7 ms·

Unfortunately, as calculator prices collapsed, so did Sinclair Radionics' profits, and the company was broken up in 1979 after heavy losses. He fought Moore'

by 6ren 13y ago

Unfortunately, as calculator prices collapsed, so did Sinclair Radionics' profits, and the company was broken up in 1979 after heavy losses. He fought Moore's law, and the law won. But this whole thing reminds me of Woz's work in the first Apples. Why wasn't his genius work similarly wiped out? Soon after the Apple, there were dozens - hundreds - of new personal computer manufacturers. I think it's software. The value of a platform is what you can do with it. Software increases what you can do, therefore increases the value of the platform. There's increasing returns, so once it gets started, it gets harder and harder to stop. Branding is also important (Jobs), which is why the Apple eventually fell to the "PC" - because the strongest computer brand in the world for decades was IBM.

WalterBright 13y ago
VisiCalc on the Apple had a huge contribution to its success. It was the proverbial "killer app" that drove Apple II sales.
- lutusp 13y ago
  Yes, that and Apple Writer. Full disclosure: I wrote Apple Writer.
  - nogoodnik 13y ago
    Thank you for writing Apple Writer. 1. I wrote most of my high school reports on it. 2. I once wrote a set of WPL programs to automate the generation of multiple-choice tests, and sold it for $50 to my uncle who was a physics teacher. 3. Apple Writer was the second program I disassembled from beginning to end (the first was Locksmith Fast Disk Copy), learning a lot in the process.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > Thank you for writing Apple Writer. You're welcome! I know this is a predictable remark, but I miss the good old days. The Apple II was so simple and understandable that I was able to write a program that played two musical notes at once (I called it the "Electric Duet"), in tune, and a fairly tolerable sound, even though the speaker was driven by a TTL output (meaning no analog level control). If the Apple II had had interrupts, my program would have stopped working. I know this because an Apple II successor supported a mouse, the mouse required an interrupt, and it ruined the performance of my program. Oh, I almost forgot -- Tom Clancy wrote "The Hunt for Red October" on Apple Writer.
      - joezydeco 13y ago
        And thank you for writing Electric Duet! That program inspired me to (cough) take it apart and understand how something so cool could come out of the Apple II's speaker. That exercise taught me 6502 opcodes and I've been working in embedded systems ever since.
        lutusp 13y ago
        Looking back, I realize I must have spent two weeks just writing the Electric Duet player, because the time through the player loop had to be constant. The loop read through the notes to be played, synthesized them, and changed their duty cycle, but had to use the exact same number of machine cycles regardless of what it did, so the music stayed in tune. Near the end of the project, I had two problems: the music was slightly off-pitch -- middle A wasn't exactly 440 Hz -- and the number of machine cycles wasn't quite constant (it varied between 40 and 41 cycles depending on which branches the code took). Finally I realized I could insert a single NOP (no-operation) instruction at a critical location. The NOP forced the number of cycles to be a constant, regardless of the path through the loop, and I then realized that it also slightly changed the output frequency to be tuned exactly right. I will always remember that moment. :)
        joezydeco 13y ago
        I've had similar situations, but never as victorious as that. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that story....(now I want to get that code back somehow and look for that NOP)
        NotAnEngineer 13y ago
        Horribly off topic, but what is the current status of the Electric Duet player routine? I read somewhere that you had placed it in the public domain in the 90s, but I can't find any confirmation of that.
        lutusp 13y ago
        I didn't really "place" it in the public domain, I just let nature take its course. The inevitable result is that there are now only versions of the program online in which my name and copyright notice have been removed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDtXflMBmw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDtXflMBmw I searched for the original program online, but couldn't find it -- only the pirated version. By "pirated" I mean someone has removed my copyright notice and offered the program as their own, successfully replacing the original in all online archives.
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    Apple Writer made me the writer I am today. (To this day, I rarely compose paragraphs more than a few dozen words long.)
  - TheCrownedFox 13y ago
    Is this you? http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi... If so, how do I end up end where you are, in regards to wilderness programming and whatnot? Do you have a book (of any sort)? That's my dream.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > Is this you? > http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi... Yep, that's me. > If so, how do I end up end where you are, in regards to wilderness programming and whatnot? Rather than try to duplicate my story, why not see how yours turns out? I bet it will be just as interesting. > Do you have a book (of any sort)? Only a free one about my around-the-world solo sail -- it includes lots of stories about my technological adventures: http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html You can read it online or download a free Kindle file.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    I think I said this before, but thanks for writing GraForth and TransForth. Besides limiting the Dijkstra damage from my exposure to Basic, it probably inspired the processor i designed in college - it was a stack machine and its assembly language was very Forth-like.
ck2 13y ago
Apple fell to the PC because the hardware was a fraction of the price since clones were allowed to exist in the PC world. Apple sued their clones out of existence. Might all be using Apple today if they had not. Then they eventually switched to pc hardware themselves.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Tloewald 13y ago
  Apple seems to be still around. You can google it to check. Apple's problem with PC was initially simply that IBM sold the PC. For many years PCs were more or comparably expensive and much less useful than Macs, but sold because they were backed by IBM. And Apple did very well despite its lower market share until John Sculley started listening to pundits and lowered prices in the early 90s. Even so that worked Ok until Spindler listened to more pundits and started allowing clones.
epo 13y ago
Sinclair's branding was huge in the UK, but you can only sell so many calculators and the leapfrog in sophistication in those days was breathtaking. Technologies plummeted in price within months.
kryptiskt 13y ago
One unnamed reason for Sinclair Radionics' falling apart was their digital watch, Black Watch, which was the ultimate example of Sinclair's infamous cost cutting and lack of quality control. http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm
- bolder88 13y ago
  Surely also ridiculous diversions such as the C5 electric car. "Micromen" is a fantastic drama of the period... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE
  - Zenst 13y ago
    At the time of the C5 I worked for one of the then government owned utility companies which had shops selling the C5. Was able to get a staff discount but was told of of the 2 seater version with a roof that was planned for release and saw pictures and spec etc, so I waited. Great idea, ahead of it's time engineering and attitude wise as well. Did not even have rare earth magnets, seen C5's with rare earth magnet motors instead of the stock motor and they are dangerously fast. Today we are slowly getting there, though cars still designed for everybody with a 4-5 member family with a boot of shopping all the time and the other end is a motorbike. Still a car/bike electric combinations do appear, albeit not mainstream and most put of from the safety of getting hit by others as you are smaller on the road effect. Which makes you think about the limitations of a vehicle that is surrounded by taller and larger ones, why we now start to believe in bike lanes. Which was a factor back then and why the C5 never kicked off enough to make the C10 and C15 go into production beyond the prototypes sadly and C5's started coming with a flag pole akin to a football/soccer corner post style pole and flag.
    - bolder88 13y ago
      I'm not sure I agree it's a good idea at all. 30 years later, and the electric car market is still miniscule. There might start to be a market demand for them when petrol is at least twice as expensive as it is now. But there's some wiggle room to reduce the tax on it a lot.
abecedarius 13y ago
Good point, how calculators differed from computers. Branding surely helped IBM establish the PC, but against Apple what mattered was its years-later entry to the 16-bit world, with a relatively closed system, with high margins. Apple had a shot at 16-bit dominance but missed. (They came out with the Apple 3 and Lisa first.)
CamperBob2 13y ago
Why wasn't his genius work similarly wiped out? A good question. I'd say that the Apple II family survived longer than it deserved to because the hardware was so nice. Woz combined classical hacker insights with a look-and-feel quality ethic that the Commodores and Ataris couldn't live up to, being designed to target a price point beyond all else. Sure, those computers could do tricks with graphics and sound that the Apple couldn't match -- but if you wanted sharp, readable 80-column text for word processing or VisiCalc work, your only options were an Apple //e at $1500 or a similarly-equipped Tandy or IBM PC for well over $4000. Apple's huge array of (relatively) low-cost peripherals also helped it compete against other platforms in the early days. These aspects weren't sexy but they were important to lots of home and small-business users. Famously, the company was also smart enough to target K-12 education, which cultivated their marketplace from the ground up. Once again, the impression of quality versus the low-cost 8-bit competitors would have helped them do that.
- vidarh 13y ago
  I agree Apple did well by getting entrenched in the education market in the US. Combined with Tandy's failure to follow up, and Commodore's incessant bungling in the US market (such as repeatedly pissing off their dealer network by letting their dealers absorb unannounced price changes) and decision to send most of its stock to Europe where they got higher margins, that explains more of it than lack of alternatives. In Europe, Apple remained virtually unheard of until the Mac compared to Commodore, Atari and homegrown brands. Largely thanks to its European market, Commodore still massively outsold Apple in terms of units shipped up until well into the Mac got popular - it's just that by the time the IIe started getting traction, Commodore had abandoned the high end and gone for volume, and by the time they went after the high end again, it was 1985, and Commodore's brand and sales channel in the US was even more tied to the cheap gaming image. But if you wanted sharp, readable 80-column text you had several alternatives at the time of the IIe launch, at around the same price range, both from Commodore and others (from Commodore, the later entrants in the PET range - one is actually on display in my local library - as well as the ill fated Commodore B128-80) Most of the other entrants that could compete for productivity applications in the same price range were from small unknown companies or insufficiently compatible with anything to get enough software, though, and so had little chance.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Branding is also important (Jobs), which is why the Apple eventually fell to the "PC" - because the strongest computer brand in the world for decades was IBM. IBM's deeply entrenched position in supply office equipment (pre-PC computers, sure, but lots beside) to business played a role in securing PC dominance over Apple in the personal computing market, but so did the fact IBM didn't protect the PC from clones (IIRC, this was not intended) or acquire exclusive rights to DOS, which resulted in both more variety and more low-price options in the "IBM PC-compatible" family.
binarycrusader 13y ago
As Doug Fisher said at JavaOne, "hardware without software just generates heat". Software brings the real value to hardware.
memsom 13y ago
But Sinclair went on to kick start the UK Microcomputer industry. The ZX range (Aka TS range in the States) was one of the most popular an influential home computers of the 8-bit era. I think only the C64 beat it world wide. it was also one of the most cloned systems as Brazil, Russia and many other Eastern European countries cloned it and extended the original design. Apple was niche and mostly unknown in the UK at the time. The Apple II never really made it here.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Not as a home computer as it was expensive it did have a good run in the business market but in the UK the PET was probably the no 1 business PC. I can still remember humping various PETs in and out of Olympia for trade shows - and I still recall the various tricks you used to make sure that disks copied correctly.
- epo 13y ago
  > But Sinclair went on to kick start the UK Microcomputer industry. Not even remotely true. There was a large homegrown industry (I worked in Cambridge at the time). Sinclair was a well-known early player but many others grew up at the same time and independantly. For a time it was known as the "Cambridge Phenomenon". What did spring from Sinclair was Acorn. If anything kick started the UK microcomputer industry it was the Cambridge University Computer Lab where Sinclair and others got much of their talent.

by 6ren 13y ago

WalterBright 13y ago

VisiCalc on the Apple had a huge contribution to its success. It was the proverbial "killer app" that drove Apple II sales.

lutusp 13y ago
Yes, that and Apple Writer. Full disclosure: I wrote Apple Writer.
- nogoodnik 13y ago
  Thank you for writing Apple Writer. 1. I wrote most of my high school reports on it. 2. I once wrote a set of WPL programs to automate the generation of multiple-choice tests, and sold it for $50 to my uncle who was a physics teacher. 3. Apple Writer was the second program I disassembled from beginning to end (the first was Locksmith Fast Disk Copy), learning a lot in the process.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > Thank you for writing Apple Writer. You're welcome! I know this is a predictable remark, but I miss the good old days. The Apple II was so simple and understandable that I was able to write a program that played two musical notes at once (I called it the "Electric Duet"), in tune, and a fairly tolerable sound, even though the speaker was driven by a TTL output (meaning no analog level control). If the Apple II had had interrupts, my program would have stopped working. I know this because an Apple II successor supported a mouse, the mouse required an interrupt, and it ruined the performance of my program. Oh, I almost forgot -- Tom Clancy wrote "The Hunt for Red October" on Apple Writer.
    - joezydeco 13y ago
      And thank you for writing Electric Duet! That program inspired me to (cough) take it apart and understand how something so cool could come out of the Apple II's speaker. That exercise taught me 6502 opcodes and I've been working in embedded systems ever since.
      - lutusp 13y ago
        Looking back, I realize I must have spent two weeks just writing the Electric Duet player, because the time through the player loop had to be constant. The loop read through the notes to be played, synthesized them, and changed their duty cycle, but had to use the exact same number of machine cycles regardless of what it did, so the music stayed in tune. Near the end of the project, I had two problems: the music was slightly off-pitch -- middle A wasn't exactly 440 Hz -- and the number of machine cycles wasn't quite constant (it varied between 40 and 41 cycles depending on which branches the code took). Finally I realized I could insert a single NOP (no-operation) instruction at a critical location. The NOP forced the number of cycles to be a constant, regardless of the path through the loop, and I then realized that it also slightly changed the output frequency to be tuned exactly right. I will always remember that moment. :)
        joezydeco 13y ago
        I've had similar situations, but never as victorious as that. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that story....(now I want to get that code back somehow and look for that NOP)
        NotAnEngineer 13y ago
        Horribly off topic, but what is the current status of the Electric Duet player routine? I read somewhere that you had placed it in the public domain in the 90s, but I can't find any confirmation of that.
        lutusp 13y ago
        I didn't really "place" it in the public domain, I just let nature take its course. The inevitable result is that there are now only versions of the program online in which my name and copyright notice have been removed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDtXflMBmw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDtXflMBmw I searched for the original program online, but couldn't find it -- only the pirated version. By "pirated" I mean someone has removed my copyright notice and offered the program as their own, successfully replacing the original in all online archives.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  Apple Writer made me the writer I am today. (To this day, I rarely compose paragraphs more than a few dozen words long.)
- TheCrownedFox 13y ago
  Is this you? http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi... If so, how do I end up end where you are, in regards to wilderness programming and whatnot? Do you have a book (of any sort)? That's my dream.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > Is this you? > http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi... Yep, that's me. > If so, how do I end up end where you are, in regards to wilderness programming and whatnot? Rather than try to duplicate my story, why not see how yours turns out? I bet it will be just as interesting. > Do you have a book (of any sort)? Only a free one about my around-the-world solo sail -- it includes lots of stories about my technological adventures: http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html You can read it online or download a free Kindle file.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rbanffy 13y ago
  I think I said this before, but thanks for writing GraForth and TransForth. Besides limiting the Dijkstra damage from my exposure to Basic, it probably inspired the processor i designed in college - it was a stack machine and its assembly language was very Forth-like.

ck2 13y ago

Apple fell to the PC because the hardware was a fraction of the price since clones were allowed to exist in the PC world. Apple sued their clones out of existence. Might all be using Apple today if they had not. Then they eventually switched to pc hardware themselves.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Tloewald 13y ago
Apple seems to be still around. You can google it to check. Apple's problem with PC was initially simply that IBM sold the PC. For many years PCs were more or comparably expensive and much less useful than Macs, but sold because they were backed by IBM. And Apple did very well despite its lower market share until John Sculley started listening to pundits and lowered prices in the early 90s. Even so that worked Ok until Spindler listened to more pundits and started allowing clones.

epo 13y ago

Sinclair's branding was huge in the UK, but you can only sell so many calculators and the leapfrog in sophistication in those days was breathtaking. Technologies plummeted in price within months.

kryptiskt 13y ago

One unnamed reason for Sinclair Radionics' falling apart was their digital watch, Black Watch, which was the ultimate example of Sinclair's infamous cost cutting and lack of quality control. http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm

bolder88 13y ago
Surely also ridiculous diversions such as the C5 electric car. "Micromen" is a fantastic drama of the period... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE
- Zenst 13y ago
  At the time of the C5 I worked for one of the then government owned utility companies which had shops selling the C5. Was able to get a staff discount but was told of of the 2 seater version with a roof that was planned for release and saw pictures and spec etc, so I waited. Great idea, ahead of it's time engineering and attitude wise as well. Did not even have rare earth magnets, seen C5's with rare earth magnet motors instead of the stock motor and they are dangerously fast. Today we are slowly getting there, though cars still designed for everybody with a 4-5 member family with a boot of shopping all the time and the other end is a motorbike. Still a car/bike electric combinations do appear, albeit not mainstream and most put of from the safety of getting hit by others as you are smaller on the road effect. Which makes you think about the limitations of a vehicle that is surrounded by taller and larger ones, why we now start to believe in bike lanes. Which was a factor back then and why the C5 never kicked off enough to make the C10 and C15 go into production beyond the prototypes sadly and C5's started coming with a flag pole akin to a football/soccer corner post style pole and flag.
  - bolder88 13y ago
    I'm not sure I agree it's a good idea at all. 30 years later, and the electric car market is still miniscule. There might start to be a market demand for them when petrol is at least twice as expensive as it is now. But there's some wiggle room to reduce the tax on it a lot.

abecedarius 13y ago

Good point, how calculators differed from computers. Branding surely helped IBM establish the PC, but against Apple what mattered was its years-later entry to the 16-bit world, with a relatively closed system, with high margins. Apple had a shot at 16-bit dominance but missed. (They came out with the Apple 3 and Lisa first.)

CamperBob2 13y ago

Why wasn't his genius work similarly wiped out? A good question. I'd say that the Apple II family survived longer than it deserved to because the hardware was so nice. Woz combined classical hacker insights with a look-and-feel quality ethic that the Commodores and Ataris couldn't live up to, being designed to target a price point beyond all else. Sure, those computers could do tricks with graphics and sound that the Apple couldn't match -- but if you wanted sharp, readable 80-column text for word processing or VisiCalc work, your only options were an Apple //e at $1500 or a similarly-equipped Tandy or IBM PC for well over $4000. Apple's huge array of (relatively) low-cost peripherals also helped it compete against other platforms in the early days. These aspects weren't sexy but they were important to lots of home and small-business users. Famously, the company was also smart enough to target K-12 education, which cultivated their marketplace from the ground up. Once again, the impression of quality versus the low-cost 8-bit competitors would have helped them do that.

vidarh 13y ago
I agree Apple did well by getting entrenched in the education market in the US. Combined with Tandy's failure to follow up, and Commodore's incessant bungling in the US market (such as repeatedly pissing off their dealer network by letting their dealers absorb unannounced price changes) and decision to send most of its stock to Europe where they got higher margins, that explains more of it than lack of alternatives. In Europe, Apple remained virtually unheard of until the Mac compared to Commodore, Atari and homegrown brands. Largely thanks to its European market, Commodore still massively outsold Apple in terms of units shipped up until well into the Mac got popular - it's just that by the time the IIe started getting traction, Commodore had abandoned the high end and gone for volume, and by the time they went after the high end again, it was 1985, and Commodore's brand and sales channel in the US was even more tied to the cheap gaming image. But if you wanted sharp, readable 80-column text you had several alternatives at the time of the IIe launch, at around the same price range, both from Commodore and others (from Commodore, the later entrants in the PET range - one is actually on display in my local library - as well as the ill fated Commodore B128-80) Most of the other entrants that could compete for productivity applications in the same price range were from small unknown companies or insufficiently compatible with anything to get enough software, though, and so had little chance.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> Branding is also important (Jobs), which is why the Apple eventually fell to the "PC" - because the strongest computer brand in the world for decades was IBM. IBM's deeply entrenched position in supply office equipment (pre-PC computers, sure, but lots beside) to business played a role in securing PC dominance over Apple in the personal computing market, but so did the fact IBM didn't protect the PC from clones (IIRC, this was not intended) or acquire exclusive rights to DOS, which resulted in both more variety and more low-price options in the "IBM PC-compatible" family.

binarycrusader 13y ago

As Doug Fisher said at JavaOne, "hardware without software just generates heat". Software brings the real value to hardware.

memsom 13y ago

But Sinclair went on to kick start the UK Microcomputer industry. The ZX range (Aka TS range in the States) was one of the most popular an influential home computers of the 8-bit era. I think only the C64 beat it world wide. it was also one of the most cloned systems as Brazil, Russia and many other Eastern European countries cloned it and extended the original design. Apple was niche and mostly unknown in the UK at the time. The Apple II never really made it here.

walshemj 13y ago
Not as a home computer as it was expensive it did have a good run in the business market but in the UK the PET was probably the no 1 business PC. I can still remember humping various PETs in and out of Olympia for trade shows - and I still recall the various tricks you used to make sure that disks copied correctly.
epo 13y ago
> But Sinclair went on to kick start the UK Microcomputer industry. Not even remotely true. There was a large homegrown industry (I worked in Cambridge at the time). Sinclair was a well-known early player but many others grew up at the same time and independantly. For a time it was known as the "Cambridge Phenomenon". What did spring from Sinclair was Acorn. If anything kick started the UK microcomputer industry it was the Cambridge University Computer Lab where Sinclair and others got much of their talent.