Review taken from Crash #39 - April 1987, piccy from NVG.
GENESIS
Uncle Clive has been plugging the idea of a portable machine since he first
began making computers - in fact, his first computer concept, the NewBrain,
was a portable machine. That was orignally developed in 1978 by his old firm,
Sinclair Radionics. Later it was sold off to Newbury Laboratories, who
launched it to an indifferent world in 1982.
As Radionics collapsed at the end of the seventies, Clive Sinclair set up a new firm, Science of Cambridge, with Chris Curry, a star employee from his previous firm. When Radionics finally bit the dust, Science of Cambridge was renamed twice - first to Sinclair Computers and then to Sinclair Research. No-one was the slightest bit surprised at this, as Science of Cambridge advertisements looked exactly the same as their earlier Radionics counterparts. The Sinclair link had been obvious all along.
RECURRENT THEMES
Clive has now sold his surname to Amstrad, but that doesn't stop him putting
CLIVE SINCLAIR (without the 'Sir') in large type at the top of the first
page of the Z88 brochure. The leaflet follows the usual Sinclair format, just
as the new company name follows on from previous titles.
Cambridge Computer seems to be run on something of a showstring. The Z88 was first revealed at a lunch for journalists at Sir Clive's house in London. Two days later a prospective customer arrived at the firm's Which Computer Show stand, and asked the name of the Sales Director. He was told, apologetically, that they hadn't got one!
Chris Curry has evidently been impressed by the ease with which Sinclair has kept the ball rolling from one firm to another. Curry set up his own company in 1979 - Acorn Computers - and he duly left Uncle Clive after the ZX-80, to work full time on his own. Acorn, like Radionics and Sinclair Research, had it's ups and downs and was eventually bailed out by Olivetti. Curry abandoned ship, but he's still in the game - he's the man behind the Red Box add-ons which we reviewed in the Christmas Special.
MORE PRE-HISTORY
Science of Cambridge avoided portable machines at first. They produced a tiny
bare-board computer called the MK14, and then the ZX-80 - the first useful
looking computer to sell for under œ100. The design of the Spectrum ROM is
closely allied to that of the ZX-80 with the ZX-81 - which actually was
useful - as an intermediate step between the two machines.
In 1980 we were told that the ZX-80 "would be linked to a flat screen display." In May of 1981 Sinclair upgraded his promise, announcing a version of the ZX-81 with a "four or five inch flat screen", scaled up from the Radionics pocket TV display...it never turned up - even in protoype form. In 1983 the QL was planned as a go-anywhere machine, with space for a column of U2 batteries along the back of the case. Portability went out of the window in the rush to get something on to the shelves, as the bottom began to drop out of the micro market.
GENESIS REVISITED
A design recognisably similar to that of the Z88 was born early in 1984,
partly in an attempt to salvage ideas left over from the development of the
QL and the LC-3. The low cost LC-3 was the first, unreleased Super-Spectrum.
It was scrapped in 1982, when a follow up didn't seem necessary, and Sinclair
Research turned to grander designs.
The details of the planned portable were published in February 1985, and it was scheduled for launch "in 1986". At this stage the machine was based around the Spectrum design, with a Z80 processor and support for Spectrum software. Built-in business packages were promised, along with "bank switched" plug-in memory cartridges. SA "proper light up display", again derive from the pocket TV, was considered essential.
"Liquid Crystal is rubbish", Sir Clive explained. "Nobody pursuing that avenue is getting anywhere. Nobody in the world has an answer to the flat display problem - except us."
PANDORA'S BOX
After a massive development effort, Sinclair engineers did manage to scale up
the Microvision display, but the result was not judged a great success. The
new screen used a combination of lenses and mirrors to project a picture in
the air between the lid and the base of the prototype machine. The idea was
ingenious, and it worked after a fashion - but it was heavy, greedy for power,
fragile, and ill-suited to mass production...and that's being kind!
This machine was dubbed "Pandora" inside the company. Like that of the "Loki" proposal which I demolished in August 1986, this name was rather an obscure joke. According to ancient myth, Pandora was a character who made the mistake of opening the box in which all the evils of the world were trapped, along with one more benign quality - hope. Opening the Pandora computer case could have released just about anything!
Under the terms of his sell-out, Sinclair is required to offer future computer designs to Amstrad. One look at Pandora was enough to put them off - the gave Sinclair permission to go it alone.
Continued Next Issue...