The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128
- Reference: 1705311008
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/01/15/opinion_column_zxspectrum_128/
- Source link:
It turned out he was mostly trying to work out where he’d heard my voice recently. "I’ve got it!" he said. "You were the hacker on the news!" I had indeed been [1]interviewed in silhouette on the news the week before regarding the unlikely events, and I admitted as much.
The week after, his secretary phoned me to see if I wanted a job at Sinclair Research Limited (SRL)’s London office. Clive never said so outright, but the understanding was that I’d hack Acorn to find out what it was up to, and so I was installed with an ICL OPD, a mutant QL/modem machine, and left alone. The idea was ludicrous, but just before it became too ludicrous to ignore the urgent call came from SRL in Cambridge for a Z80 assembler programmer for an urgent project. I’d already said at the dinner party that I’d taught myself Z80 on first a ZX81, then a Spectrum. I was already on the books, so up I went, trailing my OPD behind me.
[2]
The rush job was the UK launch of the ZX Spectrum 128, now known as the Toast Rack because of the lake heatsink bolted on the side. The first had already been launched in Spain. It had the extra RAM and the sound chip, but only the original Spectrum firmware. Good enough if you think of the Speccy as a mere games machine, and thus deemed probably good enough for the Spanish market, but SRL knew that it was a serious educational, even borderline business, computer. Reality was always optional.
An extended BASIC with a full-screen text editor for programming and full support for the new hardware was the least the UK market deserved. Which meant modifying the original ROM. Which first meant being able to rebuild that ROM from the source code. Which was a huge heap of mostly uncommented Z80 mnemonics living, somewhat bizarrely, on a VAX 11/750. I was given a seat, a VT-220 terminal, manuals for VMS and CP/M, and left to get on with it.
How a hack on Prince Philip's Prestel account led to UK computer law [3]READ MORE
If you were there at the time, you will remember that Sinclair was famous for delivering stuff late. There were many reasons for that, but running projects by throwing untested naive enthusiasts into a production environment without any sort of qualifying test exemplified the organization's management style. If SEL could be called organized or managed. Many very bright people fought nobly and well to establish corners of stability; many more very bright people were guided by their substantial skills filtered by their substantial egos.
I loved it all. I worked out how to make the VAX run CP/M, how to make the original source code work with the M80 CP/M assembler, and rebuilt the ROM as a saner set of modules with proper comments. I stole copiously from [4]The Complete Spectrum ROM DIsassembly by Ian Logan and Frank O’Hara, a book from which I'd learned my Spectrum licks in the first place and without which the 128 would have arrived much much later.
[5]
Then it was on to writing the new code for the new ROM. I did a bunch of cosmetic and peripheral stuff – the most obvious of which was the menu system that comes up on power on. Almost vestigially useless, this was the subject of endless meetings as to what should go where and why. These exemplified SRL’s tribal structure, where the Hardies, the Softies (my tribe) and the Marketers battled for turf, inch by inch. You’ll notice two tribes missing: production, who had to make it all work, and the users, who decided whether to buy the stuff. Yeah, about that.
[6]
[7]
My one small spot of inconsequential pride was pointing out at one of the menu meetings that we could add the Spectrum rainbow flash to the menu title bar, if we were careful about attributes. The Hardies couldn’t find anything to complain about and the Marketers were actually enthusiastic. In it went. Every time you see that tiny splash of color, think of that rare moment where peace broke out. Every quirk in every retro box that you find lovely or mystifying is there because some long-forgotten member of an ancient team nipped a tiny twist of creativity out of an embattled process. Think of them from time to time.
[8]Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99
[9]Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come
[10]Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday
[11]Tales from four decades in the Sinclair aftermarket: Parts, upgrades and party tricks
There are many stories from behind those particular 8-bit battle lines. The technicalities of testing dodgy software on dodgy hardware. Compatibility testing hundreds of 48k games on 128 prototypes. Eric the Wireman’s betting habits. Moving out of the Cambridge HQ to the out-of-town top secret Metalab as the money ran out. The dying days of the QL. Building the Pandora portable Spectrum prototype out of a Timex-Sinclair TS-2068 and modded Blade Runner tech. Yes, really.
Yet if I learned anything at Sinclair*, it’s to promise everything except a delivery date. Old habits die hard – but a recapped Spectrum goes on forever. ®
* I also learned that writing system software for a paged memory map and no MMU is as much fun as root canal work via nostril. Don’t ask.
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[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/rupert-goodwins-diary-3039167849/
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/01/12/shutterstock_zx_spectrum_128.jpg
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2015/03/26/prestel_hack_anniversary_prince_philip_computer_misuse/
[4] https://archive.org/details/CompleteSpectrumROMDisassemblyThe
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZaUQVmT@GgReI3ybYSZFMwAAAUg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZaUQVmT@GgReI3ybYSZFMwAAAUg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZaUQVmT@GgReI3ybYSZFMwAAAUg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/09/prince_philip_obituary/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/windows_nt_30_years_on/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/21/apple_lisa_source_code_release/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/20/retro_tech_week_rwap/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "their substantial egos"
Re: " their ego crashes the company (you don't hear about those in the news)."
I think Gerald Ratner counts here.. Another I can think of (although this wasn't in the mainstream news) is Adam Osborne, who developed the Osborne 1. For those who don't know, this was the first "portable" (put in quotes as the thing was the size of a large sewing machine, required a mains supply and weighed 11 kilos, so more luggable). While the sales were already dropping thanks to competition, The sales of the 1 were not helped by the fact that 2 years after the launch, he started talking about how their next computer, the "Executive" was so much better.
Re: "their substantial egos"
I'm sure the instruction book that came with the ZX81 had a picture of a ZX81 controlling a factory. It might have even been a power station. The memory is hazy but it does show the ambition of the Sinclair people :-)
Excellent article. It's amazing to think that the Spectrum could have been a business machine, but thinking about it, it wasn't that much less powerful than the first generation IBM PCs, but it was about a 20th of the price.
Of course, those IBM PCs were so well built that I always thought if you threw one at a brick wall, the wall would come off worse, and they had the advantage that at the time there was a perception that no one was fired for buying from IBM. I think if Sinclair had developed a standard floppy drive (I know other companies did have floppies for the Spectrum, but they had all sorts of formats), and possibly even a hard drive, with a reasonable DOS, the Spectrum could have been a contender business wise. The problem is, both would have cost too much.
I love both my Speccy 48K and my ZX81 (with the wobbly RAM pack and ZX Printer), but being honest, Sinclair didn't have a great rep for reliability.
It's amazing to think that the Spectrum could have been a business machine,
I think it would never have been one, because it didn't look serious. Imagine if the Spectrum said no to someone. They would have asked the computer operator of this oversized TV remote to bring in a real computer to compute the answer instead.
Not in the original case, and certainly not with the rubber keyboard. But given a decent case, and a better keyboard, it could have. Of course, a better case and keyboard would have raised the price, but Amstrad managed to build the PC1512 and 1640 for a lot less than the IBM cost, so there is likely no reason Sinclair could not have done it.. Cases and keyboards can be changed. The question is, whether it is feasible to do so.
Paper Tigers
Back in the day the main user interface for Computers was paper. So a document printed on a business system (£500 pc + £200 matrix printer), was inferior to the Spectrum version (£200 pc + £500 matrix printer), even the user could see that!
A Z80 based business machine? Banked memory really is not as much fun as it sounds. At least the 8088 in the PC could keep its BIOS and interrupt table visible while you fought the segmented memory model and gave a fairly straightforward route to increase the amount of RAM available to any program (except GW-BASIC that was hardcoded for 64K).
Lovely
A lovely vignette of the time..
As far as hiring practises go, the biggest problem was (and amazingly still is) knowing how to decide if someone was good for the job. Outside of academia (which was largely above the squalid battles of home computers), there were no qualifications to check, and no easy way to discern if people were capable of doing something that next to no-one had done before. You hired people, put them to the fire and saw whether they melted, exploded or achieved something remarkable. Companies weren't just figuring out how to build computers for the masses, they were figuring out how to be companies.
And these computers are still living on - there are some cracking Z80 kits (and, hiss 6502) out there, that recreate the experience of having a machine over which you have complete and utter control. Some allow you to build out interesting systems to your specific needs, and some allow you to (ahem) play games. Remarkably, quite a bit of new software is being written, from entirely new operating systems to.. yes, ok, games.
OPD
I have a vague memory of having the OPD on my desk at BT, but I think I only used the telephone part of it.
"their substantial egos"
With those kind, you have either of two possibilities : their ego drives the company forward (think Steve Jobs), or their ego crashes the company (you don't hear about those in the news).