Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  Fortunately, programming didn’t require an absurdly advanced display of computer literacy. Both the British machines, and most others from around the world, treated coding as the natural first task of a computer owner. When you turned them on, the screen presented you with a few words of information and a blinking cursor – an invitation to write code.

  Unless you were a fan of obscurities, there were two ways home computers could be programmed in 1980: the hardcore, ‘next to the metal’ language of machine code, sometimes called ‘assembler’ after the tool used to create it; and BASIC, which was the language of choice for the beginner. BASIC allowed simple tasks to be described in order, made repetition easy, and enabled complexity to grow quickly from simple building blocks.

  Following his tour of global computing, David Allen embarked on three projects. He made a thoughtful documentary series called The Silicon Factor, which eschewed doom-mongering and won a prize at the New York Film Festival. He bought a TRS-80 – an American home computer – and began to learn BASIC, although he wasn’t particularly impressed with this version of the language, or any other on the market. And he co-wrote a report for the BBC, the Manpower Services Commission, and ultimately, the Department of Trade and Industry, which recommended that the BBC create a Computer Literacy Campaign, complete with all the books and courses that should go with it.

  The report had been commissioned in the dying months of James Callaghan’s embattled Labour government, and was first read by outgoing MPs before the 1979 general election. But the new Conservative administration and its far-sightedly titled Minister for Information Technology, Kenneth Baker, received it surprisingly favourably. Perhaps because the involvement of the BBC seemed to be minimal at this stage, the parties least interested were the manufacturers.

  Allen had asked John Coll, an electronics whiz teaching at Oundle School in the Midlands, to help explore the requirements for an educational computer. Principal among these was an invention Coll called ‘Adopted BASIC for Computers’, an idealised, utopian and very powerful version of the language. The manufacturers, who were invited to talk to the DTI at the BBC, proved more than resistant, as Allen found: ‘We said: “Can you implement this?” And they said: “Woah, given a lot of money!”’ Some weren’t interested at all – why should they spend this money and resource on something that would help their rivals?

  It was a false start, but one that would be overcome via the application of a rather unfashionable idea: state intervention. It was decided that the BBC should sponsor an entirely new computer as part of the course. Both the Corporation and the government were sensitive about backing a commercial enterprise, but the DTI broke the deadlock. After all, Britain had a thriving young computer industry – why not take advantage of its expertise? And one machine that had emerged from the East Anglian hotbed of genius appeared to be the perfect candidate.

  The Newbrain.

  After the breakup of Sinclair Radionics, the NEB had sold the viable businesses, and spun-off research projects of varying degrees of credibility into independent companies. The Newbrain, Sinclair’s first attempt at entering the home computer market, had been given to Newbury Laboratories where, with delicious synchronicity, it became the Newbury Newbrain. Freed from Clive Sinclair’s energetic urgings, work had continued at an unhurried pace under designers Mike Wakefield and Basil Smith. And, as Newbury was still largely publicly funded, the DTI was comfortable that promoting its version of the Newbrain would avoid the charge that the government was giving preferential treatment to any one of the new technology entrepreneurs.

  Chris Curry found out about the BBC’s new computer on the BBC news. It was a fait accompli – this was the way the Corporation was going and, for a short while, it pulled him and the rest of the industry warily together. ‘I rang Clive, who was now a competitor, of course, and said, “What do you know of this?”’ Curry recalls. ‘He said he had never heard of it. I said, “Well a television programme is the biggest advertising campaign you could possibly get – something has to be done.”’

  In fact, the deal was less assured than was being reported. John Coll’s specifications far outstripped Newbury’s plans, as they had those of every other manufacturer approached. But by now all the parties were committed. And crucially, the BBC had started developing its courses and programmes, which, with the certainty of a national broadcaster, it had scheduled for the following year.

  Winter arrived – but the Newbrain didn’t.

  Curry visited London on a fact-finding mission: ‘I went off to the Department of Trade and Industry to find out what was going on, and then to the BBC . . . There was clearly some mixed feelings at the BBC, because the Newbury Newbrain didn’t appear to do a lot of the things they wanted to do with it, and it wasn’t ready, and wasn’t ideal in various ways.’

  Then and there, Curry told them to open the project out to other computer makers, but the BBC was in the driving seat, and it was still optimistic. For six months it pursued the Newbrain, but the designers couldn’t bring it up to the BBC’s specification, or down to its price point.

  Allen remembers the period as one of desperation and despondency. Between Christmas and New Year, he and his team gave up on Newbury Laboratories, and drew up a brand-new specification to pass around other manufacturers. In the face of this setback they consoled themselves with the thought that, since the manufacturing run would be no more than ten or twelve thousand, at least the BBC Continuing Education Department wouldn’t be making anyone rich.

  Curry and Sinclair had each seen the way the computer market had jumped in size with every new appeal to the consumer sector, and both men knew that a computer endorsed by ‘Auntie Beeb’ would win the confidence of parents and teachers. The computer the BBC chose could be very profitable.

  They each had a machine that they thought could do the job. In 1981, Sinclair Research updated the ZX80. The designers had considered calling the new machine the Series B or Series II, but eventually embraced their accidental nomenclature and released the jet-black ZX81. It represented only a small refinement; the forthcoming ZX82 would be the real leap forward, a graphics powerhouse, with a sound chip and a massive 48 kilobytes of memory. And this time, a keyboard with moving keys.

  Acorn was also in the early stages of designing a ‘professional Atom’, which, with a brand consistency that would appeal to its science-aware market, was christened the ‘Proton’. But the name was almost the only decision that had been made about it. There were divisions throughout Acorn over the form the machine should take – the technology, the specifications, and even the target market. Again Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber were tasked with designing the Proton, but they found themselves juggling the different demands of those advocating ‘super workstations, super home computers, and everything in between’. Even the core question of the processor was up for grabs. The 6502 had worked fine, but Acorn was a hive of technologists endlessly buzzing with alternative opinions.

  Wilson literally engineered a truce. The new computer would have the reliable 6502 at the core, but also include a ‘tube’ that could hook in other – yet to be decided – processors, so the two could work in harmony. It was both a compromise and an inspiration, and another ‘butterfly effect’ decision that would contribute to creating a tsunami in the wider technology world.

  Early in 1981, Acorn and Sinclair Research officially learned the industry’s open secret – that the Newbrain had faltered and any and every computer manufacturer with a British headquarters was now in the running to replace it. Allen and Coll’s specification was sent out to anyone who wanted it. Slender but specific, in two pages of bullet points it described a utopian machine of state-of-the-art power and myriad features: full positive keyboard, high-resolution colour graphics, sophisticated sound, both cassette and floppy disc drive interfaces, ports for controlling every conceivable peripheral device – it was easy to see why Newbury had found itself falling short of the BBC’s vision. Most important of all, the chosen mac
hine would need to handle Coll’s souped-up ABC BASIC.

  Nobody had a design that matched the aspiration but, in their different ways, the companies tried to satisfy it. Sinclair looked at the cost of building this Platonic form of computer, and was convinced that he could bend the BBC’s will to his. As well as having advanced plans, he had another, powerful weapon: he had secured the industry’s first deal with a retail chain, striking up a relationship with WH Smith, which was looking to diversify from books and magazines. Soon, ZX81s would be available for £69.99 at shops throughout the country, and the same could be true for a Sinclair BBC.

  Acorn, on the other hand, had no demonstrable hardware at all. The spec had arrived a few days ahead of a visit from Allen and his team and, as it seemed to Curry and Hauser, all they had with which to greet him was conversation.

  There is a legend in the British computer industry about what happened next. Hermann Hauser rang Steve Furber and asked him if what Allen wanted was possible. The answer was a firm ‘no’. So, he rang Sophie Wilson with the same question, and received the same answer. Then he rang Furber back with a simple lie: that Wilson had said it was plausible. Furber rose to the bait and promised it could be done. Hauser then passed this news on to Wilson, who decided that if Furber could do it, so could she. The design race was afoot.

  The story is more or less accurate. Hauser enjoys recounting it, but Curry is more circumspect: ‘It was fairly common practice, yes it’s true,’ he admits. ‘And people knew that it was being done to them. It was not enormously crafty on that occasion . . . it did happen, but it happened all the time, actually.’

  Working around the clock, Furber, Wilson and the team managed to construct an embryonic Proton ready for the BBC’s visit. Allen’s team arrived fresh from seeing a company called Tangerine, where they had seen the innards of a computer that two years later would become the Oric 1. Then, at the vital moment of the BBC’s arrival, Acorn’s newborn device stopped working.

  It’s another mythic event from the birth of the industry, but this time even Curry concedes the truth contained real drama: ‘That was quite a nail biter when the BBC came to look at it, but everything was met.’ Not working though. It was Hauser who, in desperation or for lack of any other choice, cut the earth wire to the machine. The wire protected their electronics from overload, and severing it could have been a fatal moment for their equipment, but instead it sprang to life. In retrospect, Curry can afford to be sanguine about this nerve-racking moment. ‘We had a deadline, and nothing was working until the last possible moment, which was all true, but then that’s the nature of things. It’s always the case,’ he says.

  The BBC liked the machine, and Allen’s team liked Acorn. The company had the atmosphere of a PhD lab with commercial energy: Hauser an inspirational ideas guy, Wilson evidently brilliant. ‘They were,’ says Allen, ‘an impressive outfit. Quite a high-powered group of university people. It was very much “above the shop in the centre of Cambridge”. We were pretty green, but they seemed to be a nice bunch. They were very open to ideas, and very enthusiastic.’

  After lunch, Allen’s team visited Sinclair Research. Unlike at Acorn, they didn’t get to meet the designers. Instead, they were faced with the famous and fired-up managing director, full of passion for his new machine, but, from Allen’s perspective, with rather less respect for his visitors’ efforts. ‘“Call this a spec?”’ Allen recalls Sinclair saying, before going through their list with a critical, cost-conscious eye. ‘He said things like: “Well, we have got a positive keyboard”, and he waved the Sinclair Spectrum keyboard at us, which is a flexible rubber thing.’

  The BBC didn’t respond well to the financial argument. One of its advisers was Mike McLean of the Electronic Times, who was a fan of Sinclair, but even he had to admit that some of the entrepreneur’s products had been tainted with a poor reputation for quality, and always because they had been engineered down to a price.

  As for whether the Spectrum could have cut it as the BBC’s machine, Allen is unambiguous: ‘No. Not as we saw it. What he [Sinclair] might have developed it into is another matter. But the thing about Acorn is that they had a co-operative spirit: we’ll meet you, we’ll evolve our thing in your direction. That was quite important, I think.’

  The BBC made its assessment in the following weeks based on a full analysis of the technology, its adherence to the specifications, and the manufacturers’ track records. As well as considering the two Cambridge companies, it had seen efforts from their neighbours Tangerine, and visited Dragon in Wales and Research Machines in Oxford. But the decision kept swinging towards Acorn.

  It was hugely significant that Wilson’s BASIC could match the BBC’s needs, and that the Proton’s design allowed for plugging in a Z80 with which to run exotic American software such as CP/M – a popular operating system. It was similarly impressive when Acorn devised a way to build a Teletext decoder into the machine, meeting the BBC’s request to download software through the spare parts of a television signal. But perhaps what mattered most to the final decision was that, at the end of that first day of meeting all the manufacturers, the visiting BBC team had chosen to go to the pub with the Acorn team.

  Then, the Newbrain reanimated.

  On the day that David Allen’s team were to choose their manufacturer, Newbury arrived at the BBC with – at last – the final, working hardware. ‘Newbury turned up saying, “We did it! We’ve got this!”’ Allen recalls. ‘And they plugged it in, and it didn’t work. It was terribly tragic, it was very sad.’ And too late. Acorn had fulfilled every aspect of Allen’s dream, even as it had become more ambitious. Nothing else under consideration came close.

  And so Acorn’s Proton became the BBC Micro and launched in late 1981. It had a large, beige case and a rock-steady keyboard. It was so reliable that in places such as railway stations and betting shops the machine remained in constant use for a decade. And when a government scheme called ‘Micros in Schools’ subsidised the education market, Acorn’s robust and incredibly highly specified design became the computer of choice in Britain’s classrooms.

  And every BBC Micro came loaded with an incredible asset. If there is a single tool that opened up computing in Britain in the eighties, and that laid the foundations for its vibrant games scene, it is BBC BASIC. Wilson’s implementation of Coll’s specification was swift and elegant, and while the BBC Micro was rarer in people’s homes, most children had access to one at school. When first turned on, it had a formal feel, with a brief list of its credentials followed by the blinking cursor politely waiting for an instruction. To the uninitiated pupil, it could at first appear to be part of the elevated world of technology, as exciting or daunting as that could be.

  In practice, it was a benign teacher: it repaid a small amount of effort with a huge amount of fun. The cursor was a prompt to enter a command in the BBC Micro’s default programming language, which was an unusually intuitive and friendly kind of BASIC. The computer came with a thick manual that could teach everything to the most interested pupils, but there were simpler tricks that everyone seemed to know. Typing the word PRINT followed by a message made the computer repeat that message on the following line:

  > PRINT “I AM SKILL”

  I AM SKILL

  Already the computer had been pulled from science fiction to matter-of-fact. Pupils sitting in a classroom, who had only seen such devices on television, could control the BBC Micro simply by copying their friends. From there it was just a tiny step to writing a program through the addition of line numbers:

  > 10 PRINT “I AM SKILL”

  > 20 GOTO 10

  Type RUN, and the screen would fill with your message:

  I AM SKILL

  I AM SKILL

  I AM SKILL

  I AM SKILL

  And so it would repeat, until someone pressed the Escape key.

  Within minutes, any child could have a first taste of the power of programming, and it seemed so easy. Soon they would add colou
rs to their message, double its height, and invite other users to enter their own message and play with it. Later they might learn to turn on a graphics mode and draw pictures, pixel by pixel, or use the computer’s immensely fast – for its hardware – line-drawing routine to outline shapes. In a way that was extraordinarily close to its design ambitions, the BBC’s project had created a nation of lunchtime programmers.

  As Curry had predicted, the BBC endorsement changed the fate of Acorn, helping it stand out as the market filled with a dozen rivals. Furber thinks it might even have saved the company: ‘Acorn was a small start-up that nobody had heard of, but if the BBC was going with it, then people had confidence that it wasn’t going to disappear overnight. The only other brand with this kind of visibility was Sinclair.’ It was effective marketing – the BBC Micro, in its various forms, sold one and a half million units.

  The ZX82, however, became the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and Britain’s bestselling computer. At £125, or £175 for the top-end model, the ZX Spectrum was cheap – half the price of its rivals. It was a bargain for its market, and the cost-saving design was inspired, but the compromises showed. The ZX Spectrum came with its own version of BASIC, and although its creator Steve Vickers had done a good job, he was boxed in by the architecture of its ZX80 origins. It was cumbersome, and so slow that Computing Today magazine shortened its ‘benchmark’ speed tests for those readers who ‘might like to read the review before the Christmas holidays.’ Its keyboard was made of an odd rubber, widely but unkindly known as ‘dead flesh’, and it was physically unstable, especially the early models. Although the computer could display sixteen colours, only two could be shown in any small area of the screen – the resulting ‘colour clash’ saw overlapping objects glitchily flicking between colours as they moved around. Additional memory was fitted as an extra board ‘floating’ inside the original, and the power supply units were known for dying in a pop of smoke. When Sinclair had been making pocket gadgets for a technophile market, the compromises required for a compact design made sense, and high failure rates were tolerated by the consumers. For some reason, the same philosophy of shaving off millimetres in size was carried over to a computer that would sit on the floor of a living room, and quality paid the price. By the end of its life, the ZX Spectrum had sold five million units, but sometimes return rates had been as high as thirty per cent.