Be Excellent To Each Other

Nice archive of the Sinclair Research product designs from the guy wot made 'em. Loads and loads of pictures, sketches and photos of the ZX80, The Speccy and the QL as well as some other products.

http://www.theproductdesigners.com/archive.html

There's a picture of a white 48k+ which just looks superb. The transparent ZX80 is a sight to behold as well. Can't post them here as the site is Flash. There are sometimes captions if you hover over the photos.

Nice find.

Chinnyhill

<3 the ZX80. First computer I typed 10 print "hello": 20 goto 10 on

To hell with Flash.

ZX80 ZX81 Microvision
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/1222232290/

Spectrum
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/696932215/

QL & Vlsi
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/829121659/

Z88
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/830198530/

Gizmondo
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/786898453/

Oooooh, good find!

That white Speccy I was talking about:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/785746203/in/set-72157600607571866/

I think the original Spectrum looks quite contemporary with today's stuff - all the cool netbooks have island-type keys nowadays.

Speaking of netbooks, I really like this design:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/788939807/
... though perhaps it could do with one of those upside-down optical mouse sensors and a few mouse buttons.

The Wafer-Scale Integration idea really caught my imagination back in the day, where a whole wafer becomes the circuitry for the computer and the random flaws get routed around (instead of cutting a wafer up in to chips and throwing away the flawed ones). I love this WSI-based QL:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/789849034/

That white speccy looks like it is made out of lego!

The laptop style Pandora looks ace. Unfortunately, I doubt that the display would've been too amazing, judging from how blurry the screen was on my dad's first laptop (a 386 PC), and that was years after Sinclair's company went under.

The display Sinclair wanted to use was the same type used on his portable TV's, ie a small scale CRT that used a clever system of lenses to magnify the end display to something usable. Apparently special fonts had to be written to make the text legible.

The engineers weren't terribly keen on the unit due to the complications around having the kind of high voltages required for CRT operation hanging around in the case. The screens had to be overdriven and had a tendency to implode.

The famous journo Guy Kearny interviewed Alan Sugar after the Amstrad takeover and asked if Amstrad were going to continue development. The conversation went something like the following:



The whole concept was weighed down by the CRT display. The concept did end up in the Z88 however, but that used a more conventional LCD display. Sadly the Z88 was years ahead of its time, I remember the computer press taking the piss out of it in 1987. 10 years later everyone and their dog was selling units like it.

As he points out in the description, the mock up uses an LCD display and wouldn't have been seen by Sir Clive who was pushing his CRT technology. Kind of shows the state of Sinclair at the time with the boss having his fixed ideas and the engineers trying to work out a plan B because Plan A was barking mad.

I'm sure that there was a later device from Amstrad that was broadly similar, with coloured 'function' buttons. From memory, about the same time that the Amiga 1500 was available, so 1992. No idea what it was or how successful it was though.

The NC100 from 1992:



We've discussed it before. Still slightly ahead of its time in many ways as portable computing was still in its infancy. Laptops were still a rare sight at this stage and the NC100 was designed to bring portable computing to the masses at a affordable price. It had a half decent keyboard, ran on AA batteries and had a good Word Processor.

But if you were the kind of high powered person who needed a portable computer, you'd shell out for a proper laptop. The rest of us just looked at it and wondered what it was for.

For reference, the Z88 from 5 years earlier. NB the keyboard was exactly as you'd expect from Sir Clive......

Ah. thanks for that. That's the exact device. Did think at the time that it was a neat idea, a portable 'computer' but not quite a full laptop. Again, ahead of it's time concept-wise.

Psh, if you wanted a portable computer back in the day, you went for one of these bad boys

I knew someone who had one. Unsurprisingly it wasn't used portably, so it was just a computer with a crap screen.

FTFY. Not so much a "laptop" as a portable computer. I did see a fair few of them around prior to real laptops taking off.

By all accounts the Sinclair PC200 was just a rehash of this design.

Oh dear god, he's DOING IT AGAIN








NAAOOOOOOO!

Actually the enclosed bike is a far better idea than the C5, but it must be interesting to drive in any sort of crosswind.

It looks so 70s though.

Was just going to say, a bicycle that you can't ride if it's windy and is really unwieldy in traffic. Brilliant Sir Clive, brilliant.

And which when you get there won't really fit in a normal bike rack. Still at least it saves the crippling inconvenience of wearing a waterproof coat, as long as you don't mind getting wet from the sides, or completely drenched when you get splashed by a puddle.

If we lived in a flat country with dedicated cycle roads which run straight for miles between useful destinations, he'd make a mint.

I mean I'd love one, I really would, but I could never use it, I'd be killed the first time I went out on it, from the potholes (look at the size of the wheels) if not the traffic or 50mph winds.