Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (26 page)

ICL, waiting to get the core of the OPD machine out of Sinclair (having given up on the original specification), was given early QLs. ICL ended up using only the display-control chip, microdrives and the Microdrive-control chips. Even with this low return on its investment, it had problems. It didn’t get that much co-operation from Sinclair, either, it would appear. Tony Tebby by this time had left Sinclair Research, his work on producing working machines done and honour satisfied. He was however still involved in QL work, and recalls a meeting with ICL personnel. He takes up the story at the inclusion of the capacitor across the Microdrive amplifier:

I said, ‘It stops the head amp oscillating.’ They said, ‘Sinclair says it improves the signal-to-noise ratio.’ Well, it does, in the sense that you got signal out of the thing, rather than noise. Without the capacitor, on a substantial proportion of machines, you got nothing but noise. .. Anyway, we went through either eleven or seventeen problems, all of which were caused because known faults in the hardware had been insufficiently notified to ICL. (Interview, 14 October 1985.)

ICL, wanting to press Sinclair’s innovative technology to use in the OPD, found that its supposed partner was not coming clean:

There was a hardware fault such that you had to go into Microdrive mode to write to a Microdrive, but you also had to disable the RS232 in total, otherwise you wrote to the Microdrive at the RS232 baud rate. You had to disable, not only disconnect, the RS232. ICL were understandably a little annoyed at all this. At this time I was in a Portakabin in the grounds of Milton Hall. ICL sent a very annoyed letter to Sinclair Research [saying] that under the terms of their contract they were supposed to be notified of changes. They had been notified of some changes but had not been informed of other errors in the hardware, (ibid.)

Tebby’s desire to help ICL did not have particularly happy consequences. When his input to the contractual partnership was revealed:

I was literally thrown off [the Milton Hall] site. They were furious. I got a letter from Nigel Searle about it, and I got an apology from Clive when I sent the letter from Searle to him and told him what had happened. At that stage he was so far removed he didn’t know what people were doing in his name, (ibid.)

However, ICL’s need to sort the hardware was fed back into the ongoing development of the QL as it assisted in identifying and rectifying problems.

The fact that meanwhile people were paying good money for these interim development machines (you could get upgrades, but only by returning your ‘business’ machine to Sinclair, a process that took at least three weeks) was brazened out by Sinclair with a bold face. Interviewed in Personal Computer News (26 May 1984), Sir Clive said:

The whole point about the software was that it wasn’t final, and it wasn’t final in the sense that it was crashable. No new computer with new software is ever totally free of bugs ... in a sense, by shipping the machines out to customers early, we are getting them to find those bugs for us, but we are not making any pretence that we are doing otherwise.

It was not mentioned in the adverts, however! Nigel Searle took a firmer view, as befits a managing director rather than a visionary looking for excuses:

How could it happen that British industry’s blue-eyed company could foul up so badly? Managing Director Nigel Searle explains that Sinclair felt customers would rather have a provisional machine than no machine ... (ibid.)

Well, maybe, but they should perhaps have been asked. The final words on the machine as it appeared in the early versions can come from the launch issue of QL User magazine. Despite the whole rationale being the wonder of the QL, by July 1984 the journalists couldn’t keep realism out of their text:

At the moment it’s hard to be enthusiastic about a product that was pre-announced and is suffering from a rush into production and premature placing into the hands of customers. The most obvious reaction is that only dedicated hobbyists and enthusiasts are going to buy the machine. If the QL is to have any part in business computing it needs to be sorted out very quickly. And that’s something of a shame because the design is a step forward (though hardly a Quantum Leap) for micros. The reality is a machine that needs a lot of work, and Sinclair Research is looking distinctly as though it made a mistake. (Max Philips.)

The marketing of the QL has been shoddy, and the treatment of customers and press alike inadequate for the seriousness with which Sinclair Research would like us to take its new product. However, I’m convinced that the machine is going to be good, and this opinion is not so much fashioned from what Sinclair is saying, but is based on the dedicated user base out there that has backed up and developed previous Sinclair machines into something worth having. Clearly there have been technical problems with this one ... Still, it’s lucky the company didn’t invent the typewriter — if it had I’d probably be carving this in stone. (Roger Mumford.)

The hope that a dedicated (and magazine-buying) user base would arise, as it had for the ZX81 and Spectrum, in order to make the QL worthwhile would seem to show an early recognition that the machine had missed the business market. Ironically, one of the few surviving businesslike bits of the QL was that it had not included a cassette port, thus depriving software houses of their cheapest means of distributing their wares. Instead, they had to use the expensive Microdrive cartridges, available only from Sinclair, which took the QL out of the cheap games arena. The ‘serious’ software that did appear - other languages, programmers’ utilities and the like - was all again for the hobbyist market. Sinclair Research hadn’t managed to crawl, let alone leap, into a new market after all.

The QLs that were produced did get better, in terms of hardware and software, over the period to the end of 1984, when they were up to version 14 of the hardware. By July 1984, with machines actually being shipped in visible and kludge less quantity Sinclair was attempting to persuade everybody that the problems were over. Production was claimed to be 2000 a week, with 28-day delivery possible by September, and Searle predicted 250,000 QL sales in 1984. David Karlin was wheeled out to practise his PR:

On the tricky subject of software bugs Karlin told us, ‘Of course silly and convoluted things will crash the machine - if you get the answer wrong through a complicated expression, then this is not significant ... no BASIC ever written is perfect - within that we are perfect.’ (Your Spectrum, August 1984.)

Improved Psion software was announced to be in preparation, but didn’t arrive until February 1985. The £4m advertising campaign in the autumn of 1984, which used television for the first time (Sir Clive in a long scarf doing a leap over rival machines), didn’t help much. This promotion was intended to support the retail availability of the QL and the flat screen, as well as the Spectrum.

Unfortunately there appeared to be some quality-control problems on the QLs:

The manager of the local branch of Dixons told me that out of 1000 machines delivered to their warehouse, only 190 worked properly. Further rumbles from Spectrum distributors seem to indicate similar troubles - with one hapless dealer spending a whole morning with six QLs and six sets of Psion software trying to find a combination that allowed all the Psion wares to be loaded. (Your Spectrum, December 1984.)

Christmas 1984 was a declining market for computers. Sinclair maintained its market share, with the ageing original Spectrum supported by freebie software, and repackaged Interface I, Microdrive and software deals, and the cosmetically upgraded Spectrum+. But it was a bad year all round. Poor sales of the QL weren’t helping, and all was not rosy on the financial front. Having reached Christmas 1984, however, we now need to backtrack to the project that had been absorbing a lot of Sir Clive’s energy and cash while the QL development debacle had been proceeding.

[9] THE MACHINE STOPPED

The C5 saga chronicles the most depressing failure of a Sinclair vision. Anticipated for decades and developed over many years, Sir Clive’s electric-powered dream came and went in ten short months. If tragedy comes in threes as the old wives maintain, then the ill-fated trike must be added to the flat screen and QL to complete Sir Clive’s trinity of disasters. Like the television, the idea of producing some kind of electric vehicle had been a constant preoccupation for Sinclair since the beginning of his commercial career. It’s ironic that both projects were destined to suffer much the same ignominious fate.

Although electric-vehicle research was begun in earnest only at Sinclair Research, company records suggest that in the early seventies Chris Curry half-heartedly tinkered with the embryonic development of the project for Radionics. Even at this stage it seems the research was active rather than theoretical, since Norman Hewett recalls spotting an early prototype rotting away in the depths of the St Ives Mill, although he stresses that the NEB never had any interest in the product. Indeed, even among Clive’s most loyal supporters one senses the desire to disown the fruits of this particular vision. Everyone is at pains to emphasize that the electric vehicle has always been Sinclair’s personal dream rather than any kind of corporate endeavour. Uncharacteristically, Sinclair seems to have bowed to this consensus of doubt, and development of the C5 was postponed until it could be backed by his own burgeoning fortune.

Although Sinclair has always promoted the C5 as a ‘completely new concept in personal transportation’, a cursory examination of developments in the motor industry reveals that such claims cannot be supported by history. While the earliest development of a crude battery-powered car can be traced to Thomas Davenport’s decidedly limited prototypes of 1834, it wasn’t until the beginning of this century that commercial research and development began in earnest.

According to The Complete Book of Electric Vehicles, Shacket’s definitive history of the subject, 35 per cent of the vehicles sold in 1900 were powered by electricity. The market peaked in 1912 when almost 34,000 electric cars were registered. This figure takes into account only vehicles used as ‘personal transportation’. (At this time, there was an even greater number of commercial electric vehicles on the streets - i.e. trucks, vans, taxis, etc.) However, as petrol-powered technology advanced by leaps and bounds, electric-powered vehicles sank into a decline, their progress inhibited by the failure of science to make any significant advances in battery technology.

A century of evidence reveals that Britain, more than any other industrial power, has intermittently taken the principle of electric-powered transportation seriously enough to commit resources to investigating its technical and commercial viability. As a consequence, in the year Sinclair’s modest contribution was revealed to the world, this country could boast 30,000 electric-powered vehicles in commercial use (27,000 of which were milkfloats), while similar developments in the domestic market still awaited significant technical innovations.

At the beginning of the 1970s, all the major political parties recognized that there were votes to be gained from a gestural support of a broad spectrum of ‘ecological issues’. To this end, correspondingly gestural grants suddenly became available to companies that could cobble together proposals demonstrating the pursuit of ‘ecologically sound’ goals. The compelling combination of an ideological fad and a crisis in oil ensured that alternatives to the internal combustion engine were, once again, an acceptable subject for corporate speculation. But only just. In the event, between 1971 and 1980 the state invested less than £6m in researching non- pollutant forms of transport. Almost half of the total allocation ended up in the hands of the already heavily subsidized Lucas Aerospace. (To date, the only tangible product of the Lucas investment is the decidedly uninnovatory van used for company deliveries.) The remaining subsidies were wisely passed on to companies researching methods of providing a reliable power source for electric vehicles, an unsolved problem that continues to constrain the commercial viability of such products.

Early in 1980, Sinclair was beginning to feel that he’d finally laid the spectre of the NEB and was once again at the helm of his own operation. The recently launched ZX80 looked set for success, and the development of its successor was well under way. While in lesser mortals such a period might prompt a sense of cautious optimism, the new decade found Sinclair in an expansive frame of mind. The time seemed ripe to re-evaluate the electric vehicle concept. To this end, Radionics veteran Tony Rogers was hired on a consultancy basis. It’s worth stressing that at this time Research was just beginning to grapple with the supply and demand problems precipitated by the success of the ZX80. If any form of corporate plan existed, it would almost certainly have been concerned with exploiting the company’s tangible success in a new line of consumer electronics. There were neither the people nor the financial resources to encourage dreams of ambitious diversification. Unless you were Clive Sinclair! Under the circumstances, it seems certain that while the rest of the company concerned itself with the demands of the early home-micro enthusiasts, only Sinclair himself felt confident enough about the future to indulge in one of his obsessions.

To be fair, there is no reason to suspect that in the early days the vehicle development would have consumed much in the way of time or money. The project was more of a diversion than a fully fledged research programme. Rogers had a full-time job running the Exeter Academy, and considered his work for Sinclair as something akin to a challenging hobby. According to corporate biographer Rodney Dale, Sinclair’s brief to Rogers was sufficiently loose to encourage inspired tinkering rather than a path of rigorous research:

[Rogers was contracted to] perform and present a preliminary investigation into a personal electric vehicle. The vehicle is assumed to carry one person (with a possible second person only by squeezing), and is seen as a replacement for a moped and limited to urban use with a top speed of 30 mph. (The Sinclair Story, p. 152.)