Rick Dickinson, designer of the first three Sinclair computers, dies.
April 27, 2018 9:22 AM   Subscribe

Few machines have changed the world of computing as much as these. I am old enough to buy two of these three gems after they were released, after millions of square kilometers of mowed lawns and petamiles of cycling through the neighbourhood, delivering unwanted advertising materials. The BASIC used on these machines was so easy to use that even an untalented 13 year old could program away in a jiffy, and there were beautiful to boot. What a talent.
posted by fordiebianco (40 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Mashing a rubberized . key.
posted by Artw at 9:26 AM on April 27, 2018 [12 favorites]


You're not gonna get off that easily, fordiebianco. I humbly request more ye olde tyme Sinclair stories. HUMBLY. REQUEST.
posted by zerolives at 9:29 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


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posted by Cookiebastard at 9:45 AM on April 27, 2018


10 REM .
posted by ocschwar at 9:52 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


Hey Hey 16K
posted by ardgedee at 9:54 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


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(To be fair, he didn't design the entirety of the Sinclair computers, just the industrial design of their cases)
posted by acb at 9:56 AM on April 27, 2018


I have a ZX81 right here, in the box it was posted in from Sinclair. Can't find a display it'll work with, but it still makes the right kind of high-pitched sound when you plug it in, so I assume it works.
posted by pipeski at 10:09 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


10 print "."
20 goto 10
posted by octothorpe at 10:10 AM on April 27, 2018 [9 favorites]


END
posted by carter at 10:17 AM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]


Nostalgia trap. I had a ZX81 that I souped up somehow. I don't remember what I did, exactly, but it involved opening it up and mucking around inside. I got the how-to out of some early computer hobbyist magazine. When my Brooklyn apartment was robbed in the early 80's it was the most precious thing that was taken. Literally irreplaceable. I figured the thieves would have no idea how to use it. The tape storage was unreliable as hell.

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posted by mondo dentro at 10:24 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


My ZX-81 looked cool, (and OK it did change my life) but to be honest that machine's physical design was so dodgy. The bubble keyboard was horrible to use and if you ever jabbed it too hard as it sat on the table the RAM pack wobble would crash your game or wipe your BASIC program.

My ZX Spectrum though, that was a triumph from every angle. Iconic look, nice mashable rubber keys, perfect size to sit in my lap while I played, warm and cuddly like a cat.

Taken together those two computers pushed my whole life in a direction it would not have gone. I worked in other fields at first as a grown-up, but the affection for computers and programming they gave me was a seed that would not stop growing, and which blossomed when I eventually got hold of a Mac. Next thing you know I'm programming at Google before the IPO. Thanks Rick Dickinson! You paid for my house.
posted by w0mbat at 10:25 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Symbol shift + M
posted by popcassady at 10:26 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I bought the ZX80 kit. You got a bare PCB and a bunch of components. I had never soldered anything before. It didn't look pretty when I finished but to my astonishment it worked when I plugged it in. I used it for a few years before I upgraded to an 8k Commodore PET.
posted by night_train at 10:31 AM on April 27, 2018


I was actually one of the posh kids with a Commodore 64, but hey, at least it wasn't a Beeb. #80sHomeComputingClassWar
posted by Artw at 10:42 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


My dad bought us a speccy for my 5th birthday. Now I write software for fighting cancer and feel pretty good about the push that wee computer gave my life.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:11 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


My first computer was a ZX81 kit, and I really loved the wedge design - simple but very distinctive. Same with the Spectrum, which was tiny compared to most of its competition but still packed in some very pleasing geometries. Things started to get a bit daft with the machines from the Spectrum + onwards, with those silly keys (that cost more to make than just buying in Cherries) but Rick always had some really interesting prototypes for stuff that never happened floating around in his studio.

I knew him quite well for a while in the 80s and 90s, and stayed in contact. I last talked to him late last year (about the fonts used on the ZX80 case and keyboard, of all things) by email, but had no idea he was ill. He was an extraordinarily pleasant, good-humoured and dedicated man who loved his work and was very proud of it without being at all egotistical (if you know many designers, you'll know that's not a given).

I'm very upset he's gone. I was always of the opinion that given the right breaks, he had many more classic designs in him. A world-class talent.
posted by Devonian at 11:12 AM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]


I had the Americanized ZX81 - the Timex Sinclair 1000, followed by a Timex Sinclair 2068 which was an Americanized color Spectrum. (Different packaging but with a ROM swap it could supposedly run many Spectrum cartridges and tapes) I used the TS2068 (modded to use an external keyboard) until approximately 1994 for world processing and still have it to this day. It's strange to think of England being a player in the PC market. Sadly, I don't have an inspiring story to write about how the Sinclair/Spectrum derivatives sparked a career coding...but I did write a cool program to print banners with ASCII!
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 11:16 AM on April 27, 2018


That the tape deck cable didn't work with my ZX81 forced me to learn to programme, first by typing in from magazines ("like tumblr with an editor on pulped trees") then from memory then a career in nerdery.

I still have my ZX81 ringbound manual ("like a README file that doesn't need the supplier to continually pay for hosting of to keep it available") here. Explaining the computer parts, the "CPU is the dogsbody".

A little like the 2600, it seemed the CPU was involved in the video signal generation. A FAST mode command would shut the display off and allocate the cycles to the CPU, which never made any sense to me.

They used to do badass cover artwork in those days.
posted by davemee at 11:31 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


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Count me among the posters whose first home computer was a kit-built ZX81. Somewhere I've still got my Zilog Z80 assembly code reference book.

(The reason the "FAST" mode could make your program run quicker at the expense of turning off the display is that the CPU did all the video generation in software, and only ran your program during the vertical blank period. This is also why the display would go nuts when you loaded from or saved to tape.)
posted by sourcequench at 12:09 PM on April 27, 2018


A little like the 2600, it seemed the CPU was involved in the video signal generation.

Intimately involved; in SLOW mode the application only runs during the blank lines before/after the frame, and even then it's interrupted periodically so the CPU can generate the horizontal sync pulse.

Lots of detail here; I found I had to tell Firefox to use "Western" text encoding for the ASCII figures to show properly.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:18 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I started my career in Cambridge in 1979, and over the years knew lots of people at Acorn and Sinclair (not Rick though) and lots of other small computer companies. It was a wonderful time to watch an industry being born. Happy days.

And I think the Cambridge term was "dead flesh keyboards".
posted by epo at 12:39 PM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


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posted by Gelatin at 12:52 PM on April 27, 2018


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posted by Jade Dragon at 12:53 PM on April 27, 2018


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posted by Sphinx at 2:17 PM on April 27, 2018


(presses . key) (presses . key) (presses . key) (presses . key) (presses . key) (presses . key) (presses . key) (presses . key)

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I was a bit too late (and they were too expensive) to have cherished childhood memories from 8-bit micros, but recently watching vintage computing Youtube channels I've grown an appreciation for the challenges both from an engineering and design standpoint in that era, before standardization and with limited tech, rushing to the lowest price point possible.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


One of my favourite ZX81 things was typing in a listing from a magazine that consisted of a sequence of POKEs (the way you inputted machine code with those machines). It generated music, which was pretty impressive given that the ZX81 had no audio. It worked by somehow sending noisy crap to the TV. I wish I remember what the tune was - maybe something Christmassy?
posted by pipeski at 3:10 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I remember doing those same pokes. It was amazing that you could make noisy little squeals come from the TV. 1k people, 1k.
posted by misterpatrick at 3:24 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


There was that story Aphex Twin once won £50 when he was a 11 by writing a program that did that. Some time ago it was debunked (WayBack because blog is currently set to private). Googling around suggests "Organic Tunes" and "The Fantastic Music Machine" as early programs that manipulated frequencies on the CRT to produce sound.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:30 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think the ZX81 was the first computer I ever saw.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 3:42 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


I remember spending hours typing some stupid program into my Timex Sinclair only to have it crash right near the end for no discernible reason. This happened MULTIPLE times. I do not miss it.
posted by evilDoug at 4:30 PM on April 27, 2018


The thing was, computers were such a new thing that typing in a program multiple times and losing it to crashes was something people were willing to do. Waiting a month for the next issue to correct the typos in the original listing was par for the course.

I was 11 when I got my ZX81, and I remember a guy a friend of my parents knew came over to help us set it up on an old B&W TV my mum had won in a competition. Turns out he'd built his own Z80-based computer a while before, so he knew a bit about them. The first program we managed to run was a game where you were orbiting a black hole. It wasn't much of a game, really.

Later on, I had a Spectrum, and my main memory of that was taping down the fire button to make it easier to play a game called Arcadia. My friend and I could finish all 12 levels and loop back to Level 1. My maths teacher at the time was an informal hub for Spectrum game piracy - swapping tapes was a big deal at school - you could even copy a game by playing one tape loudly through the speaker while recording through the microphone of another. It even worked with the shitty tapes I could afford to buy from Woolworths.

Then I saved up for a Sinclair XL (which arrived after a massive manufacturing delay while they engineered away a 'dongle'). It used 'microdrive' cartridges which were basically little video tape loops used for storage - a bit like a mini 8-track. It was intended as a business machine, so there weren't many games. I wrote my first game for the XL, an adventure game with a few screens of graphics, similar but inferior to The Hobbit on the Spectrum. I sent it to a publisher, who wrote back after about a year to say that it was a bit boring. Fair enough... at least they sent the cartridge back. And now here I am, a middle-aged IT director who still gets excited about all this stuff.
posted by pipeski at 4:54 PM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


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posted by Smart Dalek at 5:06 PM on April 27, 2018


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posted by JoeXIII007 at 6:00 PM on April 27, 2018


Much love for the ZX81 here too. It was my first computer, the local Dixons or whatever were flogging off "cheap" some they'd found buried in the stockroom well into the mid-eighties.

Sorry to see the one of the guys responsible for that beautiful doorstop leave us.

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posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 7:04 PM on April 27, 2018


As a kid who grew up and will be buried with his Apple ][, learning later in life that there was a thing called the ZX Spectrum was like learning about an alternate universe where someone called Krasy Krasom did an entirely different Top 40 list.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:37 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Spectrum especially is stone cold classic of 80s UK design and sits alongside massive boomboxes, skinny fake leather ties, aviator sunglasses, red graph paper wallpaper and late night Channel 4 program title sequences.

*Pours out a can of Quatro*
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:54 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


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posted by filtergik at 4:18 AM on April 28, 2018


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I was just looking at 3D printing a case for a ZX Spectrum add-on and trying to match the curves on Rick's case design. They're simple, but not as simple as many add-on designers assumed.

Then there was the link to Rick's gallery, and mockups for QL wafer disks … oh my. Peak UK 1980s: so confident in intention, so far off in outcome.

As a kid who grew up and will be buried with his Apple ][, learning later in life that there was a thing called the ZX Spectrum

I'm (kind-of) the other way around. I recently picked up some Apple II things, and am amazed that such a lumpen thing could ever be popular. Trying to even find ads for Apple II kit in the UK from the time of the Spectrum release was tricky: Apple UK used dealers and seemed to discourage publishing prices. Taking £175 as 1 Spectrum, an estimate of Apple II pricing in the UK in 1982 would be roughly: Apple II: 5½ Spectums; Apple II monitor (green phosphor): 2 Spectrums; Apple disk drive: 2½ Spectrums. Apple II games were 3-5× the price of Spectrum games, too.
posted by scruss at 9:36 AM on April 28, 2018


RANDOMIZE USR Ø
We - me and my brother - learned to program on ZX Spectrum+, and it changed our lives forever.
posted by hat_eater at 2:00 PM on April 28, 2018


just another 40 something game develop who owes this man his career
posted by inpHilltr8r at 1:43 PM on May 5, 2018


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