Sir Clive Sinclair

It's almost unthinkable that you might not have heard of Clive Sinclair, despite the fact that he seems to have completely vanished from the public eye for the past twenty years or so. I keep expecting him to pop up on Dragon's Den, or some dreadful reality TV programme, but no - Sir Clive has more about him than that. Alan Sugar, take note - everyone knows your name, but Sir Clive is still blessedly esoteric. Because Clive Sinclair is no television personality, no souped-up fat cat who wants to be in the public eye (I'm deliberately ignoring the late night poker shows. Impartiality... hah!) Clive Sinclair is an entrepreneur, but also, and most importantly, an inventor in the truest sense of the word, like Trevor Bayliss and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Each of these, in their time, changed something about the world. Which sounds grandiose, but it's not much of a search to find fervent believers in Clive Sinclair. Scratch the surface just a tiny bit, and you'll find those who believe he changed the world of computing, in particular, rushing to the fore with tales of glorious childhood memories. (Or, in my case at least,  maybe childhood is a wishful thought...)

Clive's most famous achievement has to be the ZX Spectrum, which contrasts sharply with his most infamous creation, the Sinclair C5. Both were revolutionary, innovatively designed, cheap and undeniably cutting-edge. One was successful, the other was not. This, in a nutshell, is the pattern of Clive Sinclair's life - the direct result of mixing inventor and entrepreneur. A string of companies; a range of imaginative designs; some of it worked, some of it (with the best will in the world) simply didn't: Sir Clive Sinclair fits the inventor mould completely. And it all started way back in the 1940s...

1940: Life, Education And Early Employment
Born on the 30th of July, 1940, Clive Marles Sinclair was the eldest of three children. Growing up in Richmond, Surrey in the UK, Clive was greatly influenced by his father's, and indeed his grandfather's, career as an engineer. Invention and exploration were childhood pleasures for Clive, and he took it upon himself to excel in this area. At the age of ten his local school, Boxgrove Preparatory declared itself unable to teach Clive anything further about mathematics, and suggested it was time for him to move on to secondary education.

Around this time, the family machine tooling business became bankrupt. It was quickly rebuilt with much hard work on the part of Clive's father, Bill Sinclair, but as a result Clive's secondary education was somewhat disrupted, beginning at Highgate, moving to Reading and then to Dorking Grammar School. Despite this lack of consistency he finally took A and S levels in physics, pure mathematics and applied mathematics at St George's College in Weybridge.

Clive Sinclair's choice of subjects, given his later business interests, is no surprise. Linked together with Clive's own interest in engineering, his later career seems a natural progression. Already, at the time of his A levels, Clive was working on a simple radio circuit and, also, an article for Practical Wireless, which was eventually published. Progressing from this, when Practical Wireless advertised for an editorial assistant Clive quickly applied for, and got, the job. Understandably, his parents were concerned: they had expected Clive to progress to university, a fact Clive was well aware of when he told them it was merely a stop-gap holiday job. With no intention of going to university, it was a a stroke of morbid luck when the editor and assistant editor became ill, leaving the magazine in Clive's capable hands. A few articles a week, various circuit designs (some of which worked and some of which didn't), and Clive was already making a mark in the electronics world.

1961: Sinclair Radionics
Accepting better-paid work by Bernard Babani publishing house, Clive continued to design circuits and edit books until 1961, when he handed in his notice and registered Sinclair Radionics as a limited company. His intention, though ill-fated, was to find backing for a pocket transistor radio and release it for general sale. The backer withdrew support, leaving Clive unemployed, though he was quick to find employment with United Trade Press.

Sinclair Radionics Ltd. began to trade from Clive's home address, and quickly expanded to a two-room operation in Islington. Forseeing a need for a manufacturing and mail-order administration base, Clive formed strong links with Tim Elioart, who ran Cambridge Consultants Ltd., the administration wing of Clive's operation. Well-placed advertisements for Sinclair products quickly produced demand, and the familiar pattern of Clive's business operations emerged.

Innovative designs continued to receive advertising input, and orders continued to roll in. A mini-amplifier, the world's first digital watch and a miniature television further embodied Clive's business ideals: as small as possible, as cheap as possible, and produced in bulk. The Sinclair Executive was the world first slimline electronic calculator, arriving (as so many Sinclair products did) in kit form, ready for assembly.

The formula worked. Engaged by now, six months after the company was formed, Clive married Ann. A move to Cambridge in 1967 formalised the base of operations and firmed up the link between Clive's later projects and Cambridge. His marriage to Ann, incidentally, was to last twenty-three years, and produce three children: Belinda, Crispin and Bartholomew.

1980: Sinclair Computers / 1981: Sinclair Research
It is for his success in the field of computing that Clive will be most remembered. In 1979 Clive applied his business formula to computers, producing the MK14, a low-cost, miniature computer. It sold well, and quickly led to the ZX80, a device with a £100 price point, nearly £600 less than Commodore's similar offering. Mail order was still Clive's chosen distribution method, although the ZX80 was available ready-made, as well as in Sinclair's usual kit form. It was an undeniable success, and the new company, Sinclair Research was ready to expand to the US, trading in association with Timex. The ZX81 quickly followed, and was just as successful.

Then came the ZX Spectrum. Arguably the most successful of Clive's creations, and still based around Zilog's Z80 chip, the Speccy brought computing into millions of eighties households. Indeed, the advent of home computing at this time had much to do with Sinclair Research, and while there were other options available, the Spectrum was as much a driving force as any other machine. Follow-ups to the Spectrum, notable the 68008-based Sinclair QL, were less well received, and Clive's interest in computing seems to have settled, following the Cambridge Z88's good reception, and subsequent sale of the Cambridge Computers company.

1985: Sinclair Vehicles
Choosing, instead, to focus on modifying personal transport, Clive's C5 is almost a prototype for the Segway. Not in design: the C5's design was widely derided and even villified for being unsafe. The concept behind it, however, is very similar - a personal vehicle with an environmentally friendly slant, relying on electric motors and offering a practical solution to the traffic problems of today's modern cities. The C5 flopped, totally, and took much of Sinclair Research's money with it, necessitating a sale of the computer division and brand name to Amstrad. Despite this, personal transport remains an area Clive is keen to exploit, and he continues to manufacture his 'Zeta' add-on kits for bicycles, as well as producing an underwater propulsion device and a wheelchair drive unit.

Other Notable Achievements And Current Activities
In 1980, at the peak of his popularity, Clive became the chairman for British Mensa, a title he held until 1997. Also, during the eighties, he studied for a diploma at King's College, Cambridge, and was a Visiting Fellow Of Robinson College from '82 to '85. He was knighted in 1983, and from 1984 onwards he took the role of Visiting Professor for the Department Of Electronic Engineering at the Imperial College Of Science And Technology. Currently, Clive Sinclair lives in London, remaining focused on his engineering and inventing interests. Additionally, Clive dabbles in poker, occasionally appearing on Channel Four's Late Night Poker.

Driller

"When the Freescape idea was conceived several programmers approached turned down the opportunity to be involved, saying it couldn't be done." - Ian Andrew, Incentive Software

In the time before dedicated 3D graphics cards, true 3D games were a rarity. The most common approach was to fake 3D: often isometric projection was used, usually by carefully layering pre-drawn graphics - see Head Over Heels, Rasputin or Knight Lore for examples. There were some genuine 3D games, of course: Elite, with its simplistic (yet astounding) vector graphics, and Sentinel, whose filled vector polygons were a step up on Elite, but came with the disadvantage that they took longer to draw. Even with these precedents, upon its release Driller was considered an astounding achievement.

But this was late 1987. Incentive had spent some time developing Freescape, their trademarked system for displaying games in three-dimensions. It was slow - each screen took a second or so to draw, and consequently smooth movement was out. The game advanced in a series of one-frame-per-second cut scenes, but you could understand why; these graphics were amazing! Perfectly shaded polygons (at 176 x 256 stippled monochrome on my Spectrum 128) with perspective - you wouldn't give it a second glance nowadays, but back then to see that kind of thing on your screen was a rare treat. The Freescape engine lasted for a couple more games, as well: Both Castle Master and Total Eclipse would take the gameplay to a higher, more polished level, and the 3D Construction Kit allowed you to inflict your own levels upon unsuspecting friends.

Which is not to say the gameplay of Driller was bad, but compared to later efforts there was definitely something lacking. The game itself took place on the fictitious mines of Mitral, a small moon. For the purposes of the game this moon turned out to be eighteen flat, square panels joined together at the edges, forming a polyhedral surface. The original game provided a cardboard model to fold up and make, at which point it quickly became apparent that there were gaps on the surface of the moon - basically it was a rhombicuboctahedron and the triangular faces didn't exist as far as the game was concerned. Walking blithely over the map quickly resulted in death - drop off the edge of the wrong platform and you were done for.

Careful (and slow: don't forget that drawing delay!) exploration of the surface, however, provided plenty to do. All manner of buildings and vehicles cover the surface of Mitral. Plenty of puzzles to solve, switches to toggle, crystals to find and, of course, gas to release. Ah, yes - the gas. That's why it's called Driller. Your job is to release a build-up of gas under the surface of Mitral by appropriately positioning drilling rigs and pressing the right key to relieve the pressure.

We're told that Driller took a year to create, and upon its release the widely held opinion was that it showed. Your Sinclair's Phil South gushed over the graphics, describing them as 'brilliantly rendered' and described the 'quality of workmanship' as superb. Driller was, in its time, a milestone.

I never finished it.

Brett Leonard

Brett Leonard is a film director and producer from America. A number of his films feature computer animation effects which, at the time the films were made, were considered cutting-edge and groundbreaking. The Lawnmower Man, his 1992 film, used computer animation extensively, and a second virtual reality based film, Virtuosity, continued this trend. Hideaway and The Dead Pit, on the other hand, are fairly straightforward horror films, the first an adaptation of the Dean Koontz novel of the same name, and the second featuring a zombie-infested mental health facility.

Leonard is also known for his music videos - two for Peter Gabriel, two for Billy Idol and one for MC Twist. Gabriel's Kiss That Frog video is notable for being entirely computer generated; the first of its kind in 1993.

In 1998 and 1999, Leonard worked with the IMAX 3D format, producing T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous and Siegfried And Roy: The Magic Box. T-Rex became the first 3D movie to gross over a hundred million dollars, quite an achievement when you bear in mind it can only be viewed on the special IMAX screens.

Recent films include Man-Thing, a comic adaptation, Feed and the 2007 Highlander movie, The Source. Feed slipped under the radar somewhat, but is a surprisingly complicated film which is reminiscent of Se7en, Cell and The Silence Of The Lambs, dealing with the topic of 'feederism', and once again reflecting Leonard's fascination with the virtual world and its effect on real life. Now, of course, virtual reality is passé and the new fear is the internet; Feed reflects this change well.

Selected Filmography

The Dead Pit, 1989
The Lawnmower Man, 1992
Hideaway, 1995
Virtuosity, 1995
T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous, 1998
Siegfried And Roy: The Magic Box, 1999
Texas, 2002
Man-Thing, 2005
Feed, 2005
Highlander: The Source, 2007

The Fun They Had - Isaac Asimov

The Fun They Had is a short short story by Isaac Asimov. Its length of roughly one thousand words is nigh on perfect, however, for in those one thousand words Asimov produces a perfect children's story with a point that's just twisty enough for most kids. And it is aimed at children, there's no doubt, and the premise is almost laughably simple. Or it would be if the story didn't make an intriguing social comment on the nature of education as a socialising influence with such gleeful innocence.

Asimov was, apparently, rather at a loss to explain the popularity of the story, which was originally written in 1951 for a newspaper and later published in Science Fiction And Fantasy Magazine. Of course, the story's length and simplicity lends it well to school literature texts for younger readers, and the story received more requests for inclusion in anthologies than any of his other stories.

In the story, Margie finds a book. And books, in 2155, are pretty peculiar. 'I guess you throw it away once you're done with it.' her brother says, and they muse on how much better their electronic book readers are - you can use them over and over again. But this mysterious object from the attic is quite fascinating to Margie, and to Tommy too. Much more interesting, in fact, than the mechanical teacher, which Margie secretly hopes might break down forever. In Margie's book it tells her all about school, about meeting friends in the playground, about homework and sitting together with your own desk. You'll have guessed the point by now - it is aimed at children after all...

"Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had."

Rescue On Fractalus

Released in 1984, the Atari 5200 game Rescue On Fractalus was one of LucasFilm's early attempts to break into the computer game market. Working closely alongside Atari to produce Ballblazer and Rescue On Fractalus, LucasFilm subsequently went on to produce more games under first this name and, later, the LucasArts label.

Rescue On Fractalus, as the name imples, made extensive and innovative use of fractal geometry to produce the mountainous ranges of the planet. Nowadays, it is by no means the only game to have done this - Captain Blood featured similarly generated alien canyons - but at the time, particularly considering the hardware limitations of the Atari 5200, its graphics were quite stunning.

Stunning... if a little jagged. Early prototypes were known as Behind Jaggi Lines, a reference to the jagged streaks of cockpit that the player was forced to peer through. The jaggy lines became personal enemies of the programmers, and thus the alien forces in the game became known as Jaggimonsters. Alas, despite the development of now-common anti-aliasing technologies, the 5200's colour palette wasn't large enough to allow for fancy graphical techniques. Low framerates and jaggy lines all round, then...

Though best remembered for its fractal graphics, which provided the right level of geek-appeal, the gameplay in Rescue On Fractalus was similarly engaging. Originally conceived purely as a straight-forward rescue mission, George Lucas enquired about the location of the fire button. Rescue On Fractalus rapidly evolved to include gun emplacements, jaggi monsters, suicidal flying saucers and alien impostors, who will leap up and bang on the front window in a most alarming fashion. All of which leads many to believe that Rescue On Fractalus, solely by design rather than luck, was one of the best Atari 5200 games to be produced.

Programmed by David Fox, Loren Carpenter, Charlie Kellner, Peter Langston, Gary Winnick and David Levine, Rescue On Fractalus was released for the Atari 5200 in 1984. Previously it had been named Star Mission, Rescue Mission and the doomed, pun-laden Behind Jaggi Lines.

Vince Clarke

Vince Clarke is probably most famous as half of Erasure, the other half being Andy Bell, and one can get a pretty good idea of the 'Vince Clarke sound' simply from taking a trip through Erasure's twenty-four consecutive top 20 hits. For a more comprehensive overview, you'd have to take in his work with the early Depeche Mode, his acclaimed time as half of Yazoo (or 'Yaz' in the US) with rootsy blues diva Alison Moyet, and the various other projects he's had a hand in (West India Company, The Assembly, The Clarke And Ware Experiment, Robert Marlowe, Paul Quinn, Feargal Sharkey, Habit, Genderfix… I'll stop now; there's too many). Through his career, a strong association with Daniel Miller's Mute Records is evident, as is a preference for producer Eric Radcliffe.

Vince is an electronic musician, famous for his love of analogue instruments, although in later years he's started to branch out into digital. He's a competent guitarist, as well, but it's in the realm of synthesizers where Vince's genius lies. His particular brand of electronic music has a genuinely recognisable style, particularly when it comes to the instrumental pieces that scatter their way across the many b-sides of Erasure's work. Vince also remixes, occasionally, turning tracks from artists as diverse as Rammstein, Sparks, Happy Mondays or Polly Scattergood into shiny synthpop treats.

Vince currently lives in Maine with his wife Tracey and their son. At 48 years old and with no sign of Erasure slowing down, there's still plenty of synthpop heaven to come...

(Caption competition winner: 'Alison and Vince quickly regret accepting the Poltergeist soundtrack commission.' Thank you Mrs B. Smegma, Warrington.)

Multiface

The Multiface, product of Romantic Robot UK Ltd, was designed to be a multi-purpose interface. You can see where the marketing boys came up with the name...

The basic idea was quite simple. The Multiface 1, a small black box with a red button on top, was wedged into the expansion slot of your Spectrum where it would patiently sit, waiting to spring into action. One press of that red button later and up popped a menu allowing you to perform all manner of amazing feats.

Back up the entire contents of memory to cassette, cartridge, wafer or disk. Fill the 8k RAM extension with whatever sneaky code you could think up. Use the 'Multi Toolkit extension' to POKE around in the gubbins of your Speccy - infinite lives, anyone? And, last but not least, there was a Kempston-compatible joystick interface stuck on the side.

This was heaven! The Multiface 1 provided unprecedented access to the guts of your machine, and most importantly of all it allowed you to take a snapshot of your entire machine and 'back up' your games collection. And your friend's game collection. And, in fact, any games you could get your hands on. Depending on your moral standpoint, of course, which led Romantic Robot to make the following statement:

PIRACY IS ILLEGAL! 

MULTIFACE 1 is NOT designed to encourage PIRACY!

Please note that you must not use it to copy, reproduce or infringe in any way any copyright material without the clear permission of the copyright owner. ROMANTIC ROBOT neither condones nor authorises the use of Multiface for the reproduction of copyrighted material - to do so is illegal!

Technically, the Multiface was extremely clever. The Z80 processor at the heart of the Spectrum had a non-maskable interrupt line. This means little to most of us, but rest assured that when the red button was pressed, a NMI was triggered, and the Multiface quickly paged outthe Spectrum ROM, replacing it with an entirely new program: that of the Multiface. It was cunning, no doubt, but most importantly of all it allowed you to hack and crack those games with consummate ease...

Oh, and it only worked in 48k mode. So Romantic Robot developed the Multiface 128 and, in time, the Multiface +3, each designed to work specifically with those systems. With each incarnation came further benefits; compare the feature set of the Multiface +3, which offered transfer of programs from various formats, copying of screens to the printer, the use of DOS commands in 48k mode, and an expanded toolkit for fiddling about with memory contents.

In its time - that's October 1986 - the Multiface was one piece of equipment any hardcore Speccy owner had to have, despite its £40 price tag. The proof of this worth may well be its inclusion in so many emulators today, and you'd be hard pressed to find a latter-day Spectrumowner who doesn't have equally fond memories of their multiface.

But, the ingenuity of Romantic Robot doesn't end there, for the Speccy wasn't the only machine around with a solid Zilog Z80 chip sitting at the heart of it. The Amstrad CPC, too, was prime candidate for a multiface attachment. With much the same abilities as the Spectrumversion, the Multiface 2, 2+ and 2E caused similar joy in the lives of many Amstrad users...

Sinclair ZX-80

Although not truly the first Sinclair computer, that honour going to the MK14, the ZX80 is widely considered to be the machine that kick-started the home computer market, particularly as the MK14 has more in common with a calculator than a computer. Although, like the MK14, it was available in kit form, a ready-built version was also available, and it was this that made home computing accessible to everyone - not just those who were handy with a soldering iron and confident enough to assemble and solder together a hundred pounds worth of kit.

£99.99, actually. In 1980 the ZX80 became the first computer available in the UK for less than a hundred pounds, and these two factors - price and the fact that it worked right out of the box - led to an immense popularity, selling 70,000 units in about a year and easily paving the way for the success of the ZX81 and its worthy successor the ZX Spectrum.

Specifications:


Containing a total of twenty-one chips, the ZX80s specifications were groundbreaking, though now they seem almost paltry. At its heart was the processor: an NEC 780-1, a clone of Zilog's Z80 chip, running at 3.25MHz. RAM amounted to 1 kilobyte, and its display, black and whiteonly, could manage 22 x 32 text characters. Cassette ports were provided for loading and saving data, and there was an extra memory port which one could use to bring the RAM to 16K, sadly also exposing oneself to the dangers of RAM pack wobble in the process; one slight knock and three hours of work disappeared into the black hole of a hard reset. The ZX80 also included a 4K ROM chip containing Sinclair BASIC. There was also support for the Sinclair ZX Printer, released in 1981, provided you updated the ZX80 ROM chip.

The Operating System: Sinclair BASIC


Sinclair BASIC itself is worth a moment of reflection. Each key on the machine produced an entire keyword: pressing 'R' would enter 'RUN', whereas 'K' would produce the command 'LET'. Other commands were produced by using modifier keys such as shift. Although this approach introduced a slight learning curve, it had a number of advantages. Proficiency was quickly established through repeated use, and the system entirely avoided potential spelling errors, and allowed each command to take up only one byte of the precious 1024 available.

The minimalist design of the computer meant that the generation of the video signal was partly done in software, with the processor taking up most of the strain. This had the unfortunate side-effect that the display was blanked out whenever the processor was doing something other than waiting for an input. Moving graphics were, therefore, out of the question: if a program was running then the screen was blank. There were ways round this, but they were hardly efficient - one website offers a version of Space Invaders which hacks its way round the problem by repeatedly calling the display routines manually. The problem was partially solved with the ZX81, which allowed the BASIC interpreter to run in 'slow' mode, with graphics, or without them in a 'fast' mode. Moving on further, the Spectrum's hardware, with considerable improvements, had no such problems.

Design:

The physical design of the machine reflects two factors. Most prominently, the industrial design work of Rick Dickinson, who produced a white, plastic shell about the size of two paperback novels. Also clearly visible is the influence of the sub-£100 price tag. A one-piece membranekeyboard graced the top of the machine, threatening to wear out rapidly unless handled with care, a clear nod toward price-cutting.

America and beyond:


In February of 1980, the ZX80 was also launched in the US, at a price tag of $199.95, just one month before their release of the ZX81 in the UK. Later, American company Timex would begin selling the ZX81 as the Timex Sinclair 1000, halving the price tag to $99.95.

Finally, we reach the glory days of Sinclair Research: A year after its release in the UK, January of 1983 saw the Timex Sinclair 2000, more popularly known as the ZX Spectrum, go on general release to the American public.

Photosynth

Photosynth is a relatively new application from Microsoft Live Labs which takes a group of related photographs and analyses them to produce what they call a 'three-dimensional point cloud' of a photographed object or scene. Following that, the Photosynth browser plug-in allows one to view the object from any angle, limited only by the quality of the photographs and the extent to which they overlap.

Which all sounds very interesting. It basically means that you can move through a Photosynthed scene to see the photos from any angle, or to zoom in on areas of interest. You can see the actual position from which a photograph was taken, or look for the same scene from a slightly different position. Furthermore, because it's an online application, anyone can use it... or that's the theory, anyway.

Practically speaking, at present Photosynths can only be created on Windows Vista or Windows XP. Using Silverlight, anyone can view them, provided they're willing to install Silverlight. Perhaps one day there'll be true Mac or Linux support, but this is Microsoft Live Labs - why would it ship for anything other than Windows? Why would it embrace HTML5, or even, at a push, Flash?

Regardless; there are two stages to the Photosynth experience. Uploading and analysis is the first step. Your set of photographs are subjected to an algorithm that matches points of interest. Little chunks of image which appear in a range of photographs are matched up, and the program uses this to calculate the three-dimensional relationship between the images. Angles, distances, perspective - it's all put together into a 3D scene. They call it bundle adjustment, though it might as well be called reticulating splines for all I know, and in fact that might have been geekily amusing, had they thought of it. 'Bundle adjustment' sounds good, however, and once you've completed this one-off, rather computationally-demanding process, you can move on to step two. This is where the 3D point cloud is navigated using the Photosynth Viewer. The server stores the original photographs, and the client does the displaying and requesting. Natively, if you're a Windows user, and via the delights of Silverlight if you're not.

So, after reading all about it, looking at the comments on slashdot and the videos on YouTube, curiosity got the better of me. I played around for a short while and never quite got round to uploading my own photographs. It was interesting, and I had a bit of fun getting lost on the outskirts of the Taj Mahal, but in the end it was all rather underwhelming, considering the hype. At the moment, I feel there's more excitement imagining the underlying technology than actually using it; it takes me back to the days of finally managing to get the library to order The Science Of Fractal Images for me, or Martin Gardner's mathematical recreation columns. Maybe when there's a Mac version, I'll have another go, but at the moment it's not really worth rebooting into Windows for, let alone selling out and installing Silverlight.

http://photosynth.net/, if you're interested. Despite the amazing concept, I'm nearly ashamed to admit that I'm clearly not.

Your Spectrum / Your Sinclair

Your Spectrum: January 1984 - January 1986

then Your Sinclair: January 1986 - September 1993

Your Sinclair: A Brief History


Your Sinclair began life as Your Spectrum in January 1984, when Dennis Publishing realised there was a market for a magazine which catered specifically to to owners of Clive Sinclair's range of ZX Spectrum owners, with the occasional nod to the ZX80 and ZX81 crowd. A great success, the magazine continued for almost ten years, pausing only to change its name at the beginning of 1986 when Sir Clive looked set to branch out with a new range of computers. As it happened, the Sinclair QL made little impact on the world of computing, but the name change stayed.

The near-decade changed Your Sinclair considerably, and yet somehow the underlying ethos remained the same. Even when Your Sinclair reached the bitter end, its publishers having realised just how few Spectrum users there really were out there, the magazine went out with a bang. The final issue's back cover, showing two of the Your Sinclair troupe riding off into the sunset, was a sad moment for many a geek of the eighties: 'Our work here is done...'

Your Sinclair: A Little More Detail

Your Spectrum was launched in December 1983, direct competition to Sinclair User and ZX Computing. Your Spectrum quickly made its mark with quality games reviews, conducted by the Joystick Jugglers, and a screenshot to go with each one. With their own unique style ('In short, play Ghosts 'n' Goblins and you'll be grabbed by the ghoulies. And as a non-sexist note for that half of the population without ghoulies, don't worry - it'll give you the willies!'.) the Your Sinclair reviews were something special, even if you might not always agree. The magazine itself had plenty of colour pages, and the programming strength of the Spectrum was indulged in with plenty of hardware articles, as well as a focus on both BASIC and machine code programming.

Other popular columns included Hacking Away, which catered for the experimental nature of Spectrum users, dedicating a half page, at least, to cheating in popular games. Jet Set Willy, in particular, was better for this...

There were other delights, too, many focused on the writers themselves. Teresa Maughan, known affectionately as T'zer, became the breaker of a thousand hearts when she married after years of innuendo-laden commentary as the YS editor. Matt Bielby, her successor, did much the same for the rest of the world, and in later years Rick Wilson managed to get a badly-recorded song onto the cover tape. No-one knows how many people fell in love whilst listening to 'Hold My Hand Very Tightly' by Whistlin' Rick Wilson, the Rick Astley mocking alter-ego of staff writer David Wilson, but current estimates centre around zero.

1986, and Your Spectrum became Your Sinclair, scarce months before Clive sold his computing division to Amstrad. Not that it would ever have been known as 'Your Amstrad' - few Spectrum owners were impressed by Alan Sugar's takeover. This was, nevertheless, a period of immense popularity for the Spectrum. In this time, games became the main focus of Your Sinclair, though there remained a large focus on programming.

By 1988, Future Publishing had bought Your Sinclair, taking on a difficult challenge in the process. The 8-bit computer market was, at this point, dying. Games consoles were taking up residence in people's homes, reducing loading times for gamers and making life a whole lot easier for anyone who wasn't seriously into computing. The technical crowd, meantime, were switching to the Amiga or Atari ST - 16-bit computing was taking off. To counter the trend, Future Publishing began offering cover tapes, posters or booklets containing tips. All of which cost money, of course, and in the face of falling sales figures the content of the magazine suffered. By the end, Your Sinclair was considerably thinner, with very few articles actually focusing on new Spectrum games. Not that there were many... the glory days of the Spectrum had clearly come to an end, despite the best efforts of Sinclair, then Amstrad, and finally Miles-Gordon Technologies. The 8-bit era had to end sometime...

Other Fondly-remembered Bits

YS Badge: More prized than a Blue Peter badge, the Your Sinclair badge was a square, metal pin badge with the YS logo in red. It was awarded for having something printed on the letters page, more commonly known as Input/Output.

Doodlebugs: Send in a cartoon, have it printed. There was a new game for any cartoon printed.

SAM Surgeon: A later addition to the magazine, in which Robin Alway answered problems concering the SAM Coupé, including the burning question: what exactly happened to the much-touted machine?

YS Adventures: Text adventures were big on the Spectrum, and this column provided hints and tips for those who were stuck with The Hobbit, had no idea what to do with the crystal on The NeverEnding Story or couldn't cross the river on Mountains Of Ket.

Rage Hard: A look at new or upcoming hardware.

Program Pitstop: The joy of hex! After typing in a hex editor one could enter line after line of code, then eventually run it using the fabled 'RANDOMIZE USR' command. Alternately, BASIC programs were often listed in full, allowing the amateur programmer to type them in, edit them and generally cannibalise the bits they wanted, all to be squirreled away on cheap C60 cassettes.

Gil Amelio

Described by the press, in his time, as gentlemanly, charming, modest and thoughtful, it is widely agreed that Gil Amelio was presented with a nigh-on-impossible task as leader of Apple computer, and even more widely-agreed that he didn't do tremendously well.

But that sounds harsh. Because Amelio was successful in solving the immediate difficulties of Apple, focusing initially on the financial crisis, moving onto issues of quality control and the OS Strategy. It was this last item that Gil never quite got right; an endless series of failed and abandoned codenames formed a veritable dungeon of next-gen operating systems that would never see the light of day.

Amelio's problems, really, stemmed from the institutional nature of Apple Computer. Amelio was well aware that Apple was often accused (not necessarily incorrectly) of valuing innovation over competition, and his solution was a bizarre determination to split the hardware and software businesses into two separate parts, something which seems quite peculiar in the light of today's intensely integrated hardware and software. Even so, Amelio was not alone in this view, though even with the support of John Sculley, the idea of Apple becoming competitive didn't rest easily with the Apple institution. "If the hardware people needed to sell Windows machines, then they would." - blasphemy, surely?

What was worse for Amelio was the lurking spectre of Steve Jobs. After acquiring Next, Steve (possessed by the firm belief that Apple was different and that's how it would stay), was prowling round Apple's campus as an advisor. Apple's board, reminded of the old days, were only too keen to believe him. Apple may have bought NeXT, but NeXT took over Apple...

Amelio did his best. And at the end of it, on July 9, 1997, he resigned. Later, after expounding his views in the book On The Firing Line: My 500 Days At Apple, one is left with the conclusion that Gil Amelio did the best he could with an impossible task.

"Apple will not fix its problems just by being cool. I honestly think that Apple needs someone more like me than like Steve. What Apple needs, if it is ever to become a competitor, is a disciplined, professional manager."

Freescape

"When the Freescape idea was conceived several programmers approached turned down the opportunity to be involved, saying it couldn't be done."

(Ian Andrew, Incentive Software)

In the time before dedicated 3D graphics cards, true 3D games were a rarity. Many people will fondly remember Wolfenstein 3D, the first truly popular game which (like its contemporary, Ultima Underworld) featured a texture-mapped, three-dimensional environment. Prior to this, back in the days of the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and even the 16-bit machines, a more common approach was to fake 3D, either through isometric projection or careful layering of pre-drawn graphics. There were some genuine 3D games, of course: Elite, with its simplistic vector graphics, and The Sentinel, whose filled vector polygons were a step up on Elite. Even so, upon its inital outing as part of the game Driller, the Freescape system was rightly considered to be an astounding achievement.

This was late 1987. Incentive Software had spent some time developing a way of rendering a three-dimensional environment and allowing a player to move through and interact with it. It was slow - each screen took a second or so to draw - but you could understand why: these graphics were amazing! Accurately shaded polygons with proper perspective, not just isometric approximations. Perfect! Well, as perfect as a Spectrum's graphics got - you wouldn't give it a second glance nowadays, but back then to see that kind of thing on your screen was a rare treat. True 3D graphics, which could be moved through and viewed from any angle, all rendered in this perfect perspective: it was stunning.

Due to the intense calculations and the consequent framerate of less than one per second, the Freescape engine was suited more to adventure games than shoot-em-ups, though this was perfectly familiar territory for a company who was responsible for the Graphic Adventure Creator. Driller, the first freescape game, its box proudly boasting 'Solid 3D!', was released for Speccy and PC, with a plot based around a mysterious moon. Chock-full of problems and puzzles, it became intensely popular, and led to a release of Dark Side on the same platforms.

By this time the commercial success of Freescape was becoming apparent and the system was ported to the Commodore 64, allowing Total Eclipse, replete with ancient Egyptian feel, to be released for three platforms in 1988. Although now aging somewhat, the Freescape engine produced a couple more games of a similar ilk: both Castle Master and Total Eclipse took the gameplay to a higher, more polished level and also saw a release for the Commodore Amiga. The final outing for Freescape, opened out to all and sundry as the 3D Construction Kit, allowed you to inflict your own levels upon unsuspecting friends and, ostensibly, produce another Freescape masterpiece in your own living room.