Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  And then, on 18 March, a group of Argentine scrap-metal dealers landed on the island of South Georgia.

  30

  Tomorrow’s World

  Do you actually need a computer? Is the computer a panacea, a plaything, a workhorse, a job destroyer, a profit maker, a job creator, or the overblown puff of a marketing manager’s imagination?

  Guardian, 10 September 1981

  The image of four-year-olds keying in to computers for fun might seem to bear out George Orwell’s wildest nightmares, but it is beginning to happen all over Britain.

  The Times, 29 November 1982

  In the spring of 1982, a slight, red-bearded man, his eyes gleaming with a salesman’s fervour, unveiled a little black box that, for millions of children, contained a world of almost unfathomable possibility. Designed in Cambridge, built in Dundee, Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum seemed a genuinely British success story. No home computer had ever made such a popular impact. ‘Up and running in minutes, hours and hours of fun, invaluable in the years ahead,’ promised the adverts – and thousands of people believed them.

  Within just a year of its launch, the Spectrum had become a fixture of thousands of youngsters’ bedrooms. By the end of the 1980s it had become easily the bestselling British computer in history, shifting an estimated 2½ million units in the United Kingdom, as well as a similar number abroad. At just £175 for the 48K version, it was astonishingly cheap: on the high street you might pay £250 for a hi-fi system, £350 for a large colour television or £500 for a video recorder. There was more to its appeal, though, than the price. Cheap computers were ten-a-penny in the 1980s. Yet the Spectrum stood out: a minimalist vision in sleek black plastic, the only flash of colour a neat rainbow stripe. Even the unconventional rubber keyboard suggested a thrilling space-age future, at least until you tried to use it. Other computers were more serious. But the Spectrum had been built to entertain. ‘When you took the Spectrum out of the packaging,’ remarks the writer Francis Spufford, ‘you knew it was supposed to be fun, not good for you.’1

  For anybody who grew up in the early 1980s, few products more immediately recall the spirit of the age than the Spectrum. Yet as children of the decade will know, it was not without its problems. The introduction to Dan Whitehead’s book Speccy Nation, billed as a ‘tribute’ to a machine that ‘changed the world’, begins with a single word: ‘Crap.’ For the Spectrum owner, writes Whitehead, the gulf between promise and performance was cruelly wide. In theory the Spectrum could produce six colours, but on screen they would ‘clash and flicker and generally fall to pieces’. It could make music, but ‘in a squeaking squawking cacophony that only the truly besotted could appreciate’. Perhaps above all, the rubber keyboard, with its ‘baffling surplus of specialist shift keys’, might have been designed to drive owners into paroxysms of fury. Bewilderingly, each key had five functions: the letter K, for example, also denoted a ‘plus sign, a “list” command, something called “screen” and LEN, whoever he was’.

  Sinclair’s machine never came close to matching the reliability of its chief British rival, Acorn’s BBC Micro. Return rates often reached 30 per cent, and rumour had it that when people sent their Spectrums back, staff at the Dundee factory simply posted them straight out to other customers. Yet the fact that the Spectrum was plagued with problems only made its sales all the more impressive. In marketing terms, it was one of the great successes of the age.fn1 By the summer of 1983, two out of every three computers bought in Britain carried the 43-year-old Sinclair’s name.2

  On the face of it, Sinclair made a very unlikely national hero. ‘With his gentle, sometimes hesitant voice, tiny spectacles, narrow frame and disappearing ginger hair,’ said one profile, ‘he looks more backroom than boardroom.’ His upbringing had been impeccably middle-class, and young Clive had been educated privately in the Home Counties. After leaving school, he became a technical journalist before setting up a small business, Sinclair Radionics, selling mail-order radio kits. In 1972, having moved into a converted flour mill in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, he had a huge popular hit with an £80 pocket calculator. Four years later, however, he launched a £25 digital watch, which proved such a disaster that he was forced to accept a £650,000 bailout from the National Enterprise Board.

  This he sank into a new venture, a £100 pocket television, which was another catastrophe. By 1978 Sinclair Radionics was losing almost £2 million a year. Chafing under the supervision of the National Enterprise Board, Sinclair sold his house and his Rolls-Royce and walked away to focus on another of his little companies, Science of Cambridge, which he renamed Sinclair Research. This time he planned to make cheap home computers, beginning with a machine called the ZX80. A year later came the ZX81, then the Spectrum. By then, Sinclair was one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs in Britain.3

  As Spectrum waiting lists lengthened, it seemed Clive Sinclair could do no wrong. Other well-known businessmen saw him as a role model. Sinclair was ‘brilliant and daring’ and ‘somebody I admire enormously’, wrote the founder of the Next clothing chain, George Davies, who thought he embodied the ‘new spirit of entrepreneurialism in this country’. Yet in many respects Sinclair was far from being the ideal Thatcherite entrepreneur. His record, remarked the Observer, was ‘littered with a multitude of close shaves, and several outright disasters’, while many of his products had a reputation for cheapness, unreliability and downright shoddiness.

  In the popular imagination, entrepreneurs were supposed to be outgoing, charming people, yet Sinclair cut a diffident figure, the stereotypical balding boffin. Employees testified that behind the mild-mannered image he could be an impatient and domineering boss. And far from incarnating the dignity of work, Sinclair boasted of being ‘rather lazy’. Interviewed by Practical Computing in 1982, he said he was looking forward to the bank holiday weekend: ‘Any excuse not to work!’ To the Guardian, he confided that he himself did not use a calculator, let alone a computer. ‘Sinclair refuses’, the paper said admiringly, ‘to fit the standard category of 1980s technocrat in any shape or form.’4

  Yet, in the public imagination, Sinclair had revived a national tradition of scientific innovation. To the press, he was the embodiment of forward-thinking ambition, a one-man guide to Britain’s technological future. In the broadsheets, interviewers lapped up Sinclair’s presidency of Mensa, his love of Porsches, his decision to enrol as a mature economics student at Cambridge, even his then very unusual habit of rising early every morning to run seven miles before breakfast. In the tabloids, reporters solemnly echoed his predictions that soon ‘computer doctors’ would diagnose you in your own home, and that people would soon carry ‘pocket telephones with unlimited range’.

  Indeed, by the middle of 1983 Sinclair’s pronouncements had become grander than ever. The next fifteen years, he said, would be ‘among the most momentous in our economic history – a major turning point’. Soon the trade unions would wither away, manufacturing would virtually disappear and Britain would have to devote itself to the ‘products of the mind’. Most economists refused to understand this, he said dismissively, ‘because they expect the future to be like the past’. But he knew better. That he, Clive Sinclair, would play a major part in that future was beyond any possible doubt.5

  The computer age had been a long time coming. As far back as 1955, the Daily Mirror had run a front-page series under the banner headline ‘The Robot Revolution’, announcing that ‘another industrial revolution’ was at hand, spearheaded by ‘machines that can almost think’. Yet for the next twenty years most people never knowingly laid eyes on a computer. It was not until the development of the microprocessor – a computer ‘brain’ packed into a tiny integrated circuit – that people began to take seriously the prospect of computers in homes, shops and offices. ‘The day is rapidly approaching’, the Observer declared in 1978, ‘when everyone can have their own household computer.’ Indeed, the paper’s science correspondent Nigel Hawkes had already caught a glimpse of the future. In
California, he reported, there was now a craze for pre-assembled ‘home computers’, which could ‘fit into the boot of an average car’. Interestingly, he was most impressed by a ‘very attractive little computer’ made by a firm called Apple, ‘started by two young Californians, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in a garage’.

  There was, however, an obvious caveat: ‘What can home computers do?’ Most American owners were hobbyists who used them ‘to play sophisticated versions of the electronic TV games’. There was talk of education, household banking, diaries and address books; but people could do all that already ‘without the help of computers’. As salesmen privately conceded, ‘the home computer is a tool looking for something to do’. Even so, Hawkes thought it possible that one day, perhaps very soon, ‘we will all want to rush out and buy our own computer. It sounds unlikely, but so did the horseless carriage.’6

  For many observers at the end of the 1970s, however, computers seemed less like an intriguing distraction and more like a threat to people’s livelihoods. On 31 March 1978 the BBC science series Horizon screened a documentary entitled ‘Now the Chips Are Down’, presenting an outstandingly bleak picture of a world transformed by computers. For too long, said the narrator, Britain had been blind to the advance of technology, its politicians deluding themselves about the terrifying implications for millions of jobs. There would, of course, be upsides: home banking, fancy watches, driverless tractors, robot-run factories. But what would happen to the ‘men in today’s jobs’? What would become of generations of schoolchildren, cast on to the scrapheap as the computers moved in? ‘Could this technology’, asked the narrator, ‘be the end of an age, the end of a line of evolution, and not a beginning?’7

  A year later, in his ITV series The Mighty Micro, the psychologist Christopher Evans tried to present a more optimistic picture. Yet amid the robot doctors, computerized fridges and computer-controlled nuclear plants, there was still more than a hint of dystopia. The dashing Evans, who died of cancer just before the series went out, was a striking character in his own right. A close friend of J. G. Ballard, he had been the adviser to the tremendous children’s science-fiction series The Tomorrow People (1973–9) and reportedly wore an Iron Cross under his open-necked shirt, which he was told to remove during filming.fn2 Some of his predictions, like e-readers, tablets and word processors, were remarkably accurate. But what really struck him, in good Ballardian style, was the new technology’s hypnotic power over the human mind:

  The one note of warning is sounded by the compelling nature of the computer itself. Increasingly, it will draw you into an obsessive embrace, where the world comes to you in your home. The current limitless fascination with microprocessor-based toys is but a tiny indicator of the trend towards an introverted society.

  With the computer as an increasingly interesting and useful companion, could the factories and office blocks empty, commuter lines fall silent, as we retreat into our own private universe?

  People could not say they had not been warned.8

  Although many viewers probably thought this was the stuff of science fiction, the microchip revolution was already gathering recruits. Britain’s first amateur computer club was founded as far back as 1972, while the magazine Personal Computer World had made its corner-shop debut in 1978. For the computer historian Tom Lean, magazines like these were crucially important in building a network of hobbyists, many of whom went on to become developers themselves. There were even several hundred dedicated computer shops. The first, according to the Observer, was the Byte Shop in Ilford. Barely three months after opening in the summer of 1978, it had sold hundreds of computers costing up to ‘several thousand pounds’. The most popular was the Commodore PET, which cost a whopping £695, the equivalent of at least £5,000 today. The manager, who claimed to sell about ten a week, reported that the buyers included ‘labourers, business people, a doctor, a dentist, an accountant and a couple of housewives’.

  By common consent, though, computer enthusiasts were very particular kinds of people. As the Guardian remarked a year later, customers might range ‘from the schoolboy, through the student and the businessman, to the retired engineer’, but this was still a ‘mainly male and young world’. Yet by the end of 1979 almost everybody agreed that home computers were poised to become very big indeed. Already there were an estimated 40,000 pre-assembled computers nationwide. Most were American, though a Japanese invasion was expected shortly. There were no significant British options, or at least none costing less than £10,000. Disturbingly, however, there were rumours that the French were building microcomputers of their own, backed by generous government funding. Unless the nation’s computer lovers came up with something special, warned the Guardian, a generation of British children might be condemned to life with a Gallic keyboard.9

  But a national saviour was at hand. Clive Sinclair had been thinking about a home computer since his days at Sinclair Radionics, but the real spur was an article he read in the Financial Times in May 1979, predicting that within the next five years somebody would make a user-friendly computer for less than £100, with a traditional keyboard and full-screen display. Sinclair saw that as a challenge. If the Financial Times thought it would take five years, he could do it in six months. He was right. Built by his chief engineer, Jim Westwood, the ZX80 was a slim white box which used a cassette recorder to load software and sent the picture to a television screen. The ‘Britishness’ of the machine, though, was a little ambiguous. Not only was the processor Japanese, but most of the memory chips had been imported from Texas Instruments. There was no sound, no colour and very little memory. On the other hand, it cost just £99.95 by mail order, a quarter of the cost of its nearest rival.

  Even in January 1980, many critics had their doubts about Sinclair’s cost-cutting compromises, from the ZX80’s cheap membrane keyboard to its disturbing tendency to overheat. Sinclair told the press that it would probably be used for ‘teaching children about computers’. But some observers doubted it would ever find a market. The economics commentator Hamish McRae, for example, was unconvinced that there were enough ‘laymen who want to be embroiled in the intricacies of BASIC, the unbelievably complicated language that these things speak’. The ZX80 could only succeed, he thought, as a ‘sort of up-market executive toy’.10

  In reality, the ZX80 succeeded beyond Sinclair’s wildest dreams. In a sign of things to come, the key thing was not so much the machine as the marketing campaign. Instead of being aimed at enthusiasts, it was targeted at people who knew nothing about computers. As the advertisements put it, ‘the ZX80 cuts away computer jargon and mystique … and the grounding it gives your children will equip them for the rest of their lives’. This last point was crucial. The ZX80, Sinclair told the Cambridge Evening News, was the world’s first ‘computer for all the family’, so simple ‘any child of 10 with normal arithmetical ability could use it’. His own children, he said proudly, had helped him to test it. In this context, the fact that you had to connect it to a cassette recorder and a television was a real asset: as Tom Lean remarks, these were ordinary ‘household items’, and the effect was to turn the ZX80 into part of the living-room furniture. ‘Inside a day’, the adverts claimed, ‘you’ll be talking to it like an old friend.’

  This was very dubious, of course; but as a sales pitch it was perfectly calibrated. With the expensive American imports aimed squarely at hobbyists, the ZX80 was the first affordable computer for the family market. Demand was unprecedented; even a year later, Sinclair was still producing machines at a rate of 10,000 a month, and by mid-1983 he had sold an estimated 100,000. Tellingly, more than half of them were for export. For the first time, a British computer manufacturer had not just broken into the domestic mass market, he was carrying the fight on to foreign soil – and winning.11

  Even as Sinclair contemplated new conquests, Britain’s politicians were adjusting to the new world. By the spring of 1978, Jim Callaghan had asked three government working parties to report on the ‘social
and economic upheaval that the microcomputer revolution is bringing’. Many experts believed Britain had been criminally negligent for at least a decade, and the director of the National Computing Centre warned a parliamentary committee that the nation was far behind its major rivals. Although the 66-year-old Callaghan was hardly an obvious convert to the creed of computing, he arranged a screening of ‘Now the Chips Are Down’ for his ministers, and launched a £55 million drive to inform businesses about computers’ potential. In his final election press conference a year later, Callaghan even tried to present himself as the candidate for the computer age, talking earnestly about ‘this trendy term we now have, the microprocessor revolution, and the silicon chip, which everybody talks about and hardly anybody has ever seen’. Yet still Britain seemed to be lagging behind. ‘The UK is not in command of the situation,’ warned the chief scientist at the Department of Industry, ‘and those who lead the technology – the US and Japan – will use the processes of the free market to the full.’12

  Given Mrs Thatcher’s antipathy to state subsidies, she might have been tempted to let Britain’s own free market do all the lifting. Yet right from the start, some of her ministers badgered her about the importance of embracing the new technology. A month after she had moved into Number 10, Sir Keith Joseph sent her a memo entitled ‘Micro-Electronics’. There was, he wrote:

  almost universal acceptance that micro-electronics technology is of crucial importance to our future industrial and economic performance and our competitive position in world markets. In its way it is likely to be of the same sort of importance as was the steam engine with the difference that (a) it will be even more pervasive and (b) we are not in the forefront of its development. Because we are not in the lead, like Avis we have to try harder.fn3