Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel Never ending or beginning on a never ending reel Like a snowball down a mountain or a carnival balloon Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind. - "Windmills of your mind", Bergman & Legrand
"The real beginning of home computing all started with the ZX Spectrum. Introduced by Sir Clive Sinclair in 1982, it proved to be a huge hit in the home.
The machine was small, smaller than any laptop available today. It plugged into a standard television set and used a standard tape recorder for storage. It was equipped with 48K of ram which was plenty for what it needed to do. A 5.25" disk drive was available for those that needed it (programmers and the like). It was a machine tailored for home use." - Alt-Tab: A Brief History of the Sinclair Spectrum http://www.alt-tab.net/games/zx-spectrum/history/
"It'd basically be a box (maybe pressed steel or something) with an E3 board at the heart (maybe with modem section depopulated) and the LCD/backlight module fitted into the "roof" - a trailing cable would go to the PS/2 QWERTY as found on the E3. So it'd just look like a generic little computer in a box - nothing like a telephone. I think we probably would put a JTAG header on it for those interested in such things (though maybe this isn't such a necessity now that Linux is ported)" - Cliff Lawson
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Do you see what I see?
Sinclair produced a computer built from parts. No amazing powerhouse, no magic abilities. Just a little box that a kid could buy and put together, and discover the magic of computers.
So I see before us the possibility of another little box, "smaller than any laptop available today", "a machine tailored for home use". Perhaps this time with another great British entrepreneur's company name printed on it. Make it simple, provide decent documentation and a little spiral bound manual. Make it available to kids, to affordable computing initiatives, and perhaps Mr Sugar could capture far more than he expected.
"For 10 years the ZX Spectrum was a mainstream computer. Nothing before or since has matched it. Just think how obsolete the Pentium III will be in 10 years time. The spectrum was incredibly well designed and it is the amazing British design which put it in good stead for an entire decade. No computing machine could match that today."
Phil H