Clive Sinclair

Hi all,

just spending a bit of time digitising loads of old photos and came across one of the first film shoots I did as a freelance video assist operator.

A fun shoot and a bit off the wall script:

The mind boggles!

Now if only the C5 had taken a lesson in upscaling from that😉

That first picture reminds me that I have one of the original IBM Model 64 computers up in the loft (dates back to 1983), one of the first few in the country). Complete with monochrome screen, keyboard, and 5.25" floppy disks with the operating system to be used in the twin 5.25" disk drives. 64Mb RAM at the most.

Colin

They have certainly miniaturised computers since those days, we had a PC of that vintage with Dbase 4, Lotus 123 and Wordstar. Just twin 5 1/4 floppies on ours but a “Winchester” was available.

Mike

When the Sinclair ZX90 came out I agonised whether to have one as christmas present or a SLR camera. From memory (excuse pun) the ZX 80 was about 1kb memory.

Thankfully I went for the camera, a Pentax ME super, still have it stored away somwhere.

Also have up in the loft an Amstrad a CPC 6128 I think with a dot matrix printer (remember those) a few plug in cartridge games, 'Burning Rubber' was one (now now no rude responses please)

Why am I keeping those, good question, suppose I thought they might gain some cult status and be worth a fortune one day.

Bill D.

I believe there are now electronics enthusiasts who collect and use these early conputers.

My own first was an Amstrad PCW9512 with daisy-wheel printer and 3.0" (yes - just 3 inch) floppy-discs; on which I taught myself BASIC to a somewhat rudimentary level, and wrote the mss for a book.

At the same time, at work (c.1990) we had computers that all used 5" discs except one. That took eight-inch floppy-discs, a size I have never encountered or heard of anywhere else.

Would that not be 64 kilobyte RAM at the most

Aye them were days

beep!

Nigel,

At my place of work, the vast majority of our computers used 8 inch floppies. These were 360Kb (single sided single density), 720Kb (double sided single density) or 1.4Mb (double sided double density). Actually, I've a vague memory that last one was known by its unformatted size, but am open to correction.

Apart from using them for data storage, they also had the CP/M operating system on them.

I don't recall seeing many 5 inch floppies until one of my colleagues managed to get hold of an early IBM XT which came with two 5 inch drives. This was in the late '80's.

In general, Clive Sinclair was quite good for me in that work bought me a Mk14 kit to learn on. I later bought a ZX80, then the modification to make it a pseudo ZX81, followed by a Spectrum 16K, Mk 2 version I believe. The Spectrum had the "rocky" 48K RAM pack added to it, and later a Rotronics Wafadrive along with Sinclair's thermal printer. Ultimately I built the whole lot into a homemade box including a ZX81 keyboard (modified by changing the labels to suit the Spectrum) and that lasted until I replaced it by a Sinclair PC200, an IBM XT clone.

Using the Sinclair machines enabled me to understand how these machines worked, and introduced me to both BASIC and machine code. Thankyou Clive.

Incidently, I believe that Spectrum is still working: my elder son has it, and last I heard he had got it working again. Mind you, that's a few years ago now.

Peter G. Shaw

It would be kB cos at that time, we made the Tatung swinestein which the advertising bumph stated 128K "Remember Swinestein" (Einstein really) (and it was Decca really)

Regards Ian.

Driving through Cambridge the other day and passed the sign to the computer museum. See it many times before but that time it just struck me as strange that there are such things these days focussing on things you consider to be modern. More a realisation of the passing of time really. I don't suppose I should be too surprised. Walking round the Mnchester Museum of Science and Industry a few years back and came accross 2 radar systems I had worked on. Doesn't half make you feel old.

regards Martin

My employer skipped my first PC which I subsequently liberated - I think it was an Altos with 2 x 5.25" floppy drives. 1 X disk with CP/M op. system and the other for data.

Next PC was fitted with a 10meg hard drive (sheer luxury) that sounded like agricultural machinery when running.

Then an Oric followed by a rubbery 16k Sinclair ZX .

A friend and I (he lived about three miles away) once sent each other messages using a RTTY prog on tape cassette from ZX spectrums and CB radios. It worked a treat. The local "good buddies" however were incandescent that someone out there was nattering and that they were unable to understand. What fun

Rik

It seems a lot of stuff I have worked with has finished up in a museum, one thing I actually worked on was a Unimate robot that is now in the Science Museum. Bletchley Park has a computer museum and many of the exhibits I remember arriving in the marketplace, the pace of advance is staggering and it’s funny to see stuff become a museum piece in your own lifetime. I suppose the same goes for many things though, I haven’t seen a trolley bus since I was a boy in Bournemouth and so many aircraft are museum pieces even if they can still fly. York museum had domestic scenes created that were filled with familiar things. My grandfather was born in the 1890s and passed away in the mid 1970s, his lifetime covered horses as popular transport to men walking on the moon and building his own radio to colour television. The internet and computers in the domestic environment were yet to come.

Mike