We're back with Spencer, and we've come to see his amazing collection. What have we got here, Spenc?
It's a whole bunch of Sinclair machines, all from the 1980s, or they're Sinclair-related at the very least.
We'll go from the ZX81 all the way up through to the Spectrum +3 and the Z88.
Clive Sinclair was a British enterpreneur, he had quite a history in the electronics business,
some of it more successful than others.
But he was quite big in the Hi-Fi side of things and the scientific instruments range of stuff as well,
but he then went on to make computers.
ZX80 was groundbreaking in its day, when it came out,
and then the ZX81 went on to be the biggest selling machine of 1981.
Which is where I pick up the story, I don't have a ZX80, unfortunately,
but if anyone's got one and they want to give it away, I'll happily give you a good home,
because they are about 400 pound on eBay, and it's a lovely machine,
but it's not worth that to me.
The variations - I mean, the majority of these are Spectrum-based, but...
but it does cover a few other odd things along the way as well.
The Spectrum is one that resonates with a lot of people I grew up with.
Yeah, the Spectrum really was one of the main computers which kicked the computer craze in the 80s.
So most people at school, they all had a Spectrum or a Commodore 64.
Unless their parents were teachers, so they had a BBC Model B, if that was the case.
But yeah, early 80s, they were just everywhere.
Why do you think they permeated society in such a way?
One of the biggest things about them was the price. They were cheap.
Yeah, Clive Sinclair really made things down to a price.
So, yeah, being that much cheaper, it's that much more affordable,
but underneath that, they are actually really good machines as well.
Really. really quite capable devices for their time.
That's a Spectrum in the background there, isn't it? What's going on at the moment?
That's Manic Miner that's playing on there.
Obviously that's the best game of all time, yeah, there's no question about that.
It is games like this that I grew up on in the 80s,
and that's kind of why I'm here today.
Until things like these, ZX81 and ZX80 came out,
a computer - you either only had little flashing lights and switches on the front to operate it,
or you had a mainframe-type thing, ridiculously expensive kit.
This - the computer plugged into your telly, which - most people had a telly back then,
and the cassette deck - yeah, most people had a tape recorder,
so really, a cheap, cheap medium for loading and saving the games.
I've just spotted these microdrive things, what were they?
Those were Clive Sinclair's alternative to a floppy disk.
Because back in the day floppy disks were quite expensive, these are little tiny tape cassette cartridges,
so you've got one continuous spool of tape, which normally takes 100K of data,
and it loads a lot quicker than what it would do from casette tape.
So you got more storage, quicker, easier random access to it as well.
That's the little microdrive cartridge itself, so you see the spool of tape in there.
There's two tracks on there, which are about 50K each,
or supposed to be there - in practice it never turned out to be quite as good as that,
so you might get about 80 or 90K of data on there, if you're lucky.
Do you use them at all, or is that...?
I used to use them back in the 80s, I've got them now just for... yeah, for completeness, effectively.
But yeah, they aren't a practical, safe way of storing data these days.
And presumably, there are not many of the cartridges around.
No, they stopped being made years ago.
We've talked a little bit about RAM pack wobble before.
And, you know, there were certain reliability issues sometimes, weren't there?
Do you think that was widespread, or did he just get tainted by a few bad examples?
There is definitely a history of him... to cut corners wherever possible, yeah.
So you save a couple of pence here and there, so there were some problems.
One of the other big issues is the fact that he would preannounce products,
and take preorders, and it'll be delivered next month.
That actually turns out to be two months, three months, four months down the line.
Some of the very early models to go out just weren't finished,
they had lots of bodged wires in them and stuff like that.
So, yeah, that didn't help his reputation much.
I've heard they used to use the delivery times as basically the finance for the devices.
Do you know about that?
The money wasn't exactly in the bank accounts to start with,
so if you can pre-sell the stuff that gets you the money in,
then you can start to make it and hopefully it's gonna work before you ship it out.
When the QL was announced, I mean, that took quite a few months before that was available,
but the first ones of those, they actually had the ROMs hanging out the back,
on the little plug-in extra circuit board, because they weren't finished, so they had to ship something.
And it's "well, that kind of normally sometimes works, so ship'em out, 'cause we got customers that need them."
The original Spectrum was a huge big hit,
obviously there was pressure on him to come up with something bigger and better.
And he wanted to get into the business world a bit more.
So, the QL was launched in 1984, and that came out with a proper keyboard.
And the actual keys. Yeah, it's just like a keyboard.
That was obviously an improvement on the "dead flesh" keyboard of the Spectrum
What did you call it, dead...?
I don't know if you've felt dead flesh lately, but it's just like that.
The Spectrum was revamped at the end of '84 with the Spectrum+,
which is effectively exactly the same computer as the original Spectrum, it's the same motherboard.
Only difference being, you got a real keyboard and a reset button.
Other than that, Spectrum+ and the Spectrum 48k are the same beast.
So now you could turn it off and on again with a button?
That's right, yes, because the power socket was always a little bit fragile,
and if you've done it too quickly, you could damage it.
So, yeah, having a reset button probably saved a lot of machines there.
That was kind of a normal operation, of loading a program, wasn't it? You did have to turn it off.
Once you've finished playing the game, you wanted to play something else, that's kind of what you did.
Yes, yes, and there's no shutdown procedure or anything like that.
There's no startup procedure either.
It's just a case of "here, there's power - it works, there's no power - doesn't work."
That's as simple as it got.
And no multitasking, of course.
Oh, no.
It was a lot more flexible, there's also a decent sound chip in there as well,
as opposed to the beep-beep-beep that we got out of the old Spectrum.
A whole number of sectors, or technically we use clusters,
which is multiple sectors joined together, to store...