Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In one area, though, Acorn could congratulate themselves on an unqualified success. In schools, the government’s computer drive had prospered beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. By the autumn of 1982, almost all of Britain’s 5,000 secondary schools had at least one computer, and now the scheme was extended to the nation’s 26,000 primary schools, with the Department of Industry again paying half of the cost. As before, schools were limited to British-made machines: the BBC Micro and the upgraded RM 480Z, with Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum later added to the list. For about three out of four schools, the obvious choice was the BBC Micro, not least because of the association with the Computer Literacy Project. ‘For most of a generation of children,’ writes Tom Lean, ‘the BBC was effectively the school computer.’ The typical school had nine computers to be shared between hundreds of pupils, with many machines spending their days ‘trundling between classrooms on trolleys’ while crowds of children gathered for a demonstration. Yet this was better than nothing. No other country in Europe came close to matching Britain’s investment in school computers.27

  Even at this point, many observers were struck by the new machines’ potential. In Cleveland, one primary school teacher used the Prestel online service to fix her pupils up with electronic pen pals at a school in Buckinghamshire, breaking down the ‘mutual misconceptions’ between North and South. In west London, another primary school teacher was an early convert to the power of word processing, arguing that it enabled children to ‘become the controllers of their words; they own their own text, and are proud of its appearance’. And in Crowthorne, Berkshire, The Times found teenagers queuing up to board the council’s ‘Computerbus’, which shuttled fourteen machines between local schools. One ‘remedial group’, aged 12 and 13, played a version of Hangman. An English class played a spelling game that invited them to shoot through a brick wall; another remedial group played a maths game called Car Wash which required them to manage a car-wash company; a first-year maths group played a times-tables game that the headmaster had written himself. (No commercially available game, he explained, was as good as his.) Did they like computers? ‘Yes,’ one boy said earnestly, ‘it’s better than doing work.’28

  For the chief evangelist of the gospel of work, the popularity of computers was a welcome sign that the younger generation were prepared to embrace the spirit of radical change. Presenting a hundred Sinclair computers to the Portuguese government, Mrs Thatcher could not resist boasting about ‘British achievements in this field’. ‘These marvellous machines’, she told her hosts, ‘now seem second nature to our children. Our aim is that every schoolchild in Britain should have access to a computer. Per head of population, Britain has the highest use of home computers in Europe. They are not only useful, they are fun to use!’

  This last remark suggests that she had never wasted an afternoon trying to type in a program from a computer magazine. Indeed, barely a month went by in 1982 or 1983 without her popping up to proclaim the virtues of British computers and the wisdom of her government in promoting them. On a trip to Japan in September 1982, for example, she made a point of presenting her Japanese counterpart with one of Sinclair’s new Spectrums. ‘This’, she said slowly and firmly, like a British tourist addressing an uncomprehending waiter, ‘is a small home computer.’ The Japanese Prime Minister, of all people, probably knew what a computer was.29

  At home, Mrs Thatcher seized on the computer revolution as proof that, despite the gloom, a brighter, more entrepreneurial future lay ahead. ‘There’s no point in looking back,’ she remarked on one occasion:

  We must be way up front in the new industries, the new products, the new services. For new technologies bring new opportunities as well. That’s where the new jobs will come from. That’s where they’ve always come from.

  Think of the successful new businesses which did not exist ten years ago and were not dreamt of twenty years ago. Think of Clive Sinclair and his microcomputers – virtually every secondary school in the country now has a microcomputer as a result of this Conservative Government’s programme.

  And that created a lot of business too. For the parents feel they have to buy computers to keep up!

  Mentioning Sinclair was no accident. As a lone entrepreneur, cutting costs, defying convention and being rude about the trade unions, he was the Prime Minister’s sort of person. Interviewed by the Observer’s Kenneth Harris, she embarked on a lengthy tribute to the ‘successful, enterprising, thrusting, driving, vigorous, dynamic’ American economy, supposedly such a contrast with sluggish, sclerotic Britain. Fortunately, she added, things were changing. Harris asked for an example. ‘The obvious and quick one is the Sinclair home computers,’ she said happily, remembering her trip to Japan months earlier. ‘I knew I was going right into the heart of electronics. I thought, what can I give Mr Suzuki, the Prime Minister? And I took with me a Sinclair home computer and I gave it to Mr Suzuki in front of all the television companies – look, there we are, first with it.’

  Mrs Thatcher’s conviction that British computers led the world never wavered. ‘This country is in as good a position as any of its competitors to benefit from the new possibilities information technology has to offer,’ she told a conference to round off the Information Technology Year in 1982. ‘We are a major producer, with skills and ingenuity second to none, and sought after throughout the world. We are world leaders in the writing of software … We are the first country in the world to put a computer into every secondary school … The information technology revolution is our revolution: let us make the most of it!’30

  There was, of course, a fair bit of spin in all this. Turning self-made entrepreneurs like Sinclair into national heroes was a way of reinforcing some of Mrs Thatcher’s favourite themes: hard work, ambition, seizing the day and standing on your own two feet. As the academic Maureen McNeil points out, men such as Sinclair were ‘prototypes in the popular capitalism the Conservative government pioneered’, their stories ‘mythical tales of private investment, risk taking, concern for the national interest and reward’. This was certainly how Sinclair saw himself, but it was not the whole story. In many ways the computer boom was a textbook example of effective government intervention. Even Sinclair, after all, had once benefited from a bailout by the National Enterprise Board. And many other firms were dependent on government help. The computer-monitor firm Microvitec, for example, was founded in Bradford in 1979 with backing from the Department of Industry. After two years it was already making a healthy profit, and by 1984, with Microvitec monitors installed in almost every single school in the country, sales had reached almost £10 million a year.31

  Underpinning all this was the fact that demand for computers did not miraculously appear in response to Sinclair’s adverts. Had the government not put computers into schools, and had the BBC not launched its Computer Literacy Project, public enthusiasm would probably have been much weaker. And despite her image as the sworn enemy of government intervention, Mrs Thatcher was very keen to take the credit. Private enterprise had played its part, she told the information technology conference in 1982. But ‘if such enterprise is to flourish, the Government itself also has a job to do’. This, she said proudly, was ‘why our support for Information Technology in schools and higher education is so vital’, and why the government was spending millions to support ‘the Research and Development that must be carried out if industry is to bring successful products to the market’. And her minister for computers freely admitted that in this respect there was more continuity between the Callaghan and Thatcher governments than people recognized. There was nothing wrong, Kenneth Baker said, in handing out ‘catalyst money’ to create ‘the climate of change’.32

  On the face of it, the story of the British microcomputer industry was a tremendous vindication of the government’s strategy. Francis Spufford suggests that it achieved ‘levels of success in the global market not seen since the 1870s’, and indeed some firms enjoyed spectacular export sales. The Dragon 32, built in Port T
albot with backing from the Welsh Development Agency, won the contract for Spain’s school computer project, while the Oric-1, designed in St Ives and built in Berkshire, was briefly France’s bestselling computer. Indeed, even the Guardian’s Victor Keegan thought Mrs Thatcher was perfectly justified in praising the achievements of the British computer industry. ‘If you were looking for evidence of industrial resurgence in the UK’, he wrote, ‘you would be hard pushed to find a better example.’ And he agreed that Clive Sinclair deserved credit, too, not merely because of the huge influence of machines like the ZX80, but because his formula – ‘designing a machine from the world’s most advanced components … and then contracting out the business of manufacturing’ – meant he and his rivals could avoid ‘the worst excesses of the British disease’.33

  Yet even at this early stage, sceptics wondered whether the emperor’s new clothes were quite as advertised. The Times, for example, was struck by the adverts for Sinclair’s ZX80, which claimed it could ‘do quite literally anything from playing chess to running a power station’. But this was quite literally untrue: in no meaningful way could such a primitive machine run a power station. It did not even have a decent keyboard. The only way for most users to save their work was through a painfully slow connection to a cassette recorder, while loading even the most basic program might take at least ten minutes – that is, if it loaded at all. Nobody who owned a home computer in the early 1980s will easily forget the agonizing frustration that accompanied loading and saving. Impatience, wrote the journalist David Hewson, was ‘an integral part of being a home computer owner’. He could ‘testify from personal experience that one hour of rerunning the same tape without success does not make one feel an advance guard of the new electronic generation, particularly if the programme concerned is Motorway Mania and an impatient child is tapping her foot by your seat’.34

  There were other caveats. As Victor Keegan pointed out, the ‘Britishness’ of the industry was more ambiguous than the government liked to admit. A survey by the Observer in March 1983 suggested that a third of Britain’s 1.35 million home computers had been built abroad. Even machines nominally made in Britain had often been pre-assembled in the Far East. Indeed, the government’s approach to all this was a bit of a mess. If companies wanted to build their machines in Britain, as Sinclair did in Dundee, they had to pay 17 per cent duty to import American or Japanese microchips. But if the machines were fully or partly assembled abroad, they only needed to pay 6 per cent to bring them into the country. It made sense, in other words, to make them abroad. But this led to a further inconsistency. As far as the government was concerned, Acorn’s machines, which were often built entirely abroad, were completely British, and could be used in schools. Yet Commodore’s machines, which were made in a Corby factory built with assistance from the Department of Industry, were not British, and could not. There was a kind of logic here, because Commodore’s machines were designed in Pennsylvania. Yet given what had happened to Corby since the turn of the decade, the government could have been forgiven for stretching its definition.35

  The bigger problem, though, was that the foundations of the computer boom were weaker than they looked. It was true that Britain was now the only country in the world, apart from the United States and Japan, with a serious home computer industry. No other country, in fact, enjoyed such success selling low-specification microcomputers to middle-class families. But it was an industry made up of some fifty tiny, squabbling manufacturers, most of them run by people in their twenties and thirties with little business experience. The fact that almost all of them struggled to meet public demand told its own story. As the Guardian’s technology correspondent Peter Large predicted in 1983, the computer market was bound to become more globalized in the years ahead. Yet most of the British firms were far too small and under-capitalized to handle worldwide competition. It was, he thought, only a matter of time before the American and Japanese corporations moved into the home computer market, offering more sophisticated machines for similarly low prices. Then the British firms would be blown away.

  And despite their boastful advertising, the British firms knew it. Almost unnoticed by the press, which preferred to run long articles about Clive Sinclair’s business acumen or Chris Curry’s technical flair, the British Microcomputer Manufacturers’ Group asked the government in December 1982 to consider banning American and Japanese computers for a year, in order to save Britain’s computer industry ‘from virtual elimination by unfair competition’. The government refused: Mrs Thatcher was not in the business of banning imports. But it was a sign of things to come.36

  Clive Sinclair never forgave the BBC for picking Acorn to make their new computer. Still, he consoled himself with the sensational success of the ZX81, which had broken almost every conceivable sales record since its launch in March 1981. It was remarkably cheap: at just £49.95 for a kit and £69.95 for a fully assembled machine, it was less than a fifth of the price of his calculator almost a decade earlier, when inflation was taken into account. It was also good-looking: a small black box with a mere kilobyte of memory, it had been designed to look ‘high-tec and desirable’ when visitors saw it ‘in the bedroom or the lounge’. But its real asset was the swagger of Sinclair’s marketing campaign, which sold it as a lifestyle choice, even a status symbol. Mocked-up screenshots, which bore remarkably little relation to reality, showed the ZX81 running home banking programs, recipe databases, diaries and address books. As one advert put it, owning a ZX81 would give you ‘a firmer grip on the way the world works, an opportunity to join what is certain to be a British way of life’.

  The campaign clearly struck a chord. As early as June 1981, Sinclair was selling about 10,000 machines a month, many of them at home, but the vast majority to France, Germany, Japan, Australia and, above all, the United States. By Christmas, total sales had reached 250,000, and by the spring of 1982 they stood at almost half a million, giving Sinclair the largest unit sales in the world. And then, that April, he launched the most popular British computer of all, the Spectrum.37

  The advent of the Spectrum could hardly have been better timed. Thanks to the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project, public interest in computers had never been higher. Indeed, judging by the volume of stories in the newspapers, the second half of 1982 was the moment when home computers definitively broke out of the hobbyists’ club into the mainstream. It is worth remembering, though, that while computers were cheaper than ever before, they still cost quite a lot of money. Using average earnings as a yardstick, a Spectrum cost the equivalent of about £800 today, while a BBC Micro cost about twice that. So why did people bother? If you bought a microwave, you could heat up some beef stroganoff. If you bought a video recorder, you could watch Minder again and again. But why fork out for a home computer? ‘Do you actually need a computer?’ wondered the Guardian, and even the designers struggled to find a convincing answer. After all, what could you actually do with it? Copy out your address book? Print out a knitting pattern? What could the Spectrum or the BBC Micro possibly offer that justified spending such a lot of money?38

  To readers of a certain age, like me, there was an obvious answer: games. But in the summer of 1982, computer advertisements barely mentioned games at all. Very few parents, no matter how well off, were likely to spend hundreds of pounds so that their offspring could waste their weekends playing Manic Miner. Instead, adverts played relentlessly on middle-class parents’ fears of their children being left behind in an age of dizzying economic and technological change. As Tom Lean points out, the fact that most parents saw computers as ‘a mystery from the future’, to quote the adverts for the Dragon 32, made them susceptible to emotional blackmail. ‘We live in an age of computers,’ proclaimed the advert for the Commodore VIC-20. ‘Coming to terms with them is part of coming to terms with the twentieth century.’

  What decent parent would want to stop their children learning what BBC Micro adverts called ‘the language of the future’? One Acorn advert even pur
ported to show a gang of previously unemployed teenagers, who ‘didn’t have to burden the state much longer’ after they had signed up for computer education. Of course this was largely fantasy, but with record youth unemployment in the headlines, and both the government and the national broadcaster banging on about Britain’s silicon future, who wanted to take the risk? As Lean remarks, ‘it became an article of faith that the cleverest children had a computer in the house, and would have a vital lead over those who didn’t … The cost of a computer might have been falling, but so was the price of not having one.’39

  The moment when computers really found their place on the high street came at Christmas 1982. As The Times observed, the computer was now ‘established as a family purchase with a market which peaks at Christmas’, with somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million machines already installed in homes across the country. No longer a machine for the dedicated hobbyist, it was bought by ‘mums and dads’, convinced that a home computer would turn their listless little darling into an all-conquering prodigy. And when the Christmas rush began, sales exceeded all predictions. Sinclair sold some 198,000 machines, followed by Commodore (32,600), Acorn (32,000) and Dragon (30,000). In fact, the demand was so high that W. H. Smith and Dixons sold out of the most popular brands, while smaller firms such as Dragon, Oric and Grundy found orders doubling every couple of months. Many shoppers, it seemed, did not care which computer they bought. All that mattered was to come home with something.

  Even after the festive glow had faded, the rush continued. In the early months of 1983, industry experts estimated that people were still buying about 62,000 machines a month. By February, Sinclair had sold about a million ZX81s and Spectrums combined, while Commodore claimed to have shifted a million VIC-20s and Acorn had sold just under 100,000 BBC Micros. All three were struggling to cope with such rapid expansion. In just twelve months, Acorn’s output had increased by a staggering 243 per cent, while Sinclair’s rate of growth was even higher at 255 per cent. Indeed, almost every week brought an awestruck feature in the broadsheet business pages, the writer swooning in disbelief at the nation’s enthusiasm for home computers.