Sinclair ZX80

Science of Cambridge had been set up by Clive Sinclair as a “lifeboat” when his previous company, Sinclair Radionics, begun to fail. The National Enterprise board had purchased a majority stake in Radionics, and Clive Sinclair was chafing under their management.

The first computer released by Science of Cambridge was the MK14, a simple microcomputer kit that had a numeric keypad and a 7 segment numeric display. It was a glorified calculator, truth be told, but it sold well and it meant that Clive Sinclair and his then-right hand man Chris Curry began to saw the potential of the nascent microcomputer market. This market was well-established, but machines like the Commodore PET retailed for around £700 and thus there were very few in homes; computers were the preserve of laboratories, commercial and (occasionally) teaching establishments.

In May 1979 the Financial Times had predicted that “Personal computers (could) drop to around £100 within five years”. Sinclair wanted engineer Jim Westwood to do it in a few months! They saw £100 as the magic number whereby people might be encouraged to purchase a machine largely out of curiosity and a wish to learn about computers. Priced at £99 for the assembled version and £79 for the kit version, the ZX80 was an immediate success and over 50,000 were sold – a huge number at that time.

The cost-cutting measures meant the ZX80 was comparatively primitive even compared to its contemporaries. The membrane keyboard was hideous to type on, it had no floating point arithmetic and the display would cut out whenever the computer was processing; the ZX80 could only show a screen when the CPU was idling, and in monochrome only. The ZX80 had no sound and only the most primitive of block-based character graphics. Nevertheless, the ZX80 made computing accessible to the British public for the first time. It created a new market sector that exceeded Sinclair’s wildest dreams and paved the way for the home computer market in the UK.