Britain, 1979. To most people in the
70's, computers were monstrous, bleeping big-brother machines the
size of a bus with hundreds of valves and great reels of magnetic
tape. They were expensive to run and difficult to understand, and
certainly, not something any of us would want at home.
Clive Sinclair, a serial inventor, thought differently. He saw
that the next step in modern computing was to create a small,
affordable machine that could be used alongside our existing
televisions and cassette players at home. His idea was to give the
general public a tool to learn, organise and play on, that they
could programme themselves.
So, in 1979, he gave us the ZX80 - a home computer with a 1KB
memory, no sound and a monochrome display. It may seem strange to
us now, but that temperamental (and sometimes glitchy) little
beauty launched the home computer industry that surrounds us
today.
Read the Sir Clive Sinclair film script
here (PDF link).