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Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!

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Fraser:
As has already been stated, The Spectrum comes from the early days of home computing and bears little resemblance to the current market. The computers were relatively simple but parts, such as the DRAM, were very expensive. As you needed 8 or more DRAM Chips, their individual cost impacted upon the total BoM cost significantly. Manufacturers of home computers were actually grateful to the DRAM fabs for making grade B DRAM available to them at discounted prices. It was a very new and very different computing world back then. We, as users, were grateful for every 1K a manufacturer could provide at reasonable cost. The 48K Spectrum had a distinct sales advantage over the competition with smaller memory capacity, such as the VIC20 and Dragon 32. I was a Dragon 32 user and I modified that platform with greater DRAM etc. The 32K and 64K DRAM was very expensive at the time. I went in to repair Spectrum computers for a computer retailer as a favour to them and still have the schematics somewhere. I did see DRAM failures but that was not uncommon in that era. The worst faults were often in ASIC’s that were both expensive and hard to source, except from other faulty Computers. The ZX81 had an ASIC that regularly popped its clogs for no apparent reason. At the time there was also a practice of swapping out DRAM chips one at a time until the fault disappeared !

As I said, a very different era to now and home computing was a new frontier and some unusual production practices were employed to ‘get the job done’. The consumer just wanted a home computer, how the manufacturer created it was of little interest, provided it worked. Dragon Data was no different and they were even accused of stealing the Radio Shack MC6809E based CoCo design for the Dragon....... it did look awfully similar at the schematic level  ;) It was so similar that CoCo schematics, programming manuals and programs were mostly compatible  ;D ‘Wild West’ Frontier days  :-+ Great fun for those of us who grew up during that era in computing. At school I was working on Commodore CBM PET’s and Z80 Research Machine platforms. A home computer such as a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore VIC20 or Dragon 32 was amazing to us at the time. To get 32K in a Dragon seemed impressive at the time. The 48K of the ZX Spectrum was a source of envy for many of us, so we upgraded our Dragon 32’s to 64K through modifications and upgrades. IIRC the Dragon 32 used ‘half good’ DRAM and when fully enabled it often worked fine in its full capacity. Grade B rejects sometimes failed speed tests but actually worked OK. A second bank of ‘half good’ 64K DRAM could also be added to make 64K. Oh fun times and I miss the simplicity of 8 bit computers.

Now if you really want to poke fun at the Sinclair Spectrum...... go after that daft calculator style rubber keyboard ! Compared to the Dragon 32’s real keyboard, it was a joke and looked like a toy. Such a pity as the computer was actually much better than it looked. I used to fit ZXSpectrum+ cases to standard Spectrum’s as an upgrade to the case and keyboard. Still not a real keyboard feel though.

Thanks for taking my mind back to happy days for me as a School kid, and then Student, working on 8 bit computers in my spare time :-+

Fraser

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: eti on September 05, 2020, 01:24:03 am ---I've just discovered that Sinclair DELIBERATELY bought in FAULTY RAM stock for the ZX Spectrum, where only half the RAM capacity worked, all to save a few pence... WHAT A CHEAP SKATE!

I absolutely couldn't live with myself, knowing I'd skimped on the BOM, just to make more money! Okay, so you save a few pence, but then, in the future, people like me will still be discussing what a skimper you are - UGH! I'd have that thought gnawing away at me, I couldn't let a designed product get into people's hands like that - and I don't care if it worked perfectly or not - YUCK!

--- End quote ---

Sinclair a cheapskate? News at 10.

Sinclair's products were always dodgy, from his first audio kits in the 60s onwards. Have a look at an insider's view: http://diy.torrens.org/Sinclair/inside/Duncan.php

Fraser:
Sinclair was a boffin, an ideas man. He should have left design and production to those who specialised in turning ideas into reality.

To be fair to Sinclair as a company though, they were providing what consumers wanted and, as already stated, that sometimes required ‘bush engineering’ or ‘Wild West’ practices when it came to designs and components used. Very different times when electronics was often less ‘polished’ than what we have come to expect these days.

Fraser

Kjelt:

--- Quote from: Fraser on September 05, 2020, 06:47:50 am ---As I said, a very different era to now
--- End quote ---
Small cough
Yes but some things don't change, cutting BOM is one of them.
In 2009 I got an assignment to purchase microcontrollers for a mass market product. To meet their target BOM the uC had to be <$0,10.
In that time that was insane. The cheapest china uC was $0,22 per million pcs.
So after a while one of our productmanagers gave me a chinese contact for a million uCs for $0,05 / pc.
I investigated and what was the story, these were 4 bit uC for toys where the ram was partly faulty. The contact had written a small program that on first run tests all ram locations and mark the bad ones if the bad ones were less than the good ones or the good ones when the good ones were less than the bad ones.
No need to say we passed but these things are used in cheap toys.

VK3DRB:
Yeah its not good to know you were ripped off.

There was a prominent but dodgy clone computer seller in Melbourne selling PC's with "external cache". He simply loaded dummy chips on the motherboard with fake cache markings and hacked the BIOS to report cache that was not there. The chips actually contained no semiconductor material inside. Added to that, he sold computers advertised with fake clock speeds. eg: 80386SX-27, when they were only clocked at 20 MHz.

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