Finally a video where it doesn't starts with "IT WAS A CRISIS AT NINTENDO" it's nice you're not only covering Nintendo stuff only but the whole gaming and pc saga of the 1900s
This pretty much. It’s kinda frustrating to see 1983 videogame crash being referred to in every retrospective as “that grand event that almost killed gaming”, when in fact videogame industry prospered and thrived in a lot of places.
@@LowSpecGamer it's funny because it's true (the UK economy in the late 70s was in the toilet. They were even called 'The Sick Man of Europe' and a huuuge part of why they initially joined the EU)
@@LowSpecGamer olá mano, tudo bom? Então eu queria lhe fazer uma pergunta: Você vai voltar a legendar seus vídeos em português? Eu fiquei muito triste, pois não sei falar inglês, e, seus vídeos são muito bons, só que agora não tenho mais condições de ver os vídeos, devido o idioma. hello bro, how are you? So I wanted to ask you a question: Are you going to subtitle your videos in Portuguese again? I was very sad, because I can't speak English, and your videos are very good, but now I can't watch the videos anymore, due to the language.
Whoever is doing the manga needs a raise. It makes these stories so much more engaging. Gives it a Japanese Halt & Catch Fire vibe (which, despite being fictional is quite accurate to the era).
To anyone who was wondering what happened to Acorn, their CPU architecture was so efficient it's now used in embedded devices everywhere. You probably know them as ARM.
Well I'll be damned! hehe Got my start on a ZX81 back in '84 when it was on sale at one of those cheesy ripoff electronics stores in Manhattan NYC for $99, which at the time was a huge sum for a 15 year old boy dreaming of computers. Fast forward almost 40 years, and here we are... taa-daaa! :)
Strangely enough, after Acorn's release of the Election personal computer, they went bankrupt, but got brought out by Olivetti. They came back in the game after they released their Archimedes computer series. With their own processor architecture, known as ARM, the Acorn RISC Machine.
@@Mike-77-YT The irony is that while Sinclair was trying to be taken more seriously instead of being seen as just a producer of gaming micros, Acorn wanted to compete in the lucrative gaming micro sector, which is why they created the Electron as a cut down, cheaper BBC Micro. Unfortunately, they missed the Christmas release period and ended up with warehouses of unwanted Electrons, which were eventually sold off really cheap and led to their buyout by Olivetti.
20:02 I had heard of them because they manufactured electronics for the British weapons industry. Since I am a lifelong aviation enthusiast, I had actually heard of Ferranti before I even heard of Sinclair, Acorn or the BBC Micro.
I am impressed! I go into this on the extra video but indeed they where primary a military tech company. And hilariously they met their end while trying to enter the US market.
As a teenager in the Greater Manchester area in the 80's, Ferranti was a big employer and lots of school leavers went to work at one of their many sites. They were, however, well known for taking 16 yr olds on as YTS trainees and then ditching them just before their 2 year stint was up. I work just down the road from a former Ferranti site, which is a continuation of a Ferranti division, now owned by French company Thales and makes submarine electronics - which is weird as it's about 40 miles inland from the sea.
It's not that unlikely a name for an English pub. I think it refers to a specific method of preparing a joint of beef for a meal. As far as I know the pub itself is still there. I've had a pint or two in there myself, although we generally preferred to drink in the Mitre next door.
Not to mention that this very tale (of the Epic struggle of Curry vs Sinclair) was made into its own comedy-drama film, Micro Men. Starring Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman!
Check the notes in the pinned comment and the sources at the bottom of the description! Micro Men is one of my favorite films in this genre, and the commentary of the film from the Acorn guys is one of my primary sources for this video. Lots of interesting info there.
The Ferranti style chips aren't completely dead though. There's a lot of companies that will take your FPGA bitstreams, and turn them into custom asics at a fraction of the cost of a traditional asic, because they're basically taking the FPGA silicon and throwing one custom layer on top, just like Ferranti did.
Reminds me of the Lamborghini story. Lamborghini (the person) was a super car enthusiast. He had some complaints about Ferrari cars to mr Ferrari. Ferrari basically said that Lamborghini might know tractors but didn’t know cars. So Lamborghini expanded from tractors to super cars out of spite
In fairness to Sinclair, even as big as gaming has become today, it really is a small sideshow compared to business clients 'if' you can achieve a dominant market position. Sinclair failed to achieve this, but diversifying the portfolio into gaming might've given his company some life support much in the way that AMDs relationship with Microsoft & Sony kept it going in that poor decade before Zen, Threadripper & RDNA came along. Maybe he could've stood to gain some millions while shooting for his billions.
Half the problem is the Sinclair were always too cheap to build anything that'd be usable by businesses. What Acorn built was a far better basis, but they screwed up on the marketing side, leading to their eventual demise in the '90s. I mean, the design of the QL is frankly embarrassing, and mainly due to all the things done to cut costs.
@@Mnnvint ARM was spun-off into its own company as Acorn died, partly due to servicing the Apple Newton in fact. ARM may have died with Acorn were it not for that fact. But that also meant not all staff stayed-on, especially after so many buyouts in the interceding years.
IBM pushed out a 16bit micro with an 8bit bus, very much like the QL, but the PC/XT were just so expandable, unlike the QL. Not to mention the tiny micro drives, they were just too small, too slow when compared to disks. Just as having so much of the OS in ROM also ended up being an issue, as you can’t issue frequent updates. The QL was too 8 bit, and too cost reduced for business
@@artemizlogan8305 back in those days in the UK beds had a wire chain linked base that was very flexible(springy). A bit like a trampoline. If you were under the bed and someone jumped on it you would likely end up with a nasty cut.
“It turned *millions* of people into gamers. It turned *thousands* of gamers into professional … [people].” Legit what my mind expected to hear, and I don’t even regret it. Amazing video!
BRILLIANT VIDEO!!!! I love the ZX Spectrum so much, my first step into gaming. I get chills every time I hear the loading sounds, so much so I made a music app that uses the loading sounds as samples. (ZXPlectrum) Weird thing is, I made it a s toy but real musicians actually use it! 🤯
I find amazing that I subbed to you when I was gaming on a lenovo laptop that barely could run league of legends. After this, I've lived in two different countries, graduated university and found a job at my field to earn enough to buy a new gaming PC. After all this time I am still a big fan of your content, even though I'm not a low-end gamer currently, your videos still have a warm place at my cpu. Thank you for your hard work!
I really enjoy your new style of videos. Especially these documentarys on technology history. But this video might just be my favourite video of yours. I already knew some stuff about Sinclair but I had no clue about the deep and personal rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn. Really fascinating stuff.
This was before my time but due to being dirt poor as a kid my first computer was an ancient Amstrad CPC and a few hundred tapes and floppies. For context this was well in to the CD/DVD era, we just got a job lot going for almost nothing but it has always made me appreciate the strange and magical UK microcomputer boom, and in turn, Sinclair and the Beeb for making it happen. (Also, any viewers who wonder what you can do with only 1k of ram? I implore you to research 1k chess, a functional chess game whose code that came out for the ZX81 which has since been further simplified down to under 700 bytes. It's crazy.)
It made sense at the time. Given that alternatives like Apple II were considerably more expensive they were out of reach for most people. I was 13 at the time I got my ZX-81. My parents weren't going to be able to buy me a computer so I saved instead. I could never have afforded an apple without saving for many years. Sinclair put computers in the hands of ordinary people, often children like myself. Regarding the Spectrum, the keyboard was typically referred to as the 'dead flesh' keyboard but it was vastly better than that on the ZX-81. Also, in case anyone is interested, there is a one off drama called Micro Men with Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman (as Sinclair and Curry) that is hilarious. It's worth tracking down.
According to another youtubers research, take it with a grain of salt, Sinclair wanted to build up funds for his *real* goals, an electric car called the C5 and a portable TV. Neither were very good.
The ZX spectrum changed my life. I was a TV and video Technician at Radio Rentals when our apprentice brought his ZX81 and RAM pack into our workshop. I was fascinated with it, and he said "Take it home as I'm not using it for a while." So I did. Eventually he wanted it back so I immedately bought a Spectrum, newly released. I couldn't afford a BBC but later worked on a lot of games for the Acorn Archimedes starting in early 1989. I soon mastered the Spectrum and got a job in Sheffield as a games programmer in late 1984, and fifteen years later, moved into more serious stuff, but remained a programmer for the rest of my working life. I've just retired, at 66 years old!
Great vid! I knew a lot of the story, but I didn't know about how the Ferranti chips were "semi-custom". That was really interesting. I also didn't know about what happened to Ferranti, so off to Curiosity Stream!
And Acorn created risc (reduced instructions) for smaller portable devices which was very efficient, and with everyone starting to use their patents, Acorn became what we know as ARM company today - legacy sitting inside any and every smartphone made to date.
I would say the main reason semi custom stuff went away was that PGA (Programmable grid array) got so much performance that it was very hard to justify the extra cost of semi custom. Also fully custom become more.. well not cheaper, but more common place. So that lead to a situation where fully custom was sitting side by side with PGA replacing both the price and performance of semi custom.
ZX81 - Thank you to Mr. Sinclair for bringing generations of young people into a new world of technology and rewarding careers in business, science, and medicine.
Its really refreshing see how you changed the scope from your videos when you realized the low spec gaming topic isnt that relevant in this times of ultra powerfull and cheap devices. Also im glad to see you made a video explaining the change of route from your channel from now on, its really a thing to appreciate, its a nice detail to make us part of this. Really interesting videos, surely some info i already heard about, but not as "deep" as you present it here. Cheers and impatient to see what comes in the future!
Yes, the issues old Clive always had were confusing cheapness with his mantra "Elegance" and his certainty that any idea he deemed incompatible with any of his own was by definition wrong. I also suspect he had a well developed case of 'not invented here' syndrome. Being a state-funded corporation the BBC didn't care about elegance and certainly didn't want to look cheap. Most importantly it wanted a computer that could do everything and at the time that was Acorn's prototype as the Newbrain remained in development hell as a result of corporate feature creep.
"a well developed case of 'not invented here' syndrome" - I don't see this as a problem ;p "the issues old Clive always had were confusing cheapness with his mantra "Elegance"" -> Could you have developed a relatively powerful home computer to that price-point in that era?! - From a purely engineering viewpoint, the relative simplicity of the ZX Spectrum circuit board is a masterpiece -> from that perspective, the design is rather elegant. - Furthermore, in terms of computational "horsepower", the Z80 + 48K RAM vs its competitors using 6502/6510 and a bit north of 20K RAM. For serious applications, the Speccy could have been the better machine - That level of computing power, to that price-point in that time period is truly remarkable. - This raw computing horsepower though, is rather offset by the poor usability in the form of the rubber keyboard and the severe I/O bottleneck with everything going through the Ferranti ULA - not to mention the rather limited colour mapping to the display! - That simplicity of the Speccy's circuitry allowed for remarkable minaturisation for the standards of the day for the type of product it is - The industrial design was also elegant. Some decades later, I still think the original Speccy looks great and - to a point - still looks futuristic. Thanks to the work of the Industrial Designer that Sinclair had.
I got myself a ryzen 3 3250u laptop, I get Athlon 3000g performance on the go. I am happy that your channel exists, and will continue to teach us new things.
Sinclair followed the usual low price strategy, but its products were limited and with the appearance of multitasking computers that was what dictated the end of Sinclair!
And yet Sir Clive himself still insisted the Speccy was better than modern machines because it booted instantly instead of taking 5 minutes to load.. right up until his death AFAIK. I don’t know if that’s just ego talking!
I owned a Beeb, I was bought it as a child in 1984, a fantastic computer, You could buy a nice gaming rig for what it cost in today's money for just that keyboard/computer, the monitors were even more expensive, I just used a TV, My dad brought home disc drives, software and monitors at weekends for me to use ( He was a school teacher, and schools all had beebs)
Another suggestion: the weird story of my first computer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a, and of course the Commodore 64 (MSX competitor in Argentina). Thanks again!
This was originally my focus at the start of the video! I ended up changing it because I would had to explain the crash, which deserves its own video eventually.
I love how many of these cartoon scenes are both so similar to and also so different to the ones in _Micro Men,_ which I presume you’ve seen as part of your research. The Baron of Beef thing made me wonder if they’d changed the name of the pub the first time I saw that.. movie? But I still learned new things from this one! Like how the ULA worked and some of the internal politicking of the Sinclair engineers. The BBC Micro may not have made it into every home as the Speccy was cheaper, but Acorn (kinda) won in the end considering the Raspberri Pi lineup (plus other microcontrollers like the BBC microbit or whatever it’s called) use ARM, designed by Acorn initially.
Watching Miro Men was actually one of my inspirations for starting this whole series of videos in the first place! One of my sources for the video is the live commentary on the movie by the Acorn guys (linked in the description, it is great) that got me on research rabbit hole that ended up with me writing this video. My plan originally was making this one and a follow up about Acorn and Arm. But my tram is no quite big enough yet to make detailed videos as frequently as I like so it might take me a bit. I want to get there though!
At the time I never saw it as war between Sinclair and Acorn, it was the Zx Spectrum vs the Commodore 64. The Acorn BBC micro got into schools (to sit next to the RML380Z), but it was simply spectrum/C64 for the mass market of bedroom gamers/coders. Honourable mentions of dragon 32, msx etc at the time.
Your videos kept popping up in my recommended, and I finally clicked through to check them out. WOW. I’m so glad I did! Love the manga art and your story telling!
Never had a Sinclair computer (I had Atari 8 and 16bit, Amiga and C64). But I love this video. Great background story and good humor. Thanks for posting LowSpecGamer.
Look at the ZX Spectrum way of getting more RAM as if it were a motorcycle company, and it becomes more insane. The industry standard is twin-cylinder motorcycles. You need a four-cylinder engine to beat the market. So how do you get it on the cheap? Just buy a bunch of rejected V8 engines where half the cylinders are manufactured poorly, and only use the other half of the cylinders. Boom: four cylinder engine. I know it's not a great analogy, but it makes me laugh. Also, I love any story where deep anger and personal rage results in great things. Sinclair is awesome.
"the sinclair is so limited, it cannot be expanded is fundamentally a throw away consumer product" and that is exactly what iphones, ipads, macs & most androids are today with their SoCs and they are the norm today.
Great to hear a lil history of many of these companies we grew up with but wondering how they started and where they end. Also what their part of the technological advancements they added to our modern day pc / gaming etc 🥰👍🤩🥳. Thanks again for doing these terrific videos LSG 👍😆
A little bit of a tangent regarding that bit near the start of the video about how the old GB currency worked; There is a defence for the old system of one GBP being 240 pence. 240 is something that is known as a "highly composite number", a number that has more subdivisors than any other number that comes before it. So for accounting purposes, it's very convenient and can be evenly splt a lot of different ways. That said, decimalisation is something I appreciate.
Nice. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 2068, i worked in a public computer workshop with two dozen Spectrums (we also had TI-994A, MSX and an IBM PC-Jr), and eventually I had in my hands to try it a Sinclair QL (Quantum Leap), which was GREAT except for the proprietary tape cartridge that failed so often that it made the entire thing a fiasco (should they place a floppy instead, with its Motorola 68008 32 bits processor it could have been at the level of a Macintosh for a fraction of its price). Both Arcorn ans Sinclair computer's history is worth to be followed, Arcorn became the designer of current ARM processors (Arcorn RISC Machines) we all have in our cell phones, and one of the main Spectrum software developers was Psion, which in turn developed Sinclair QL multitasking operating system, and trough several PDA's implementations, evolved into the Symbian cell phones OS.
A QL with a floppy drive? Uncle Clive could never have done something sensible like that: he always snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cheaping out on something vital. With the Merlin Tonto (a rebadged, repackaged QL, some of which were sold with floppy drives) we saw what the QL might have been... but by then everyone had a PC.
I see Scottish comedian/actor Stanley Baxter playing a couple of roles in an advertisement @15:47, still alive aged 95. Of course, whilst Acorn is not around any more, the company was responsible for the design of the ARM processor, and that will be in more cheap computers than any other, quite apart from its wider role. Thus the Raspberry Pi, born out of a similar desire to produce a cheap computer designed for teaching and learning the basis of computing is surely the true inheritor of that mantle. A win for the legacy of Chris Curry, and I'm sure Clive Sinclair is spinning in his grave. nb. for those interested in how to squeeze several quarts out of a pint, then reading how Sinclair managed to do the impossible, using the TMS0805 chip, with (the very quirky) Sinclair Scientific calculator is worth reading. Released in 1974, at a fraction of the cost of the HP35 scientific calculator, it rather exemplified Sinclair's approach to taking an electronic component and twisting it beyond the original capabilities to produce a cheap, innovative albeit flawed product.
One of the spectrums top game developers was a small company that went by the name "Ultimate play the game", the stamper brothers sold off the name and went to develop games on the NES under their new name Rare.
To be fair to Clive Sinclair, the UK govt were also not very good at running businesses. If you see the mess that was created by British Leyland, which was a govt initiated semi-nationalisation and amalgamation of multiple UK car manufacturers, you'll see what I mean (And later ditto Delorean in Northern Ireland)....whatever the UK govt touches, turns to sh|t.....
The British micro market was kinda insane compared to the American marker but even though it arguably played just as big a role in bringing computers to the masses, especially in Europe it often gets forgotten because most of the companies never managed to make it out of the 8-bit micro era. Also the ZX Spectrum ad is just great, I love it.
These stories are great! One of the best on UA-cam! Unfortunately the voice over is sometime a bit unintelligible for me, so I need to watch it with subtitles.
I used to run a large network of BBC Micros. The Acorn machine had built in networking (Econet) and expandability (the Tube) plus was a really solidly built and reliable machine.
The BBC keyboard is a delight to type on. I especially like the Master 128's keyboard that came later. That one even has Cherry switches, although sadly not mechanical ones
Hands up if you remember doing a paper round after school to buy a colour computer, to only then plug it up to a hand me down black and white portable TV!
I'm from the UK, grew up here in the 80's and 90's. Our economical situation at the time was complicated. There were vast divides in wealth, with some hardworking people earning very little whist others were rich far beyond their input to the workforce of the country by getting into boom industries. I think it's fair to say that the majority of people were not on generous incomes, and even those on somewhat better salaries were mindful of not wasting money. So when it came to the emerging home gaming scene, price was the driving factor behind the success or failure of a system. We didn't much think of micro computers and consoles as being different. We used the word 'computer' to describe any device. The console scene was not strong here, in the 80's. The NES didn't have a big impact. When choosing a system to own, we looked at both the hardware and software costs. We didn't see the value in consoles, because games cost around £30 to £40 each. On the micros, software could cost over 90% less, typically retailing between £2 and £3 on budget cassette. Plus the piracy scene was rife, taking the cost down to near nothing in some cases. ZX Spectrum and C64 were the dominating machines. They continued to have a strong foothold into the mid 90's. We would happily take compromises in overall gaming quality and loading times if it cut the cost. We were very aware that the ZX Spectrum was a low spec device, but it served our needs.
The ZX Spectrum keyboard was wonderful... just after cleaning. It was very fast to program basic with it, and the amount of force was quite light... for couple of days, then it started to suck until you heard cracking noises when you had to press it so hard. Because of the need to keep cleaning (and it only gets worse once you start cleaning it, goes bad quicker..) i had a contact problem with one of the foil cables. I had to adjust it thru the expansion slot with a small screwdriver while the ZX was powered. And of course i shorted out one of the pins and it died on me... That was a sad, sad day since i knew i would not get a new computer, they were starting to be pricey; Amiga or Atari were the only real possibilities for upgrading to the next gen and my parents didn't understand computers or reason to have one at home, other than being a toy. Spending what would be now... 2000€ for a toy was out of the question. I later god amiga for basically nothing and used it for years, and god damn i love that computer. In hindsight, if i knew how important they were going to be, i could've pressured to get me a used C64.. So, i can't blame them, i kind of knew what you can do with them but didn't see any way for me to ever do anything like coding for a living.
Love the spectrum, I still have 3 two 48’s and one 128K plus 3 micro drives. The sound of the game loading from tape is stuck in my brain forever, plus the frustration when game didn’t load mostly due to them being copied.
What the hell happened to Ferranti? This story is the topic of this month's bonus video on Nebula. You can get in for cheap with the bundle: curiositystream.com/lowspecgamer Some notes on this episode: -There is a great movie called Micro Men about some of the events covered in this vidéo. It stars Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry. It is one of my favorite movies of this tech history genre and highly recommend you look it up. The commentary on the movie by the real life Acorn crew (linked in the sources) was one of my inspirations for digging deeper into this story. -Sinclair Radionics had a lot of successful products before the calculator (and arguably after), but the Calculator seemed like a great jumping point to introduce the relationship between Clive and Chris. -The secret company Sinclair made to escape the government was called Westminster Mail Order Ltd, rthen Sinclair Instrument Ltd, then Science of Cambridge Ltd, then Sinclair Computers Ltd, and finally Sinclair Research Ltd. I removed this constant name changing in the vidéo to avoid confusion. Sinclair was able to retake control of this company after Chris left and after the government kicked him off Sinclair Radionics. And it was technically this ever name changing company that released all the computers. -The clip at 3:13 is actually real archival footage of a ZX Spectrum factory. -I could not find a direct source of how/where Chris and Hermann met, but a pub is as good an assumption as any. -I kinda glossed over the importance of the Zilog Z80 because I want to dedicate a video to it soon. -I MASSIVELY oversimplified how the Ferranti semi custom chip method works. It is a fascinating read if you are into electronics. The book on top of my sources is an exquisitely detailed look into it and its history if you are interested. -I glossed over this not to distract from the main point, but the original government developed computer meant for the BBC program was then Grundy NewBrain. And get this: they owned the rights to this computer because it had started development in Sinclair Radionics, which the government acquired when it went Bankrupt. So in a way both Chris and Clive were competing about a project of their past! The NewBrain project however was so terribly behind schedule they decided to just give it to a private company. -Paul Kriwazcek, which I quote here as the producer of the BBC program, is also an accomplished mesopotamia historian. I envy his flexibility. -I could not find enough direct sources of the exact details of how the BBC project went to acorn instead of Clive so I interpolated and simplified for narrative purposes. -Clive´s propensity for anger and throwing things around is surprisingly decently documented. -A surprising amount of people think the ZX Spectrum was the computer created for the BBC contest, but all direct sources say the ZX 81. The Spectrum seems, at least in part, a reaction to losing the BBC contract. I did have to interpolate a bit for narrative purposes. -I have a nagging suspicion that the “half bad” ram trick was used by more devices back then by other companies, but could not find a single other example that is not the Spectrum, so I included it in the narrative. This might only be a thing on earlier models. -I feel I am unkind to Acorn and Chris Curry on this vidéo, but I want to focus on the story of Acorn on its own vidéo down the line. The legacy of Acorn is arguably much more impactful than Sinclair, given that they developed the ARM architecture (which used to stand for Acorn Risc Machine) -The details of the Baron of the Beef incident are mixed within a ton of internet and tech history legends. I saw a lot of blogs and forums posts convinced the fight started much earlier, when Chris left Sinclair. Thankfully, on the commentary for Micro Men in the sources Chris confirms the split was initially amicable and the fight started over the return rates ad campaign. Chris sounds resentful of having punched Clive on it, and claims he is not a violent man. Clive probably was really good at pushing his buttons. -There were a ton of Spectrum revisions, many of them with a much better keyboard.
Thank you, this was incredibly fascinating. I used a BBC Micro in school and played on the Spectrum as well as many other systems at the time. I hope you do many more of these interesting less well known computer company stories.
LOVE YOUR VIDS ALEX ❤️🙏👍 Edit: Well now I feel like a dumb dumb because I had not read to the end hahaha 😂 I understand that for the brevity of the video you had to cut LOTS OF THINGS, but I really would've loved seeing 5 seconds of "Acorn, which would later evolve in ARM. Yes, THAT ARM (screen full of GBA, DS, iPhone and pretty much every smartphone and gadget of today) The impact of that BBC Micro contract is what allowed them to have the funds to develop the Acorn Archimedes which is basically the 1st ARM computer ever and the distant ancestor to basically a BAJILLION of chips today in our phones and stuff Just talking about it, mind-blowing stuff honestly :'D
Though to be fair... and since you've introduced him already, there's a whole episode that could be done about Herman Hauser and ARM hehehe 😌 Bonus : you'd be able to link back to a ton of stuff you've already done :D
Semi-custom chips like the ones Ferranti made are, to this day, quite popular for smaller production runs where producing a fully custom chip is not feasible and a microcontroller would be too slow. Ferranti called them ULAs but I assume they were similar to PLDs or CPLDs. Those are usually only programmable once. The modern equivalent with reprogrammable flash memory would be an FPGA. Both Intel and AMD have recently bought companies that make these things, namely Altera and Xilinx, respectively. Some of them are actually enormous, and you could program an entire CPU on one if you really wanted to.
@@LowSpecGamer naa was talking about the video you told that because of games config being limited now youll not make the videos about running them on low end hardware
What isn't mentioned was the effort Sinclair had on the US computer industry with the release of timex versions of the zx81. As for a few months they became the best selling machines. While not long these sales began the price war of US machines scared of loss of market share. Many home computers were cancelled due to this war as could only be sold now below cost.
The Sinclair computers created & fuelled a thriving 3rd party peripheral industry, to enhance them. My ZX81 had a Memotech keyboard, Memotech RS232 serial port, Memotech parallel port & a 32K. RAM pack that I designed & built myself. I've worked in companies where the EPROM programmer was a commercial peripheral attached to a ZX81 or Spectrum. I've seen a CNC milling machine run by a ZX81. NASA has even took ZX81 & a stripped down Spectrum computers into space for science experiments, on the space shuttle. Sinclair computers have had a greater legacy than the BBC Micro.
Finally a video where it doesn't starts with "IT WAS A CRISIS AT NINTENDO" it's nice you're not only covering Nintendo stuff only but the whole gaming and pc saga of the 1900s
IT WAS CRISIS IN THE UK
Lol
This pretty much. It’s kinda frustrating to see 1983 videogame crash being referred to in every retrospective as “that grand event that almost killed gaming”, when in fact videogame industry prospered and thrived in a lot of places.
@@LowSpecGamer it's funny because it's true (the UK economy in the late 70s was in the toilet. They were even called 'The Sick Man of Europe' and a huuuge part of why they initially joined the EU)
@@LowSpecGamer olá mano, tudo bom?
Então eu queria lhe fazer uma pergunta:
Você vai voltar a legendar seus vídeos em português?
Eu fiquei muito triste, pois não sei falar inglês, e, seus vídeos são muito bons, só que agora não tenho mais condições de ver os vídeos, devido o idioma.
hello bro, how are you? So I wanted to ask you a question: Are you going to subtitle your videos in Portuguese again? I was very sad, because I can't speak English, and your videos are very good, but now I can't watch the videos anymore, due to the language.
Whoever is doing the manga needs a raise. It makes these stories so much more engaging. Gives it a Japanese Halt & Catch Fire vibe (which, despite being fictional is quite accurate to the era).
I agree. She is getting a raise soon.
To anyone who was wondering what happened to Acorn, their CPU architecture was so efficient it's now used in embedded devices everywhere.
You probably know them as ARM.
Well I'll be damned! hehe
Got my start on a ZX81 back in '84 when it was on sale at one of those cheesy ripoff electronics stores in Manhattan NYC for $99, which at the time was a huge sum for a 15 year old boy dreaming of computers. Fast forward almost 40 years, and here we are... taa-daaa! :)
Strangely enough, after Acorn's release of the Election personal computer, they went bankrupt, but got brought out by Olivetti. They came back in the game after they released their Archimedes computer series. With their own processor architecture, known as ARM, the Acorn RISC Machine.
@@Mike-77-YT The irony is that while Sinclair was trying to be taken more seriously instead of being seen as just a producer of gaming micros, Acorn wanted to compete in the lucrative gaming micro sector, which is why they created the Electron as a cut down, cheaper BBC Micro. Unfortunately, they missed the Christmas release period and ended up with warehouses of unwanted Electrons, which were eventually sold off really cheap and led to their buyout by Olivetti.
Whoa, I just learned today that ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine.
Acorn
RISC
Machines
20:02 I had heard of them because they manufactured electronics for the British weapons industry. Since I am a lifelong aviation enthusiast, I had actually heard of Ferranti before I even heard of Sinclair, Acorn or the BBC Micro.
I am impressed! I go into this on the extra video but indeed they where primary a military tech company. And hilariously they met their end while trying to enter the US market.
@@LowSpecGamer - The US market is a completely different beast than the Euro market. It's a tough market to penetrate.
As a teenager in the Greater Manchester area in the 80's, Ferranti was a big employer and lots of school leavers went to work at one of their many sites. They were, however, well known for taking 16 yr olds on as YTS trainees and then ditching them just before their 2 year stint was up. I work just down the road from a former Ferranti site, which is a continuation of a Ferranti division, now owned by French company Thales and makes submarine electronics - which is weird as it's about 40 miles inland from the sea.
@@Mike_Connor - Well, I'm sure they have pressurized water tanks to test their electronics. hehe
Ferranti was also a brand of 405 line TV sets sold in the UK in the late forties to late 50s as well.
THE BARON OF BEEF, oh my god. It's a good thing historical fact is immune to criticism for anachronistic jokes in the narrative.
It's not that unlikely a name for an English pub. I think it refers to a specific method of preparing a joint of beef for a meal. As far as I know the pub itself is still there. I've had a pint or two in there myself, although we generally preferred to drink in the Mitre next door.
@@jimcameron6803 I THINK he's referring to the fact it was referred to as 'The Baron of THE Beef' so it fits the joke.
Not to mention that this very tale (of the Epic struggle of Curry vs Sinclair) was made into its own comedy-drama film, Micro Men. Starring Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman!
Check the notes in the pinned comment and the sources at the bottom of the description! Micro Men is one of my favorite films in this genre, and the commentary of the film from the Acorn guys is one of my primary sources for this video. Lots of interesting info there.
and it is on UA-cam
@@LowSpecGamer whoa, commentary? Like a commentary audio track, or interviews about it?
I have watched that movie a few Sundays ago 😊
The Ferranti style chips aren't completely dead though. There's a lot of companies that will take your FPGA bitstreams, and turn them into custom asics at a fraction of the cost of a traditional asic, because they're basically taking the FPGA silicon and throwing one custom layer on top, just like Ferranti did.
I love these stories. You've got a knack for presenting these narrative throughlines!
Reminds me of the Lamborghini story. Lamborghini (the person) was a super car enthusiast. He had some complaints about Ferrari cars to mr Ferrari. Ferrari basically said that Lamborghini might know tractors but didn’t know cars. So Lamborghini expanded from tractors to super cars out of spite
Every hero creates it rival. Like Nintendo and the PlayStation
In fairness to Sinclair, even as big as gaming has become today, it really is a small sideshow compared to business clients 'if' you can achieve a dominant market position. Sinclair failed to achieve this, but diversifying the portfolio into gaming might've given his company some life support much in the way that AMDs relationship with Microsoft & Sony kept it going in that poor decade before Zen, Threadripper & RDNA came along.
Maybe he could've stood to gain some millions while shooting for his billions.
Very good summary. I think the same
Half the problem is the Sinclair were always too cheap to build anything that'd be usable by businesses. What Acorn built was a far better basis, but they screwed up on the marketing side, leading to their eventual demise in the '90s. I mean, the design of the QL is frankly embarrassing, and mainly due to all the things done to cut costs.
@@talideon Isn't Acorn still technically around as ARM?
@@Mnnvint ARM was spun-off into its own company as Acorn died, partly due to servicing the Apple Newton in fact. ARM may have died with Acorn were it not for that fact. But that also meant not all staff stayed-on, especially after so many buyouts in the interceding years.
IBM pushed out a 16bit micro with an 8bit bus, very much like the QL, but the PC/XT were just so expandable, unlike the QL. Not to mention the tiny micro drives, they were just too small, too slow when compared to disks. Just as having so much of the OS in ROM also ended up being an issue, as you can’t issue frequent updates. The QL was too 8 bit, and too cost reduced for business
Parents bought a commodore 64 and I was jumping on my bed not realizing that Mom had stored it....under my bed in the box 😮
ouch
Did it break?
You would have to break the bed first. I jumped on my bed just to see how high i can bounce many times and I couldn't even break my bed.
Instead of a "bread bin" as it was called affectionately, it became a "bed bin". hehe
@@artemizlogan8305 back in those days in the UK beds had a wire chain linked base that was very flexible(springy). A bit like a trampoline. If you were under the bed and someone jumped on it you would likely end up with a nasty cut.
“It turned *millions* of people into gamers. It turned *thousands* of gamers into professional … [people].”
Legit what my mind expected to hear, and I don’t even regret it. Amazing video!
Micro Men is a fantastic BBC dramatization of this era, and it's on UA-cam.
Yes! I highly recommend watching it. It talks about the rivalries between Sinclair's ZX Spectrum and the Acorn/BBC Micro.
Alex was like "What if LGR Tech Tales was a manga?"
computers finally got to the cheap and small and people went crazy with this tech when it was born
Yeah, I like that! The manga element attracts me so much!
BRILLIANT VIDEO!!!!
I love the ZX Spectrum so much, my first step into gaming.
I get chills every time I hear the loading sounds, so much so I made a music app that uses the loading sounds as samples. (ZXPlectrum)
Weird thing is, I made it a s toy but real musicians actually use it! 🤯
i’m a musician and just bought it based on this comment! hell yeah
I love the animations and the edits 🔥
I find amazing that I subbed to you when I was gaming on a lenovo laptop that barely could run league of legends. After this, I've lived in two different countries, graduated university and found a job at my field to earn enough to buy a new gaming PC. After all this time I am still a big fan of your content, even though I'm not a low-end gamer currently, your videos still have a warm place at my cpu. Thank you for your hard work!
While I'll miss the old LSG style vids, I love these animated docs! Of course, I'm always a sucker for vintage tech!
I really enjoy your new style of videos. Especially these documentarys on technology history.
But this video might just be my favourite video of yours. I already knew some stuff about Sinclair but I had no clue about the deep and personal rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn. Really fascinating stuff.
This was before my time but due to being dirt poor as a kid my first computer was an ancient Amstrad CPC and a few hundred tapes and floppies. For context this was well in to the CD/DVD era, we just got a job lot going for almost nothing but it has always made me appreciate the strange and magical UK microcomputer boom, and in turn, Sinclair and the Beeb for making it happen. (Also, any viewers who wonder what you can do with only 1k of ram? I implore you to research 1k chess, a functional chess game whose code that came out for the ZX81 which has since been further simplified down to under 700 bytes. It's crazy.)
I never had any ZX machine but Sinclair's attempt to make new tech as affordable as possible so that everyone can use it, is remarkable.
It made sense at the time. Given that alternatives like Apple II were considerably more expensive they were out of reach for most people. I was 13 at the time I got my ZX-81. My parents weren't going to be able to buy me a computer so I saved instead. I could never have afforded an apple without saving for many years. Sinclair put computers in the hands of ordinary people, often children like myself.
Regarding the Spectrum, the keyboard was typically referred to as the 'dead flesh' keyboard but it was vastly better than that on the ZX-81. Also, in case anyone is interested, there is a
one off drama called Micro Men with Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman (as Sinclair and Curry) that is hilarious. It's worth tracking down.
According to another youtubers research, take it with a grain of salt, Sinclair wanted to build up funds for his *real* goals, an electric car called the C5 and a portable TV. Neither were very good.
The ZX spectrum changed my life. I was a TV and video Technician at Radio Rentals when our apprentice brought his ZX81 and RAM pack into our workshop. I was fascinated with it, and he said "Take it home as I'm not using it for a while." So I did. Eventually he wanted it back so I immedately bought a Spectrum, newly released. I couldn't afford a BBC but later worked on a lot of games for the Acorn Archimedes starting in early 1989. I soon mastered the Spectrum and got a job in Sheffield as a games programmer in late 1984, and fifteen years later, moved into more serious stuff, but remained a programmer for the rest of my working life. I've just retired, at 66 years old!
Great vid! I knew a lot of the story, but I didn't know about how the Ferranti chips were "semi-custom". That was really interesting. I also didn't know about what happened to Ferranti, so off to Curiosity Stream!
Make sure to check for your Nebula email and check it there!
Your narration is awesome and the animations are just as good, please make more of these
And Acorn created risc (reduced instructions) for smaller portable devices which was very efficient, and with everyone starting to use their patents, Acorn became what we know as ARM company today - legacy sitting inside any and every smartphone made to date.
I want to video about Acorn and Arm eventually
I would say the main reason semi custom stuff went away was that PGA (Programmable grid array) got so much performance that it was very hard to justify the extra cost of semi custom. Also fully custom become more.. well not cheaper, but more common place.
So that lead to a situation where fully custom was sitting side by side with PGA replacing both the price and performance of semi custom.
ZX81 - Thank you to Mr. Sinclair for bringing generations of young people into a new world of technology and rewarding careers in business, science, and medicine.
Its really refreshing see how you changed the scope from your videos when you realized the low spec gaming topic isnt that relevant in this times of ultra powerfull and cheap devices. Also im glad to see you made a video explaining the change of route from your channel from now on, its really a thing to appreciate, its a nice detail to make us part of this. Really interesting videos, surely some info i already heard about, but not as "deep" as you present it here. Cheers and impatient to see what comes in the future!
thank you. Needed to hear this today
Yes, the issues old Clive always had were confusing cheapness with his mantra "Elegance" and his certainty that any idea he deemed incompatible with any of his own was by definition wrong. I also suspect he had a well developed case of 'not invented here' syndrome.
Being a state-funded corporation the BBC didn't care about elegance and certainly didn't want to look cheap. Most importantly it wanted a computer that could do everything and at the time that was Acorn's prototype as the Newbrain remained in development hell as a result of corporate feature creep.
"a well developed case of 'not invented here' syndrome" - I don't see this as a problem ;p
"the issues old Clive always had were confusing cheapness with his mantra "Elegance"" -> Could you have developed a relatively powerful home computer to that price-point in that era?!
- From a purely engineering viewpoint, the relative simplicity of the ZX Spectrum circuit board is a masterpiece -> from that perspective, the design is rather elegant.
- Furthermore, in terms of computational "horsepower", the Z80 + 48K RAM vs its competitors using 6502/6510 and a bit north of 20K RAM. For serious applications, the Speccy could have been the better machine
- That level of computing power, to that price-point in that time period is truly remarkable.
- This raw computing horsepower though, is rather offset by the poor usability in the form of the rubber keyboard and the severe I/O bottleneck with everything going through the Ferranti ULA - not to mention the rather limited colour mapping to the display!
- That simplicity of the Speccy's circuitry allowed for remarkable minaturisation for the standards of the day for the type of product it is
- The industrial design was also elegant. Some decades later, I still think the original Speccy looks great and - to a point - still looks futuristic. Thanks to the work of the Industrial Designer that Sinclair had.
I got myself a ryzen 3 3250u laptop, I get Athlon 3000g performance on the go. I am happy that your channel exists, and will continue to teach us new things.
Good stuff
I love you're new style of videos. I don't know how to say this without it sounding bad but I hope they can be as popular as your other videos.
Sinclair followed the usual low price strategy, but its products were limited and with the appearance of multitasking computers that was what dictated the end of Sinclair!
And yet Sir Clive himself still insisted the Speccy was better than modern machines because it booted instantly instead of taking 5 minutes to load.. right up until his death AFAIK. I don’t know if that’s just ego talking!
Not really, the QL was multi-tasking, even supporting it in BASIC. It's problem is that it was a bit crap.
He's back :D
He never left ❤️
We need him now more than ever before.
Back he is
I owned a Beeb, I was bought it as a child in 1984, a fantastic computer, You could buy a nice gaming rig for what it cost in today's money for just that keyboard/computer, the monitors were even more expensive, I just used a TV, My dad brought home disc drives, software and monitors at weekends for me to use ( He was a school teacher, and schools all had beebs)
Another suggestion: the weird story of my first computer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a, and of course the Commodore 64 (MSX competitor in Argentina). Thanks again!
Great video that also showed that the whole 1980's game crisis was not felt in the UK, where things thrived extremely well.
This was originally my focus at the start of the video! I ended up changing it because I would had to explain the crash, which deserves its own video eventually.
This video is amazing and really high quality! I love this direction your channel is taking
I love how many of these cartoon scenes are both so similar to and also so different to the ones in _Micro Men,_ which I presume you’ve seen as part of your research. The Baron of Beef thing made me wonder if they’d changed the name of the pub the first time I saw that.. movie? But I still learned new things from this one! Like how the ULA worked and some of the internal politicking of the Sinclair engineers. The BBC Micro may not have made it into every home as the Speccy was cheaper, but Acorn (kinda) won in the end considering the Raspberri Pi lineup (plus other microcontrollers like the BBC microbit or whatever it’s called) use ARM, designed by Acorn initially.
Watching Miro Men was actually one of my inspirations for starting this whole series of videos in the first place! One of my sources for the video is the live commentary on the movie by the Acorn guys (linked in the description, it is great) that got me on research rabbit hole that ended up with me writing this video. My plan originally was making this one and a follow up about Acorn and Arm. But my tram is no quite big enough yet to make detailed videos as frequently as I like so it might take me a bit. I want to get there though!
Amazing high quality content, i love this new format
At the time I never saw it as war between Sinclair and Acorn, it was the Zx Spectrum vs the Commodore 64. The Acorn BBC micro got into schools (to sit next to the RML380Z), but it was simply spectrum/C64 for the mass market of bedroom gamers/coders. Honourable mentions of dragon 32, msx etc at the time.
Your videos kept popping up in my recommended, and I finally clicked through to check them out. WOW. I’m so glad I did! Love the manga art and your story telling!
Your channel and your content are helping me power through my Masters good sir. Love these uploads!
Loving the new videos lsg great art and editing keep it up
My first computer was the Sinclair ZX80 in kit form that a built in my electronics class in high school. My how far we have come!
FINALLY A NEW VIDEO...
But i have to sleep, oh well
Gotta watch it tomorrow....
Never had a Sinclair computer (I had Atari 8 and 16bit, Amiga and C64). But I love this video. Great background story and good humor. Thanks for posting LowSpecGamer.
These videos are always great! Please never stop doing them! Eres genial, amigo!
Look at the ZX Spectrum way of getting more RAM as if it were a motorcycle company, and it becomes more insane. The industry standard is twin-cylinder motorcycles. You need a four-cylinder engine to beat the market. So how do you get it on the cheap?
Just buy a bunch of rejected V8 engines where half the cylinders are manufactured poorly, and only use the other half of the cylinders. Boom: four cylinder engine.
I know it's not a great analogy, but it makes me laugh.
Also, I love any story where deep anger and personal rage results in great things. Sinclair is awesome.
"the sinclair is so limited, it cannot be expanded is fundamentally a throw away consumer product" and that is exactly what iphones, ipads, macs & most androids are today with their SoCs and they are the norm today.
Great to hear a lil history of many of these companies we grew up with but wondering how they started and where they end. Also what their part of the technological advancements they added to our modern day pc / gaming etc 🥰👍🤩🥳. Thanks again for doing these terrific videos LSG 👍😆
A little bit of a tangent regarding that bit near the start of the video about how the old GB currency worked; There is a defence for the old system of one GBP being 240 pence. 240 is something that is known as a "highly composite number", a number that has more subdivisors than any other number that comes before it. So for accounting purposes, it's very convenient and can be evenly splt a lot of different ways. That said, decimalisation is something I appreciate.
It is probably a matter of compromising in account or making day to day operations easier.
@@LowSpecGamer Probably! Especially with the metric system being uniformly based on powers of 10 whenever possible.
I feel fortunate to have stumbled on your channel. Your narrations legit make me happy. Thanks for being so consistently awesome!
Laughed so loud at "Baron of the Beef" that my wife had to see what I was watching.
I know you might not see this but I these videos are great!
I like these new different content videos of yours other than low spec vids.😁
Nice. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 2068, i worked in a public computer workshop with two dozen Spectrums (we also had TI-994A, MSX and an IBM PC-Jr), and eventually I had in my hands to try it a Sinclair QL (Quantum Leap), which was GREAT except for the proprietary tape cartridge that failed so often that it made the entire thing a fiasco (should they place a floppy instead, with its Motorola 68008 32 bits processor it could have been at the level of a Macintosh for a fraction of its price). Both Arcorn ans Sinclair computer's history is worth to be followed, Arcorn became the designer of current ARM processors (Arcorn RISC Machines) we all have in our cell phones, and one of the main Spectrum software developers was Psion, which in turn developed Sinclair QL multitasking operating system, and trough several PDA's implementations, evolved into the Symbian cell phones OS.
A QL with a floppy drive? Uncle Clive could never have done something sensible like that: he always snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cheaping out on something vital. With the Merlin Tonto (a rebadged, repackaged QL, some of which were sold with floppy drives) we saw what the QL might have been... but by then everyone had a PC.
Next: how the speccy clones shaped the eastern european computing scene
this documentaries are top quality and entertaining af good job man ♥
Damn, these animations in your videos are really good.
I see Scottish comedian/actor Stanley Baxter playing a couple of roles in an advertisement @15:47, still alive aged 95.
Of course, whilst Acorn is not around any more, the company was responsible for the design of the ARM processor, and that will be in more cheap computers than any other, quite apart from its wider role. Thus the Raspberry Pi, born out of a similar desire to produce a cheap computer designed for teaching and learning the basis of computing is surely the true inheritor of that mantle. A win for the legacy of Chris Curry, and I'm sure Clive Sinclair is spinning in his grave.
nb. for those interested in how to squeeze several quarts out of a pint, then reading how Sinclair managed to do the impossible, using the TMS0805 chip, with (the very quirky) Sinclair Scientific calculator is worth reading. Released in 1974, at a fraction of the cost of the HP35 scientific calculator, it rather exemplified Sinclair's approach to taking an electronic component and twisting it beyond the original capabilities to produce a cheap, innovative albeit flawed product.
Really really good content man, liked your channel before, love it now❤
Love the history videos, keep it up with the great content.
U truly understand us the lowspec ppl
Muchas gracias por sus amables palabras sobre el Museo.
Avísanos cuando vengas para que podamos organizar algo especial.
Great video, nice production
The sponsor is history
0:17 There, that right there, that was the machine that gave me so much pleasure, it was truly magical.
Ferranti's idea reminds me of what Field Programmable Fate Array's are doing now. It was like the predecessor for FPGAs
The old pound is wonderful if you want to do arithmetic.
I just love the new format of the channel GG
I swear this is the video to make me subscribe to nebula even after all the half as interesting videos
I love this channel so much ♥️
LowSpecGamer forever 🤜
Acorn computers were in every UK school - I still remember using them as a kid, in primary and secondary. I had no idea why until now!
Loving the artwork
One of the spectrums top game developers was a small company that went by the name "Ultimate play the game", the stamper brothers sold off the name and went to develop games on the NES under their new name Rare.
To be fair to Clive Sinclair, the UK govt were also not very good at running businesses. If you see the mess that was created by British Leyland, which was a govt initiated semi-nationalisation and amalgamation of multiple UK car manufacturers, you'll see what I mean (And later ditto Delorean in Northern Ireland)....whatever the UK govt touches, turns to sh|t.....
The British micro market was kinda insane compared to the American marker but even though it arguably played just as big a role in bringing computers to the masses, especially in Europe it often gets forgotten because most of the companies never managed to make it out of the 8-bit micro era.
Also the ZX Spectrum ad is just great, I love it.
These stories are great! One of the best on UA-cam! Unfortunately the voice over is sometime a bit unintelligible for me, so I need to watch it with subtitles.
Que buen contenido gracias 🔥
I used to run a large network of BBC Micros. The Acorn machine had built in networking (Econet) and expandability (the Tube) plus was a really solidly built and reliable machine.
The BBC keyboard is a delight to type on.
I especially like the Master 128's keyboard that came later.
That one even has Cherry switches, although sadly not mechanical ones
Great docu.
I loved this episode of Micro Men!
Hands up if you remember doing a paper round after school to buy a colour computer, to only then plug it up to a hand me down black and white portable TV!
In a way, Sinclair was like Packatd Bell, before Packard Bell.
I'm from the UK, grew up here in the 80's and 90's. Our economical situation at the time was complicated. There were vast divides in wealth, with some hardworking people earning very little whist others were rich far beyond their input to the workforce of the country by getting into boom industries. I think it's fair to say that the majority of people were not on generous incomes, and even those on somewhat better salaries were mindful of not wasting money. So when it came to the emerging home gaming scene, price was the driving factor behind the success or failure of a system. We didn't much think of micro computers and consoles as being different. We used the word 'computer' to describe any device. The console scene was not strong here, in the 80's. The NES didn't have a big impact. When choosing a system to own, we looked at both the hardware and software costs. We didn't see the value in consoles, because games cost around £30 to £40 each. On the micros, software could cost over 90% less, typically retailing between £2 and £3 on budget cassette. Plus the piracy scene was rife, taking the cost down to near nothing in some cases. ZX Spectrum and C64 were the dominating machines. They continued to have a strong foothold into the mid 90's. We would happily take compromises in overall gaming quality and loading times if it cut the cost. We were very aware that the ZX Spectrum was a low spec device, but it served our needs.
The ZX Spectrum keyboard was wonderful... just after cleaning. It was very fast to program basic with it, and the amount of force was quite light... for couple of days, then it started to suck until you heard cracking noises when you had to press it so hard. Because of the need to keep cleaning (and it only gets worse once you start cleaning it, goes bad quicker..) i had a contact problem with one of the foil cables. I had to adjust it thru the expansion slot with a small screwdriver while the ZX was powered. And of course i shorted out one of the pins and it died on me... That was a sad, sad day since i knew i would not get a new computer, they were starting to be pricey; Amiga or Atari were the only real possibilities for upgrading to the next gen and my parents didn't understand computers or reason to have one at home, other than being a toy. Spending what would be now... 2000€ for a toy was out of the question. I later god amiga for basically nothing and used it for years, and god damn i love that computer.
In hindsight, if i knew how important they were going to be, i could've pressured to get me a used C64.. So, i can't blame them, i kind of knew what you can do with them but didn't see any way for me to ever do anything like coding for a living.
Love the spectrum, I still have 3 two 48’s and one 128K plus 3 micro drives. The sound of the game loading from tape is stuck in my brain forever, plus the frustration when game didn’t load mostly due to them being copied.
Adjusting the azimuth on the tape heads, using your ears to listen for the clearest signal is a lost art.
@@handlesarefeckinstupid yeah it is,. I think these young tech kids should be taken back to those days, and maybe They wouldn’t complain so much
@@nicsandee123 TBF i still complain.
What the hell happened to Ferranti? This story is the topic of this month's bonus video on Nebula. You can get in for cheap with the bundle: curiositystream.com/lowspecgamer
Some notes on this episode:
-There is a great movie called Micro Men about some of the events covered in this vidéo. It stars Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry. It is one of my favorite movies of this tech history genre and highly recommend you look it up. The commentary on the movie by the real life Acorn crew (linked in the sources) was one of my inspirations for digging deeper into this story.
-Sinclair Radionics had a lot of successful products before the calculator (and arguably after), but the Calculator seemed like a great jumping point to introduce the relationship between Clive and Chris.
-The secret company Sinclair made to escape the government was called Westminster Mail Order Ltd, rthen Sinclair Instrument Ltd, then Science of Cambridge Ltd, then Sinclair Computers Ltd, and finally Sinclair Research Ltd. I removed this constant name changing in the vidéo to avoid confusion. Sinclair was able to retake control of this company after Chris left and after the government kicked him off Sinclair Radionics. And it was technically this ever name changing company that released all the computers.
-The clip at 3:13 is actually real archival footage of a ZX Spectrum factory.
-I could not find a direct source of how/where Chris and Hermann met, but a pub is as good an assumption as any.
-I kinda glossed over the importance of the Zilog Z80 because I want to dedicate a video to it soon.
-I MASSIVELY oversimplified how the Ferranti semi custom chip method works. It is a fascinating read if you are into electronics. The book on top of my sources is an exquisitely detailed look into it and its history if you are interested.
-I glossed over this not to distract from the main point, but the original government developed computer meant for the BBC program was then Grundy NewBrain. And get this: they owned the rights to this computer because it had started development in Sinclair Radionics, which the government acquired when it went Bankrupt. So in a way both Chris and Clive were competing about a project of their past! The NewBrain project however was so terribly behind schedule they decided to just give it to a private company.
-Paul Kriwazcek, which I quote here as the producer of the BBC program, is also an accomplished mesopotamia historian. I envy his flexibility.
-I could not find enough direct sources of the exact details of how the BBC project went to acorn instead of Clive so I interpolated and simplified for narrative purposes.
-Clive´s propensity for anger and throwing things around is surprisingly decently documented.
-A surprising amount of people think the ZX Spectrum was the computer created for the BBC contest, but all direct sources say the ZX 81. The Spectrum seems, at least in part, a reaction to losing the BBC contract. I did have to interpolate a bit for narrative purposes.
-I have a nagging suspicion that the “half bad” ram trick was used by more devices back then by other companies, but could not find a single other example that is not the Spectrum, so I included it in the narrative. This might only be a thing on earlier models.
-I feel I am unkind to Acorn and Chris Curry on this vidéo, but I want to focus on the story of Acorn on its own vidéo down the line. The legacy of Acorn is arguably much more impactful than Sinclair, given that they developed the ARM architecture (which used to stand for Acorn Risc Machine)
-The details of the Baron of the Beef incident are mixed within a ton of internet and tech history legends. I saw a lot of blogs and forums posts convinced the fight started much earlier, when Chris left Sinclair. Thankfully, on the commentary for Micro Men in the sources Chris confirms the split was initially amicable and the fight started over the return rates ad campaign. Chris sounds resentful of having punched Clive on it, and claims he is not a violent man. Clive probably was really good at pushing his buttons.
-There were a ton of Spectrum revisions, many of them with a much better keyboard.
It sounds good
Thank you, this was incredibly fascinating. I used a BBC Micro in school and played on the Spectrum as well as many other systems at the time. I hope you do many more of these interesting less well known computer company stories.
LOVE YOUR VIDS ALEX ❤️🙏👍
Edit: Well now I feel like a dumb dumb because I had not read to the end hahaha 😂
I understand that for the brevity of the video you had to cut LOTS OF THINGS, but I really would've loved seeing 5 seconds of "Acorn, which would later evolve in ARM. Yes, THAT ARM (screen full of GBA, DS, iPhone and pretty much every smartphone and gadget of today)
The impact of that BBC Micro contract is what allowed them to have the funds to develop the Acorn Archimedes which is basically the 1st ARM computer ever and the distant ancestor to basically a BAJILLION of chips today in our phones and stuff
Just talking about it, mind-blowing stuff honestly :'D
Though to be fair... and since you've introduced him already, there's a whole episode that could be done about Herman Hauser and ARM hehehe 😌
Bonus : you'd be able to link back to a ton of stuff you've already done :D
"micro men" done in your animated style...👍
Semi-custom chips like the ones Ferranti made are, to this day, quite popular for smaller production runs where producing a fully custom chip is not feasible and a microcontroller would be too slow. Ferranti called them ULAs but I assume they were similar to PLDs or CPLDs. Those are usually only programmable once. The modern equivalent with reprogrammable flash memory would be an FPGA. Both Intel and AMD have recently bought companies that make these things, namely Altera and Xilinx, respectively. Some of them are actually enormous, and you could program an entire CPU on one if you really wanted to.
14:15 Well, Spectrum really had 15 colors (7 with two levels of bright plus black) and flash mode
He's used to B/W Drawings, so cut him some slack. (:
How do you make history so interesting? Falcon Punch!
Yup the video you told that youll be not making. That much of low spec videos but this new video is lit
When did I ever say I would not make a video about Sinclair computers?
@@LowSpecGamer naa was talking about the video you told that because of games config being limited now youll not make the videos about running them on low end hardware
What isn't mentioned was the effort Sinclair had on the US computer industry with the release of timex versions of the zx81. As for a few months they became the best selling machines. While not long these sales began the price war of US machines scared of loss of market share. Many home computers were cancelled due to this war as could only be sold now below cost.
Would be great to hear abour the arm processor and the acorn archimedes.
I plan to get there. Every new subscription in UA-cam and Nebula gets me closer to having the resources to do it
Your explanation of the old British pound system actually made me say “what the hell”
I had a Timex Sinclair $100.00 Computer, remember it well. I also remember playing around with an Acorn Computer in a store once in Tulsa Oklahoma.
Very interesting story - hoping for a video on Amstrad next!
The Sinclair computers created & fuelled a thriving 3rd party peripheral industry, to enhance them. My ZX81 had a Memotech keyboard, Memotech RS232 serial port, Memotech parallel port & a 32K. RAM pack that I designed & built myself.
I've worked in companies where the EPROM programmer was a commercial peripheral attached to a ZX81 or Spectrum. I've seen a CNC milling machine run by a ZX81.
NASA has even took ZX81 & a stripped down Spectrum computers into space for science experiments, on the space shuttle.
Sinclair computers have had a greater legacy than the BBC Micro.
Lowspecgamer : post video
Me : press like button