Alfred Milgram, president of Melbourne House and David Ahl chat about the ZX80, Sinclair Research, and two new books.
D.A.: Nigel Searle made an interesting comment about marketing kits by mail order. He said that kit builders in the U.K. generally knew what they were doing and there was very little trouble or returns, whereas in the U.S. it is entirely different. People buy a kit expecting it to be like a leathercraft or model car kit that any kid can assemble. Nigel told me of a person who called after buying a kit and asked, “What’s a soldering iron?” In the U.S., MicroAce sells a version of the ZX80. While there’s not a lot of soldering or assembly to do, people have to know or do have to handle the integrated circuits reasonably carefully. Static electricity is a real enemy, at least until the chip is installed. They also have to know that you can’t use the same sort of soldering gun that you use for your plumbing repairs to solder a printed circuit board.
A.M.: How is MicroAce distributing their product here? I don’t see them in the magazines, they are not visible.
D.A.: Strictly by mail order. They have been restricted by Sinclair from advertising in a certain group of publications that Sinclair has reserved for itself. Sinclair has more or less picked the top one or two magazines in each individual field and left the balance to MicroAce which is a policy, in my mind, to defeat MicroAce. What is the story on that? What actually happened between Sinclair and MicroAce?
A.M.: The people at CompShop have a history of copying. The guy behind MicroAce is the guy who runs CompShop in the U.K. At one stage they couldn’t get enough supplies from Ohio Scientific, so they redesigned the OSI Superboard and got the ROM from Microsoft. Now they are paying the royalties to Microsoft, have redesigned the board and are selling it as the U.K. 101.
Then the Sinclair came out and they figured here was a golden opportunity to save on development costs and come out with effectively the same machine. They copied the ROM, byte for byte, moved the circuits about, cleaned it up a bit, and moved the RAM memory away from the heat sink. The case is black instead of white, and they were going to market it in the U.K. for £ 50 as opposed to £ 70, the price of the ZX80. Sinclair got upset and sued them for breach of copyright. In the case two items were put up for breach of copyright: stealing the ROM and the keyboard. The judge said in effect, “I can’t read the ROM. Nobody can read the ROM. The ROM is not copyrightable. But the keyboard: that’s the same keyboard, anyone can see that.” They settled out of court.
D.A.: So Sinclair then licensed them to do a kit version?
A.M.: They allowed them, because at that stage they had gone quite a ways into manufacturing, and were already committed, with many thousand ROMs and printed circuit boards and all the rest of it. They couldn’t afford to pull out of it at that stage. So Sinclair allowed them to market it as long as they didn’t sell it in the U.K., only sold it in kit form, and complied with the restrictions on advertising.
D.A.: From what I gather there are people at Sinclair that would like to design peripherals and add-ons that specifically would not fit the MicroAce.
A.M.: One of the reasons they told me that they were not prepared to let the new ROM out, was that they did not want to be ripped-off in the same way. I don’t think they can really avoid it in the long run. Because basically anyone who has a MicroAce can go and buy a new ROM from Sinclair and pop it in.
D.A.: Will it fit?
A.M.: Yes, because it is a straight copy. The only thing that MicroAce has done is to add another 1K on board. Apart from that it is exactly the same machine. It has the same routines which all run in the same places, the same operating system, the same number of chips, it is basically the same machine. I can’t see how Sinclair can design anything that would not be compatible with the MicroAce.
D.A.: Tell me a little more about your plans. You mentioned two books, one on machine language programming.
A.M.: We’ve done exceptionally well in the U.K. with our first book, 30 Programs For the ZX-80, because it seems that the market is mainly people who have not bought a computer before and they don’t know what to do with the machine. We are finding that a lot of buyers are people who don’t even know how to enter a program. They are are just following blind, letter for letter. But the cost of the machine, in our mind, made it so it wasn’t worth marketing cassettes in the U.K. There are a lot of people who are marketing cassettes in the U.K. but they tend to have six or eight programs on one cassette.
There is a subgroup of users who are very interested in going further, and using the machine as a learning tool in developing their own programs. It is for those people that we are doing machine language programming and programming techniques. Programming Techniques is fairly basic. It uses the specific capabilities of the Sinclair. You could just buy a book on Basic programming, but the language isn’t quite the same because you are working with a subset. So you must know how to cope with certain limitations—not having a step function in loop, for example. The biggest difference is the totally dynamic display screen where the display shrinks and expands as you use the machine. So you just can’t poke in and out of the screen or easily move things about. Then there are the people who want to use machine language programming for its user subroutine capabilities. But again you need special advice beacause there is no RAM protected area.
There are ways of entering machine programs and yet being able to save them, because when you save a program on cassette you can save all the variables as well. So you can retain a machine languge program on tape and use it later.
D.A.: How do you save machine languge programs?
A.M.: In our 30 Programs book, several programs utilize machine language routines. We show two different ways of loading those routines into the program. The two simplest ways are to load it into a REM statement or to load it into a variable.
D.A.: Into a Remark statement? A machine language routine? How can it then be used?
A.M.: You make your Remark statement the first statement of the program. So you know its location. You poke the values into the Remark statement later on. Then, because you know absolutely its location, you can call up the subroutine. If you use a variable to poke it into, you have to remember that the computer is dynamic and every time you call a new variable it’s likely to shift in position. So you have to peek into the location which tells you where the variable storage starts.
D.A.: We received one article, in which someone showed how different characters—graphic characters—could be put on the screen to create a moving graphics display. It emphasized that you had to peek to the beginning or look at the beginning of the graphics display in the same statement that you poke because of the dynamic allocation.
A.M.: That’s true unless you have defined all of your variables first. However, you must remember that loop variables have a separate definition from your regular variables (because they are stored differently in the machine).
D.A.: Do you think that the 8K Basic will be any more standard?
A.M.: It is a step closer. It has step functions available, trigonometry and other scientific functions, decimal numbers, and string arrays. All of those things mean that the subset is that much closer to Microsoft Basic. What you don’t have is the ability to define variables and integers, which I think is very stupid, because you are wasting a lot of memory when you are just using ordinary integer arithmetic.
D.A.: Where do you see Sinclair going in two or three years? Do you see prices coming down, etc?
A.M.: I think Clive Sinclair is going to move out of the computer market. I think that what he should be doing is moving into the small businessman’s cheap computer. Because he has a reputation in the U.K. of being able to come out with a product which is technically brillant, but very cheap and very tinny. That’s what he does, and he does it very well. If he came out with a computer for £300 which would be very basic—a 16K machine with a one-page word processor, that could handle invoicing for 30 accounts or whatever you can get into 16K, and a very cheap printer for £200, it would sell an immense number of small business machines. But I don’t think he sees it this way. I think he is going to move out into other markets.
Sinclair is the first in the personal computer field who has come out with such a low price. But very soon there are going to be others who are going to offer better products for the same price. And he won’t be able to compete any more. He has been able to do well because he was first. And he has shown the potential that exists both in terms of technology and in terms of marketing. Just as he wasn’t able to keep up in electronic watches or pocket calculators, I don’t think he will be able to keep up in the computer field.
D.A.: Word reaches us that the next big thing that Sinclair is working on is “flat screen television.”
A.M.: He has been working on that for years and I think that he probably will do it.
D.A.: They claim that the flat screen television is being built and sets will be on the market by this December.
A.M.: I will be surprised if it is that early, because he has always had a problem with delivery. He will probably demonstrate a model by December.
D.A.: Is your machine language programming book going to take people by the hand assuming they don’t know anything about programming at all.
A.M.: The people who are involved in the ZX-80 users club in the U.K.—and they know the Basic very well—still don’t know how the user function works. They don’t understand how you get a machine language program to run. If that is at all typical, and I think that it is, then the people who have now taught themselves some Basic want something different. They bought the computer because they think it is time to learn about computers, and they don’t understand the way the machine language in the computer works. The ZX-80 machine language code is a very powerful one but it is also very complex. It is a very useful code; you can do a lot of things with it. Our book will try to put it within the grasp of every reader.