The Home Computer Market, the ZX80 and the Future

Excerpts of a speech given to the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey, December 11, 1980.

I would like to describe what Sinclair has been doing — what we are doing, and what we plan to do. I would also like to speculate about what Sinclair and other companies in the small computer business might be doing 10-15 years from now. We are still in a very young business, none of us has been around for more than a couple of years, and another 10-15 years is going to make perhaps more difference than any of us realizes.

Sinclair is a company which has been involved in the consumer electronics business (calculators, digital watches. etc.). When we were designing calculators, particularly programmable and scientific calculators, we’d say, “wouldn’t it be terrific if we could design a computer that wasn’t much bigger than a calculator, but would be a real computer, programmable in a high level language.” It seemed as though it would be a long time before we could do that when we thought of it in 1973-1974. Technological advances have made it possible much sooner than anyone expected.

We introduced the Sinclair ZX80 in Europe in February 1980. and in the U.S. in August 1980. We’ve sold a large number of computers. To say that we have been successful is an understatement. We are still growing very rapidly. We’ve been selling exclusively by mail order and primarily to technically-oriented people. We choose our markets by the type of magazines we advertise in and. although we are beginning to advertise in consumer magazines, most of our sales have come from technically oriented people. We certainly don’t intend that that will always be the case.

The Home Computer Market

We think that our success has proven the home computer market, which people talked about four and five years ago. and which they became diverted from because of the greater profits and the readier market in the small business area — that true consumer market (personal, home. etc. but definitely not small business)— does exist. The sales of our ZX80 have shown that. At the same time that we are not selling a small business computer, neither are we selling a home entertainment computer. The Sinclair ZX80 is not the greatest computer on which to play “Space Invaders.” We do have such a software package coming out but it doesn’t have sound or color and its graphics are not high resolution. There are other disadvantages from the games and entertainment point of view which we will come to in a moment.

We are selling a serious computer for use in a particular application. Very often that application is education — the user’s own education or his children’s education. We are selling it to individuals who are paying with their own after-tax dollars and not with the tax deductible money of a business. So we have shown, I think, and certainly we have satisfied ourselves, that the personal computer market really does exist and there is no reason to believe that it won’t go on growing. We are, of course, doing some of the things which we believe will help it to grow.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about our success so far— and we have sold literally tens of thousands of units, in excess of 50.000 units world wide — is that this unit has an integer-only Basic, has just 1K bytes of RAM, has virtually no application software, and has no off-the-shelf peripherals as of today. Obviously we expect the market to grow as we provide those things. The highest priorities on our own list. i.e. items that will be manufactured by Sinclair, are a 16K RAM module, which comes in a small case about 2.5″ square and plugs in to the back of the main board through an edge connector.

Our next add-on option for the unit will be an 8K extended Basic, which will no longer be integer, but will be a fully floating-point Basic with multi-dimensional arrays, powerful string handling capabilities and a whole host of other features. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that just as our 4K integer Basic is considerably more powerful than Radio Shack’s Level 1 Basic, so our 8K Basic will be considerably more powerful than Radio Shack’s Level 11 Basic and. indeed, more powerful than Microsoft’s 8K Basic. We are also working hard to produce exciting applications software.

Consider VisiCalc. It stands almost all alone as a software package, it is so good that people buy computers just to use VisiCalc and never use their computer for anything else. It may be that VisiCalc is the only software package that justifies the $1000-$2000 expenditure to buy an Apple, Atari, Commodore or whatever.

We envisage that there will be a lot of software packages that are to the ZX80 what VisiCalc has been to those larger computers. Our software packages will certainly be very powerful, but it doesn’t take as much to persuade someone that it is worth going out and spending a couple of hundred dollars to be able to use a particular package. We have some software packages, which are scheduled to be released soon that 1 think are going to be as well known a year from now as VisiCalc is.

Not only has Sinclair satisfied itself that there exists a huge consumer market, but other people also have been persuaded that there is a large market. Consequently, Sinclair is not the only company that is working to support the basic product. In addition support provided by publications such as SYNC magazine, there are at least three independent companies that are far advanced in their plans to manufacture and market hardware and peripherals for the ZX80, including a general purpose interface which will include an RS-232 and also support disk drives. There are numerous companies developing software and printed materials. Image Computer Products is the semi-official software supplier in the U.S. for the ZX80. While most of the programs in their current catalog, because they are designed to run on the basic 1K machine, are certainly no great advance on anything you have seen before. Image is working hard on more advanced, complex programs which will be available as soon as the larger memory and extended Basic are available.

ZX80 Features

Some of the features of our machine that make it appealing to the first time user include the following:

Any line of Basic or command at the system level that you enter to the machine will appear at the bottom of the screen. When you enter a line into the program it will go to the top of the screen. The cursor originally appears as a “K,” for “keyword.” a Basic command word. As long as you only enter digits they will be entered and the cursor will move along and remain in the “K” mode. As long as the cursor is in the “K” mode you can enter at a single key stroke any of the Basic command words that are available. It will be entered and appear in its full format as a result of a single key stroke. So without the use of a shift key or anything else you can hit a single key and get “SPACE PRINT.”

This feature eliminates a great deal of typing and is extremely convenient when you get used to it. More importantly, the ease of input is mirrored by the simplicity and economy of storage, because the seven characters involved in “SPACE PRINT SPACE” are stored internally as a single byte. Offering a machine with only 1K bytes of user memory, we had to be very mean in our use of memory and thus we have employed a number of tricks, or data compression techniques, to minimize the amount of memory the program storage takes.

The 1K bytes of user memory are dynamically allocated between program storage, working space and display. There is no separate video circuitry in the machine. As you get close to your memory limit with a program being stored, you have a decreasing amount of memory available for the storage of the information which is to be displayed to the screen. You then have to look at the results of your program in chunks. It will display as much as it can — usually a full screen, but sometimes 3/4 full— and then you have to continue execution to see the remaining results. Obviously with a 16K memory it is going to be relatively rare that you would run into that constraint. The boundaries in the memory are not fixed; there is no memory mapping.

If you enter a character such as + (plus) and say PRINT + . the machine recognizes that that is syntactically incorrect. That is not a meaningful statement in the Basic language. There is no way that a PRINT + can ever be continued in such a way as make it a statement, therefore the machine, indicates with the symbol “S” a syntax error. By its position it tells you where the error is located and, thus you must make a change at the point indicated before the line will be accepted into a program.

If you are a beginner learning to program, you won’t have the frustration of entering a large program only to find at run time that you have put a comma at every place you wanted a semi-colon or that you misused some other feature of the language. You will be made aware of any syntax error in your program before you can complete that line of the program.

One of the disadvantages of the machine which makes it unsuited for games applications is that the microprocessor drives the display. Consequently, when it is computing it isn’t displaying and when it is displaying it isn’t computing. When you tell it to EXECUTE a program, it goes ahead and EXECUTES the program and when it is finished it displays the results. It tells you at the bottom where the execution terminated and what the termination condition was. Because we never allow a program to be entered with syntax errors in it, the termination errors are few.

After manufacturing was started, some of our workers decided to make the ZX80 compute and display at the same time. They were successful, and there will in some future version of the ZX80 be the facility to compute and display. Some people have already written machine code routines which enable the existing machine to display and compute. It is programmable in Z80 machine code but there is not an assembler available at the present time. There are PEEK and POKE commands and you must enter the machine code instructions one at a time with a POKE command. You can then call and execute them with a USR command.

Future Speculations

I would like to take the opportunity now to speculate. I am going to present some fantasy rather than fact, but I believe that it is in the nature of most science fiction— fiction that will come true.

1 think we are going to see the development of at least three different types of what have hitherto been known as personal computers, to serve the needs of three distinct markets. One of those markets will be the small business market: one will be the educational market; and the third (of which the ZX80 is perhaps the first) will be a market for truly personal consumer-oriented computers.

Within each of these markets, let’s consider three elements of computer system design. In particular, what will be the primary means of input to a personal computer? What will be the primary method of data and program storage? What will be the primary means of output?

Future Types of Input

Each of the three markets— business, education and personal— have different needs in each of those areas. If one allows one’s imagination to run wild it would seem that the most convenient method of input for a personal computer would be to communicate with it the way we communicate with anything else that we think is intelligent, the way we communicate with other human beings. That is, we should be able to speak to it and have it understand us in a fairly free format manner.

Obviously, a lot of people have thought about that and some people have done something about it. In fact, one company sells a voice input peripheral for less than $120 and is going make a version of it for the ZX80. At this stage, it’s capability is limited to a small number of commands that you have to speak fairly consistently in order that it will understand. I have no doubt that speech input will be the primary method, if not in the next 10 years then in the decade following, for the personal/ consumer computer.

When you come to the business computer. I think the keyboard is going to remain the dominant method of entry. Business has a huge pool of people who are used to using keyboards, who can use them very effectively, and will continue to do so. The typical business executive is not going to be interested in learning to use a keyboard any more than he or she has been interested in learning how to use a typewriter, a copying machine, or any other piece of equipment in his or her office. The business executive is not even going to be interested in learning how to talk to it. It will always be easier for him to buzz his or her secretary on the intercom and say “Do this or that on your computer or computer terminal.” It is going to be easier for him or her to get something done than to do it for himself. Consequently. I think the primary method of input for small computers in business is going to be via a typewriter keyboard by exactly the same people who use keyboards now in business.

On the other hand, the educational market has, at a certain level, a requirement for input that isn’t served by either voice or keyboard input. I’m thinking of the young child for whom I think the personal computer is going to be a large part of his or her life and education. Clearly that child is not going to be able to use a keyboard with facility, nor is the child readily going to be able to learn to speak to the computer in a way that the computer will understand. In fact, one reason that child will use the computer for education is that he or she cannot do those things with facility. I think the primary method of input for the home education market is going to be a touch sensitive screen.

So we have for the three main market areas three methods of input: speech for the consumer computer, keyboard for the business computer and touch video for the educational market. I don’t want to suggest that these are the only methods of input that are going to exist or that they are the only ones that are going to exist in those markets, but I think they are the primary ones.

Memory and Data Storage

Just as we have found out that the disk is more convenient than cassettes. I think we will find that bubble memory or something of equivalent capacity, convenience, speed and low potential cost will be far superior to any medium such as disk, stringy floppy or cassette where you have one device that reads and writes the data and another medium on which you store the data. For both the consumer and business markets. I feel the primary method of data storage is going to be bubble memory or its equivalent if it is overtaken by some other technology with similar but improved characteristics.

In the educational market there may be a need for something that will look very much like a video disk. There seems to be a demand for a large quantity of data in excess of what can be stored within any affordable amount of bubble memory. The same programs which teach a child a given discipline in 1990 will probably be perfectly adequate in 1995. So there is a demand for a huge amount of data that does not change. I think that the video disk or something very similar to it is going to meet that need.

In the business and consumer markets there will be a heavy dependence upon remote data banks, with software programs and data being down loaded from a larger system at high speed over a telephone line. I foresee problems with being in constant communication with a remote data bank, but I feel the down-load mode is going to be extremely important. It also solves what otherwise will become a major problem of piracy of both software and data. It will be cheaper for a one-time download than to make a copy and have a means of storing that data or software.

Output in the Future

For the consumer computer I have no doubt that the primary form of output is going to be video. It has the huge advantage that most of us can and still will be able in 20-30 years time to read. We can take in a lot of data at once, far more than we can hear. We can see far more at a glance on a screen. The screen need not be large as long as the resolution is there, a screen of 2″diagonal is more than sufficient to present the information that most of us would require. We can look at a 2″ screen with sufficient resolution and see what we want as readily as we can look at a 2″photograph or read that area on the page of a telephone book.

In the educational area video is not so useful. Although I have suggested a touch sensitive screen, probably more important to the educational market for the child is sound output. A child will respond to sound better than to video. It will capture his attention when his attention might have wandered from the screen. It will convey information to the child which cannot be given visually because the child can understand the spoken word but can’t read with great facility. Indeed the computer might be doing the job of teaching the child to read.

In the business market, I forsee primarily printed output. Again, there will be a screen on the small business computer or office terminal. But for the same reasons I cited before, when a business executive wants to see last week’s or yesterday’s or the last hour’s sales figures, he or she will push a button and say. “Get me the sales figures.” The screen and the keyboard will be outside the executive’s office. Somebody will key in the information necessary to get the required data, and that data will come out on a sheet of paper, which can be handed to the boss. That is the way business executives deal with information— on paper. I think there will be a major problem getting them to deal with it on a screen.

In the business market I see something that is going to be operated by the people who today operate typewriters. It will look exactly like a typewriter with the addition of a screen. It is going to look like one of today’s word processors. It will have a keyboard to key in information and a very extensive solid state memory of its own. It will be connected remotely to larger computers and will have printed paper output. It will also have a screen for editing, word processing etc.. but that will not be the primary method of output. Strangely enough, I don’t see, in the one area that has already adopted small computers, a great deal of change.

In Summary

In education, I see a computer with a screen that will serve as an input device almost as much as an output device with a heavy dependence on sound output. It will probably have some voice input, depending on the age of the child and, in many instances something equivalent to a video disk that has the lessons— in David Ahl’s words, the “courseware”— on the disk.

That is not vastly different from the way in which computers are being used today in schools, although the system I am speaking about will be widely used in homes. However, while I say the system will not look that much different from the ones in use today, it will be vastly more powerful and less expensive.

It is in the personal area, in which I have suggested that the ZX80 may be the first computer, that I see the greatest change. I have suggested that the computer will have speech input and video output, for which a 2-3″ diagonal screen will be quite sufficient. The memory will be of a bubble type that will be extremely compact and in which we will see the same type of advances that we have seen in semi-conductor memory over the last 15-20 years. The only other thing that will be needed is some means of connecting this computer to a telephone line so that you will be able to get data down-loaded from a large computer. Just as calculators took 10 years to get to their present size, so personal computers will be the size of the calculators of 10 years ago. And they will incredibly inexpensive.

Ubiquitous and Essential

However, what will be expensive is the capability to utilize the power that will be put in your hands, and I think that will create a major social change. Not because there will one group of people who can afford the “credit card computer” and another group that can’t: the question is who will choose to use it? Who will have the imagination and the basic education to use it? Maybe with the use of computers in education everybody will, but initially I think there will be a two groups of people that have been described by someone else in contrast to the haves and the have nots. These will be the “knows” and the “know nots.” There will be some people who will know how to gain access to and manipulate for their own advantage just about any piece of information they can possibly wish to have. The “credit card computer” will revolutionize the way you do your job and the way you live your life. This card will replace all the others. It will be your electronic funds transfer card; it will be your personal ID; it will be everything. It will be so important to you that if you use it and integrate it into your life, you would no more go out of your house or indeed be anywhere in your house without your card, than you would without your clothes. About the only place you won’t have it with you is in the shower.

I hesitate, but only momentarily, to go one step further and suggest that instead of looking 15 years ahead we double the period and look 30 years ahead. You may have the opportunity in 30-40 years time literally to insure that you will no go anywhere without your computer because it will be inside your body. Of course that will require that it be interfaced with your brain so that all you have to do is think that you would like to know the contents of page 73, volume 21, of The Encyclopedia Britannica, and no sooner will you have thought it than you will see it. That I believe is not impossible. I am not sure that it isn’t dangerous. I know what is dangerous, and that is to think that it is not possible, if indeed it is going to happen. That is really dangerous. So whether we like it or not. whether we are scared by it or not. it is something that we need to think about.

Note: Nigel Searle was an employee of Sinclair Research, Ltd.