stick you've got to look at them
and
look at the
You know the design the aesthetic of these and realize actually there was a lot of thought going to it having a machine that was
This small in comparison with something like the MS @atk
That was there. You know there is a big difference, and there is a beauty to this
This came before
But this was been the sort of machine that people would recognize as a computer
I think for for cried to come along and have a product that looked like this
It was space-age at the time look at the manual the menu itself has got that kind of space-age representation on it
And I think there a lot is to be said for the designers of these machines
As much as they were built to that price point
They were done in a way you know with a with a very
pretty professionally
Plastic molded case, so I think a lot has to be created succinctly on that school
And he had a history of it as well miniaturization
To a fault in some cases you know
He was making miniature TVs and little radios and this kind of stuff and the calculators that was making
sometimes he was trying to get too much Institute to smaller space and
That caused heat problems and whatever, but you know to have successes. You've got our failures and
In my mind, this is a huge huge success, and I think to a lot of people's minds a really really important machine
The BBC put out to tender a project to create a machine that they could use for their television program
So the government were very much pushing the idea of home computers and trying to get everybody involved with them and understand them what they
Were because there's a bit resistance. It's you know computers. They're gonna lose all their jobs at this time
You know this is computers were the thing that were you know kind of feared ins in some
respects
So the government were pushing that kind of thing and the BBC we're going to make a programme about it
They put out to tender for this this project they
specification the BBC computer itself was pretty much SPECT up by the BBC they take a lot of credit for
the way that machine turned out and anybody could come along and
And produce that machine or perform plans to do it
Sinclair did and
acorn, did apparently
Newbury computers Newbury new brain and put forward something
Ultimately long story short I called got that tender
You could argue. They didn't necessarily have the machine they were selling to the BBC at that time
And but they had plans and they knew what they were gonna do to make it and Sinclair just didn't get it
Now the whys and wherefores of that I don't know
But bottom line is you lost that and he was really angry about it, and you know field microman Connor puts that into
Into perspective but some but yeah, it was just one of those things
His sort of specifications for the machine that he thought should be used
Didn't really match with what the BBC wanted, and you know you could argue that
There were there were reasons why Sinclair probably should have been yeah, the cost is a big deal the BBC micro is 399 pound
And for a lot of people they use their BBC micros at school
They typed in lines of code really really simple basic programs
There's only kind of the higher end students that were that were getting in there and doing the clever stuff
So you could argue actually the Sinclair probably did have and I know actually was in schools anyway a place within when schools and within
Teaching because of the price point you know a lot more students would have been have it would've had access to it
So yeah, I know schools had them anyway. You know they went out and bought it seemed closed because of that price
Programs on those tapes and load them in from tape so that was feasible we tended to spend ages just getting the volume exactly right