And what the chip fabs could create. Seriously. The Konix Multisystem was way too ambitious and overhyped when making reliable 10+ MHz CPUs was a struggle. See that video with the video titled "Apple IIGX Megahertz Myth".
@@negirnothe problem was that EDA software was in its infancy and the likes of the 65816 was being designed by hand without aids. One of the things that Acorn did right with the ARM processor was to design and simulate it as much as possible on their existing systems before they sent the design off to the fab. It’s not that the fabs couldn’t produce chips of those speeds, it was a case that the designers couldn’t handle the complexity of designing for them. It’s no coincidence that the VHDL and Verilog hardware description languages came out in 1983 and 1984 respectively.
@@stevetodd7383 Acorn had access to Apollo workstations for silicon design, so the stories about it all being done on Beebs is not entirely truthful or accurate. And there were EDA solutions around for things like Ferranti's ULAs, even when the likes of Acorn and Sinclair pretended otherwise. That isn't to say that such solutions were great or that designers were wrong to use other approaches, however. ICL also wrote specialised tools for their gate array work that used their Distributed Array Processor technology. But as you note, the industry was clearly developing in this area at that time.
"Low Cost Colour Computer(Console)" These Spectrum game consoles being something that Sinclair was actually going to release going on to be something popular and widely available with several different versions in Russia is really interesting. Sinclair releasing a console so early that was cross compatible would have been a really interesting alternative history.
The way history worked out, with the BBC winning the schools contract, and the Speccy being the bedroom gamer/coder personal computer of choice and a dearth of titles worked out really well!
With Sinclair's philosophy guaranteeing they would become the working class computer, I suspect that had the schools situation been reversed, that the BBC would have just failed miserably. It was likely the school association that sold it to those that did own it, with it seeming to go to rich, education focused families.
@@arostwocents The BBC Micro certainly got a halo effect from education in terms of home sales, but it also sold into other markets like small business and industrial applications. Remember that Acorn started out doing rack-mounted systems, dipping their toes into the consumer market with the Atom. And the BBC Micro as we know it was a consequence of the BBC contract: without that, Acorn might have launched the Proton instead, probably as a more upmarket system where there were more lucrative opportunities to be had, particularly when the home market slowed down. That's where Sinclair wanted to go with the QL, but he never really got there. That really brings up the matter of Sinclair's attitude to the Computer Literacy Project. Having shifted many machines already, he presumably believed that he knew best, had set the de-facto standard, and wanted the BBC to acknowledge it. But it is clear that the BBC's ambitions were a lot greater than just exposing people to computers and the idea of having one at home: they clearly wanted people to explore the many applications of computers and wanted a versatile enough system to let them do so. The Spectrum did see some use in education, and it may even have had the DTI subsidies (alongside the older Z80-based RM models), but the ergonomics were not adequate enough for such environments, and Sinclair's penchant for offbeat technological choices just made its selection less and less likely. Overhauling it, ICL-style, might have pulled it back into consideration, but had it been shipped out to schools, I think it would have been a very short-lived fad, hastily reviewed and replaced within a few years. So, I don't think there was any chance of the schools situation being reversed. Had Acorn not accommodated the BBC's requirements, which Sinclair refused to do, the BBC might well have paused the whole thing until CP/M or DOS systems became cheaper.
@@arostwocents There were some industry BBC users. Some drafting houses used them to drive large plotters and the like. They could have just leaned into niche sectors.
@@rog2224torch computers ltd sold BBC micros with the z80 second processor and floppy drives for running acorns clone of cpm (called cp/n). A spectrum just couldn't have coped.
The red QL Plus mock up looks modern even by today's standards and would fit in today as some kind of low powered all in one PC. The only thing you can almost guarantee is though if Sinclair had produced it it would have the lowest quality parts and build quality to make it as affordable as possible as that was his business method of trying to get cheaper hardware that was technically better than the competition cutting as many corners a humanly possible to get there.
The red one? It's a sharp looking machine for sure. Wouldn't look out of place on a modern desk. I think Rick Dickinson was a fantastic designer, unfortunately hobbled by a mandate from Clive to get his designs as cheap as possible to manufacture.
I love that 'Which Micro?' is running a story about how to change software to run on your micro. I'd love to read that. As one of absolutely everyone who knew nothing about computers, id pick up the magazine and a tonne of c64 games to 'make run on my Spectrum' with the help of the article 😎
Thanks for another awesome video❤. The mighty Speccy was so iconic and despite having modest sound and color specs compared to other 8 bit machines of the time, some of the best game versions were released. I still remember Elite, Chase HQ, Cobra, and Barbarian among so many others.❤
It always seemed to me that Sinclair’s R&D department was too unfocused with too much going on at the one time rather than concentrating on a project that actually had a realistic chance of coming to the market.
To be honest that totally reads like Sir Richard Sinclair, he was a genius but a very unfocused genius, and a bit out of touch with reality (the C5...).
Often you don't know what problems you will hit until you actually do it. They got lucky finding nine tiles to do the software and ferranti to do the hardware design. Most of their stuff sucked. Commodore had a similar experience, the vic20 and c64 were great because they had half a dozen engineers that were amazing and then they left. They tried for years to make a color pet with those same engineers. Eventually they got lucky
If the Konix had come to the market at the right price and working as advertised, it would have cleaned up the market overnight and no doubt would have spawned variations to cater for more markets. The Murray Walker impression wasn't too bad either.
The konix was a disaster. They replaced the Loki's z80 with a slower 8088, then switched to an 8086. Later on they they did ship the chipset in fruit machines where now it had a 386. They didn't know what they were doing and didn't have the money to figure it out Flare were more successful after splitting up, the jaguar at least was released but it has a lot of technical issues.
The convertible console part ended up as a pc controller. Apparently it wasn't very good and sold poorly. The lightgun with force feedback was ahead of its time, im surprised it wasnt snapped up by another company. The moving chair would have been epic but wasn't really viable, it used cheap electric drill motors rather than hydraulics and broke frequently.
Kind of, the Alf was just a Spectrum console, the LC3 was a new lost cost design that was somewhat similar to the Spectrum, it wasn't an actual Spectrum and wasn't compatible with it. I have covered the Alf, and the similar Hobbit, on the channel a few times: ua-cam.com/video/SxLsjFFsvxY/v-deo.html
The Sinclair QL is in my opinion a very advanced 8-bit computer. Even if the 68008 CPU can process 32 bits internally it still has to get them out of the door to do anything. And that door is the 8 bit wide system bus. The Z80 is an 8 bit CPU even if it can process 16 bits internally. Therefore the QL should also fall into that 8 bit category. The 68008 is "just" more powerful than a typical 8 bit CPU like the Z80.
I guess, an improved Spectrum shouldn't have been so hard to develop. The 128k was already a good step. A faster Z80 CPU with optional double clock speed (Turbo Button) would have been the Turbo Spectrum. And a new ULA and Rom could have eliminated Colour Clash and enabled more Colours on Screen. I guess, there was too much focus on the next revolution instead of cheap, manageable evolutionary steps. I would have liked to see a Spectrum Micro Drive Laptop, even with a monochrome LCD.
A Sinclair version of the Amstrad, at the right time, would have been the step needed to keep the company going as games using the full Amstrad power are convincingly next gen to Speccy. It's such a shame, but encapsulates Sinclair perfectly that Clive was looking for revolution rather than evolution. The attitude that birthed the C5.
A 2x turbo spectrum 128 with hardware sprites and scrolling, released at the right time (1987-1988) would have destroyed commodore and made a significant dent in the console market. It still would have EOLed in 1992 but that would be four solid years of big sales before it.
It's both amusing and confusing to read the popular computer mags of the time. What was reported as being in development at such-and-such a company often bore little resemblance to anything that was actually released.
Is it me or does the Loki sound rather like a later generation MSX? I wonder if it was actually supposed to be based on that chipset. Imagine if Amstrad had actually kept hold of just that one, and developed it instead of the gx4000. Surely even they couldn't have messed up making an MSX clone, but if they made it cheaply and got it on the UK market history may have been a lot different.
In the end it's usually better for the consumer when only two or three systems have the lion's share of the market. Otherwise, development is spread too thin and games might suffer.
YES! Somebody finally noticed the Sony like stylings. I might go into this in another video actually because it's fascinated me so much. The Janus design seems to have been adapted by Atari to create the Falcon Microbox and then that design was actually purchased by Sony for use on the PS2. The common denominator in all this? Flare Technology! The Flare guys started at Sinclair, then formed their own company and then joined up with Atari. At this point Flare's Richard Miller actually left Flare to become president at Atari and then moved onto Sony where he took up a similar role. So I am guessing he took that design with him from Sinclair to Atari and then onto Sony!
@@TheLairdsLair Trying again here as there was no reaction to the initial comment... It was interesting to see a couple of pictures from my retro museum collection used in this video. If you would like to shout out my RetroComputerMuseum-site that would be great! ❤
Never saw a previous comment, did it have a link? Perhaps it got blocked by UA-cam, happy to shout you out, although I actually found those images on different website. I'll add a pinned comment.
it seemed like back then the tech industry was really brutal companies could get huge and go bankrupt in a really shirt time if they made just one mistake it was the same in the 90s and 2000s but it seems like these days it happens less and companies can recover from big mistakes. but in the 80s all these systems were very interesting compared to later on when things got more standardised but it may have been annoying at the time if you bought something like the ql and it didn't get enough 3rd party support .Amstrad was playing it safe and slowly moved to making dos pc's. while dos pc's were not great compared to the cpc it was way too hard to make a successor to the cpc or spectrum. since the amiga and st were not doing well despite them being way better than the pc and mac. so in that period it seemed like there was not a big demand for cheap computers with good graphics and it was all about the office market in the mid 90s more people wanted that because of the internet making it so computers are more useful to people that aren't gamers or businessmen .but at that point the pc had fixed most of its issues but eventually Amstrad failed anyway because they couldn't keep up in the 2000s .
I vividly remember the konix and the hype around it. Typical British journo horse shit. I do remember thinking at the time, how on Earth is this joystick company gonna compete with sega and commodore and atari?! But i guess hyoe sild magazines. And that ad is hilarious to my 2020's eyes. The clearly digital inputs being applied to the car, bike and plane, despite the claims of ad guy talking stuff he knew nothing about, and the God awful sensation of 'speed' on those crappy graphics. C64 space harrier looked better. Excellent upload though mate, really good. Gonna check the commodore one next...
Shout out to the Retro Computer Museum in Sweden - a great resource!
www.retrocomputermuseum.net/
Many computer companies in the 80s had more ambition than time or money.
And what the chip fabs could create. Seriously. The Konix Multisystem was way too ambitious and overhyped when making reliable 10+ MHz CPUs was a struggle. See that video with the video titled "Apple IIGX Megahertz Myth".
@@negirnothe problem was that EDA software was in its infancy and the likes of the 65816 was being designed by hand without aids. One of the things that Acorn did right with the ARM processor was to design and simulate it as much as possible on their existing systems before they sent the design off to the fab. It’s not that the fabs couldn’t produce chips of those speeds, it was a case that the designers couldn’t handle the complexity of designing for them. It’s no coincidence that the VHDL and Verilog hardware description languages came out in 1983 and 1984 respectively.
So, what exactly has changed? Seen the Galaxy Fold/Flip fuckups?
yea they often went bankrupt super quickly after making one bad product
@@stevetodd7383 Acorn had access to Apollo workstations for silicon design, so the stories about it all being done on Beebs is not entirely truthful or accurate. And there were EDA solutions around for things like Ferranti's ULAs, even when the likes of Acorn and Sinclair pretended otherwise.
That isn't to say that such solutions were great or that designers were wrong to use other approaches, however. ICL also wrote specialised tools for their gate array work that used their Distributed Array Processor technology. But as you note, the industry was clearly developing in this area at that time.
To paraphrase a favorite saying of his, no man's reach ever exceeded his grasp more than Sir Clive's. The world needs more like him.
We have still some madmen like Clive, some of them even have achieved Clive's dreams, like Elon Musk or Michael Dell.
I love the Sinclair design language. It’s bold and edgy with a distinct sense of 80s futurism. Super sexy tech.
"Low Cost Colour Computer(Console)"
These Spectrum game consoles being something that Sinclair was actually going to release going on to be something popular and widely available with several different versions in Russia is really interesting.
Sinclair releasing a console so early that was cross compatible would have been a really interesting alternative history.
The way history worked out, with the BBC winning the schools contract, and the Speccy being the bedroom gamer/coder personal computer of choice and a dearth of titles worked out really well!
With Sinclair's philosophy guaranteeing they would become the working class computer, I suspect that had the schools situation been reversed, that the BBC would have just failed miserably. It was likely the school association that sold it to those that did own it, with it seeming to go to rich, education focused families.
@@arostwocents The BBC Micro certainly got a halo effect from education in terms of home sales, but it also sold into other markets like small business and industrial applications. Remember that Acorn started out doing rack-mounted systems, dipping their toes into the consumer market with the Atom.
And the BBC Micro as we know it was a consequence of the BBC contract: without that, Acorn might have launched the Proton instead, probably as a more upmarket system where there were more lucrative opportunities to be had, particularly when the home market slowed down. That's where Sinclair wanted to go with the QL, but he never really got there.
That really brings up the matter of Sinclair's attitude to the Computer Literacy Project. Having shifted many machines already, he presumably believed that he knew best, had set the de-facto standard, and wanted the BBC to acknowledge it. But it is clear that the BBC's ambitions were a lot greater than just exposing people to computers and the idea of having one at home: they clearly wanted people to explore the many applications of computers and wanted a versatile enough system to let them do so.
The Spectrum did see some use in education, and it may even have had the DTI subsidies (alongside the older Z80-based RM models), but the ergonomics were not adequate enough for such environments, and Sinclair's penchant for offbeat technological choices just made its selection less and less likely. Overhauling it, ICL-style, might have pulled it back into consideration, but had it been shipped out to schools, I think it would have been a very short-lived fad, hastily reviewed and replaced within a few years.
So, I don't think there was any chance of the schools situation being reversed. Had Acorn not accommodated the BBC's requirements, which Sinclair refused to do, the BBC might well have paused the whole thing until CP/M or DOS systems became cheaper.
@@arostwocents There were some industry BBC users. Some drafting houses used them to drive large plotters and the like. They could have just leaned into niche sectors.
@@rog2224torch computers ltd sold BBC micros with the z80 second processor and floppy drives for running acorns clone of cpm (called cp/n). A spectrum just couldn't have coped.
Here in The Netherlands we had Philips P2000 (with micro cassette), pretty cool stuff for a 12 year old 😅
The red QL Plus mock up looks modern even by today's standards and would fit in today as some kind of low powered all in one PC. The only thing you can almost guarantee is though if Sinclair had produced it it would have the lowest quality parts and build quality to make it as affordable as possible as that was his business method of trying to get cheaper hardware that was technically better than the competition cutting as many corners a humanly possible to get there.
14:18 - "Approaching Enemy Base" at the top of the photo of Sinclair and Sugar is pretty apt.
Beat me to it. That was an excellent accidental reference.
The QL+ looks fantastic. A piece of art. Stunning. ❤
I really want some keychains of them for my keys and collectables shelves ❤
The red one? It's a sharp looking machine for sure. Wouldn't look out of place on a modern desk. I think Rick Dickinson was a fantastic designer, unfortunately hobbled by a mandate from Clive to get his designs as cheap as possible to manufacture.
The QL easily looks like something we'd see in the 2000s were CAD was used to design devices 😳
I love that 'Which Micro?' is running a story about how to change software to run on your micro. I'd love to read that. As one of absolutely everyone who knew nothing about computers, id pick up the magazine and a tonne of c64 games to 'make run on my Spectrum' with the help of the article 😎
It would be about BASIC porting, I'm sure.
Even if the Konix Multi-system had been released, no-one could have afforded it.
Very ambitious project.
Thanks for another awesome video❤. The mighty Speccy was so iconic and despite having modest sound and color specs compared to other 8 bit machines of the time, some of the best game versions were released. I still remember Elite, Chase HQ, Cobra, and Barbarian among so many others.❤
Another absolutely horrific between entries sound though 😂
I prefer the word authentic!
It always seemed to me that Sinclair’s R&D department was too unfocused with too much going on at the one time rather than concentrating on a project that actually had a realistic chance of coming to the market.
To be honest that totally reads like Sir Richard Sinclair, he was a genius but a very unfocused genius, and a bit out of touch with reality (the C5...).
Richard?
Often you don't know what problems you will hit until you actually do it. They got lucky finding nine tiles to do the software and ferranti to do the hardware design. Most of their stuff sucked. Commodore had a similar experience, the vic20 and c64 were great because they had half a dozen engineers that were amazing and then they left. They tried for years to make a color pet with those same engineers. Eventually they got lucky
Konix didn't even know what they had. That commercial says it's 32 bit... and then 16. Oops.
Well, as a technological ancestor to the Atari Jaguar, the bit counting antics should not be entirely surprising.
Love your uploads my friend
If the Konix had come to the market at the right price and working as advertised, it would have cleaned up the market overnight and no doubt would have spawned variations to cater for more markets. The Murray Walker impression wasn't too bad either.
The konix was a disaster. They replaced the Loki's z80 with a slower 8088, then switched to an 8086. Later on they they did ship the chipset in fruit machines where now it had a 386. They didn't know what they were doing and didn't have the money to figure it out
Flare were more successful after splitting up, the jaguar at least was released but it has a lot of technical issues.
The convertible console part ended up as a pc controller. Apparently it wasn't very good and sold poorly. The lightgun with force feedback was ahead of its time, im surprised it wasnt snapped up by another company. The moving chair would have been epic but wasn't really viable, it used cheap electric drill motors rather than hydraulics and broke frequently.
At least you showed the omni as close as you can get to the Loki :) And probably beyond Sinclair back in the day as colour lcds were not around yet :)
Sugar is the kiss of death for so many things.
something resembling the LC3 was later released in USSR under the name "Alf"/"Elf"
Kind of, the Alf was just a Spectrum console, the LC3 was a new lost cost design that was somewhat similar to the Spectrum, it wasn't an actual Spectrum and wasn't compatible with it.
I have covered the Alf, and the similar Hobbit, on the channel a few times: ua-cam.com/video/SxLsjFFsvxY/v-deo.html
On the QL advert, is sounds like they had Michael Bryant for the VO.
The Sinclair QL is in my opinion a very advanced 8-bit computer.
Even if the 68008 CPU can process 32 bits internally it still has to get them out of the door to do anything.
And that door is the 8 bit wide system bus.
The Z80 is an 8 bit CPU even if it can process 16 bits internally.
Therefore the QL should also fall into that 8 bit category. The 68008 is "just" more powerful than a typical 8 bit CPU like the Z80.
I guess, an improved Spectrum shouldn't have been so hard to develop. The 128k was already a good step. A faster Z80 CPU with optional double clock speed (Turbo Button) would have been the Turbo Spectrum. And a new ULA and Rom could have eliminated Colour Clash and enabled more Colours on Screen. I guess, there was too much focus on the next revolution instead of cheap, manageable evolutionary steps. I would have liked to see a Spectrum Micro Drive Laptop, even with a monochrome LCD.
A Sinclair version of the Amstrad, at the right time, would have been the step needed to keep the company going as games using the full Amstrad power are convincingly next gen to Speccy. It's such a shame, but encapsulates Sinclair perfectly that Clive was looking for revolution rather than evolution. The attitude that birthed the C5.
A 2x turbo spectrum 128 with hardware sprites and scrolling, released at the right time (1987-1988) would have destroyed commodore and made a significant dent in the console market. It still would have EOLed in 1992 but that would be four solid years of big sales before it.
It's both amusing and confusing to read the popular computer mags of the time. What was reported as being in development at such-and-such a company often bore little resemblance to anything that was actually released.
Is the footage while youre talking about the QL of QL games? I thought it was exactly the same as the Spectrum graphics wise. Wow.
Yes, actual QL Games.
Honestly that red sinclair looked really cool. It would be neat to see a modern system take design cues from it. Jesus loves you!
What if the Sinclair QL used Sinclair's cartridge format instead? Loading an office programme from a small cartridge sounds quite pleasant to me.
Is it me or does the Loki sound rather like a later generation MSX? I wonder if it was actually supposed to be based on that chipset. Imagine if Amstrad had actually kept hold of just that one, and developed it instead of the gx4000. Surely even they couldn't have messed up making an MSX clone, but if they made it cheaply and got it on the UK market history may have been a lot different.
In the end it's usually better for the consumer when only two or three systems have the lion's share of the market. Otherwise, development is spread too thin and games might suffer.
Did you miss the wafer scale integration storage and latter wafer scale ai ?
How is that QL Wafer/Plus/Janus mock up at 06:04 not the PS5 in the 80’s!
YES! Somebody finally noticed the Sony like stylings. I might go into this in another video actually because it's fascinated me so much. The Janus design seems to have been adapted by Atari to create the Falcon Microbox and then that design was actually purchased by Sony for use on the PS2. The common denominator in all this? Flare Technology!
The Flare guys started at Sinclair, then formed their own company and then joined up with Atari. At this point Flare's Richard Miller actually left Flare to become president at Atari and then moved onto Sony where he took up a similar role. So I am guessing he took that design with him from Sinclair to Atari and then onto Sony!
@@TheLairdsLair Trying again here as there was no reaction to the initial comment... It was interesting to see a couple of pictures from my retro museum collection used in this video. If you would like to shout out my RetroComputerMuseum-site that would be great! ❤
Never saw a previous comment, did it have a link? Perhaps it got blocked by UA-cam, happy to shout you out, although I actually found those images on different website. I'll add a pinned comment.
it seemed like back then the tech industry was really brutal companies could get huge and go bankrupt in a really shirt time if they made just one mistake it was the same in the 90s and 2000s but it seems like these days it happens less and companies can recover from big mistakes. but in the 80s all these systems were very interesting compared to later on when things got more standardised but it may have been annoying at the time if you bought something like the ql and it didn't get enough 3rd party support .Amstrad was playing it safe and slowly moved to making dos pc's. while dos pc's were not great compared to the cpc it was way too hard to make a successor to the cpc or spectrum. since the amiga and st were not doing well despite them being way better than the pc and mac. so in that period it seemed like there was not a big demand for cheap computers with good graphics and it was all about the office market in the mid 90s more people wanted that because of the internet making it so computers are more useful to people that aren't gamers or businessmen .but at that point the pc had fixed most of its issues but eventually Amstrad failed anyway because they couldn't keep up in the 2000s .
2:02 - Sinclair QL Plus
6:21 - Sinclair QL Plus (again)
Bugger, that's a mistake, the second one is supposed to be the Sinclair Enigma.
@@TheLairdsLairwhat is that ?
Finally! I'm first.
Great, while I have your attention, can anyone tell me what the opening tune is from and what the words are?
Ta.!
"Welcome STUN Runner!"
Taken from the Atari Lynx port of the famous 1989 Atari Games arcade game.
@@TheLairdsLairTHANK YOU! 🙏
@@TheLairdsLair i always thought it was "welcome dumb runner" lol
😂😂😂😂😂
Nes came out in 1984. Lc3 wasnt many years before
The zx 64 was the best
I vividly remember the konix and the hype around it. Typical British journo horse shit. I do remember thinking at the time, how on Earth is this joystick company gonna compete with sega and commodore and atari?! But i guess hyoe sild magazines. And that ad is hilarious to my 2020's eyes. The clearly digital inputs being applied to the car, bike and plane, despite the claims of ad guy talking stuff he knew nothing about, and the God awful sensation of 'speed' on those crappy graphics. C64 space harrier looked better. Excellent upload though mate, really good. Gonna check the commodore one next...