My God this is brutal. I don't know about the UK but in the United States there is no way you would get away with asking a corporation questions this tough.
Yeah he would, Comp Chronicles was just as rude to superior Amiga 1000 and 520ST vs shitstain crap like mono Mac and Windows wank that cost 400% more lol
i worked two weekend jobs and a paper round and managed to save enough to buy a speckie 48K my father thought i was a wizard or warlock for programming a digital clock that was on our 24 inch tv !!!
The excuse given for lack of joystick port is a load of crap. Backward compatibilities? The Sinclair interface basically emulate the numeric keys from 0 to 9 for the 2 joysticks. Back in the days, i had my Spectrum + modified by the shop to include 2 joystick ports at the front. Built in and no hassle. I didn't know any better than as a kid. It was just a simple job of a couple soldering and wires to 2 DB9 pin male ports and two rectangles were cut out at the front to accomodate this. It's still neat and cool. And works 100% as long as you can choose "Sinclair Interface"
I only used a Spectrum a couple of times at the school computer club in 1983 so never even played any Speccy games with a joystick back then lol my friend who had a Spectrum wasn't allowed to have friends round so I never got to play classics like 3D Starstrike etc. Considering 99% of games by this time had an option for Kempston they would just adopt that but oh no.........lol mind you Commodore were just as bad with those stupid Plus/4 and C16 mini DIN joystick ports chosen.
Plus, there was nothing to stop someone plugging in an additional interface like Kempston if there was really a compatibility issue (which I highly doubt). The Sinclair interface was just the keyboard controller, so there wouldn't have been any conflicts.
To be fair, Fred went straight in for the kill with a negative slant on his questions right from the very start. So she was pushed into having to be defensive in her answers. BBC Micro Live was always negatively biased when it had to mention Sinclair.
If you only ever listen to the *_answers,_* then you miss an entire half of a story. I think that's the key lesson you should take away from this. You're not supposed to be able to think carefully about what's being asked, as it's been done much more subtly than the answers provided by the interviewee. What are your thoughts on that question he posed to her?
And like every engineer worth a shit said clive's designs cut too much out to be worth a shit in the grand scheme of things. they were the Lada/Skoda of home computers. The Amstrad CPC was no better but cost more than the 25 million selling Commodore computers so not quite as bad as Amstrad but no real innovation like the £199 C64 that raped all competitors in the ass and only cost a tiny bit more than speccy rubbish
And OMG. Only today i realized the Spectrum 128K has a MIDI port because i never seen any standard MIDI port on it! My first dabble with MIDI was with a Joystick adapter to the Soundblaster card on a PC.
Technically as I understand it any RS232 or general 'serial port' can act as a MIDI port, the difference is not many computers have a buffered RS232/serial port which was the difference between the A500 for MIDI via an adaptor and the Atari ST. I had that same 'joystick port' on my Gravis Ultrasound :)
@@lovemadeinjapan Only the ST and CDTV had buffered MIDI ports. The rest are just adaptions with dongles on a serial port which will never be as good as the ST of 85....which doesn't have MIDI Through, just in and out.
@@lovemadeinjapan Ah, that's what all the magazines kept going on about but most people working in single format mags were n00bs. My interest stops at analogue mono synths really
The Atari 800 and 800XL, PET, BBC Micro type high quality keyboards were above average back then, it's not as good as the C64 keyboard which is probably the bare minimum but it's an improvement on the old one I guess. I might do a video on how to improve the C64 keyboard with some new thinner/softer springs and some PTFE spray for the plastic mechanism after a full dismantle and clean up in the sink. I have 6 VIC-20s with the original PET style square keys and that is my favourite keyboard. Second is probably the BBC Micro or Atari 800XL...luckily the C64 had 2 Atari style joystick ports so I didn't really care...type in games were rubbish and I hated adventure games. TheC64 full size/maxi keyboard is exactly like the rubbish Sinclair +2 or Amstrad CPC keyboard quality so I hear you there :) I guess I was selfishly happy I got a C64 in March 1983 because my VIC-20 stopped working in 3 months and it was out of stock in the shop so we got the C64 and they let us keep the tape deck from the VIC-20 starter pack if we used our refund in their shop instead of go somewhere else to get another a VIC20 or a C64 with the refund they gave us. I am typing this all on a PC keyboard that is as rubbish as the Amstrad CPC keyboard. oh well.
Shame because, like the CPC, the +2 and +3 Amstrad models look like shit and you are stuck with a low rent tape deck. I hope the quality of the wiring inside the +2/+3 is better than the 464, looks like some 1960s crap the way they spliced it all together.
@@madcommodore I have 128K "toastrack" and +3 model. Honestly I prefer running 128K over +3, since it uses the standard 9V power adapter. Interface port is universal even today, can be used for devices like DivMMC. Whereas +3 has that horrible PSU brick, offering no new features. Their 3" FDD interface was non-standard, and it's more of a liability than a feature at this point. Rubber keys on 128K "toastrack" are awesome (this was my first computer).
True, every penny saved by Jack tramiel was worth about $200k each. I am guessing Sinclair didn't make their own DRAM chips at cost price, which 128k would be significant cost.
@@lovemadeinjapan Opinions of clueless idiots don't interest me. It cost more than the 64 in reality, the games had the screen shrunk to the size of a Game Gear screen to make up for the piss poor 16kb zero innovation screen and the sound came out of a 1 inch shit speaker in an badly designed case etc, those people know sod all about 8bit computers. The CPC464,664 and 6128 sold 40% less than the C128 alone and the C128 was not on sale for 9 years, 5 at best. plus the only time the games were better is when spastics worked on the 64 port. oh well if you don't know you don't know as they say. Anyway I spend my time using cutting edge computer systems now, I don't care to support proving what is true or the spastic YT algorithm that prioritises social media addicted spastics and what is fanboy/loser bullshit myths. I played it all when it was cutting edge, own every PAL console/computer ever made now so I don't care for all the bullshit of the 'retro community'. I busted every fan boy myth like drab C64 palette or Speccy cheaper/sold more in the UK than 64 from 1984 onward. The king of real hardware has left the kingdom for the world of cutting edge emerging AI lol and that community is not full of losers with fake facts like the retro one, it's like the early days of home computers and a lovely place to be. I actually work for an AI text 2 video company now anyway so......
@@lovemadeinjapan Nah, the 128 models were important as they added sound, and the Plus2 models a joystick port. Back then if you couldn't afford a £300 520STFM in 1987 it was either C64 or Plus/2 with tape games really. My comments are only ever about the hardware, if you like games on a particular machine that's fine by me but the only real machines designed well were BBC Micro, Atari 8bit comps, C64 and Speccy. The Memotech MTX 500 was the best Z80 machine but not more than 2 or 3 decent games on it and they cost a lot now. I don't give buying advice :) If you have a C64 with a 6581 SID you don't need a c128 as well
Would cause a lot of headache for compatibility though. Amstrad should have put the TI chip in there though for the CPC, 16kb is a whopping amount of screen RAM for the poor Z80 to push around at 50fps.
Well it should have had a sound chip yes, the extra 80kb would have cost a fortune though for Sinclair to purchase, about an extra 150 to the total price of the 48k Spectrum (174.99 in 1982).
@@madcommodore Yes memory prices were expensive in the 1980s. According to Bank of England inflation calculator £175 in 1982 would be £657.14 in 2021. In the case of Sinclair Research the need to keep prices very low could have gone too far on minimum specifications and a slightly higher price could have improved basic specifications out of the box such as sound, interfaces, connections and cables.
@@safirahmed The 175 pounds extra is calculated from the 50 pounds difference between 16k and 48k Spectrum. The Spectrum was always meant to be a low cost computers, a colour version of the ZX81 for as little as possible I guess.
@@safirahmed Looking back it seems obvious that Interface 1 should have been a more advanced upgrade to the Spectrum. 128K ram, joystick port, sound chip, midi and fdd instead of microdrive. Even if it would have costed more than the machine itself it would have been a must have to all Spectrum users so the 48K could have worked as a cheap entry into the Sinclair ecosystem, then the Interface 1 upgrade would have made the real profit.
Fred Harris was so slimy in this segment. His biased derision of the Spectrum, the way in which he phrased (particularly) his opening question to Allison - just his generally veiled contempt for something which isn't a BBC machine. The BBC Micro was hugely more expensive, more cumbersome, slower, had less memory and less software. It's only real saving grace, was its uses for school and business. Nice yes, but not in any way outstanding compared to the Spectrum.
Schools got the BBC for about £200 vs £400 in the high street stores. Some schools had non Acorn machines, rare instances of Spectrums or C64s. My school had 10 ZX81s and 10 old black and white TVs from the science lab in 1983 until in 1984 we got a proper computer lab with 15 networked BBC micros connected to a 20mb 'Winchester' hard drive and a couple of printers. That was really why the BBC was better, Atari/Commodore/Sinclair/Amstrad couldn't replicate this classroom setup. Was only a brief period of happiness though, the Archimedes was as rare in schools as C64s, by then it was all Research Machines Nimbus 80186 clones with a high quality BASIC and some other languages not for sale to other PC owners within 2-3 years. The initial comment Fred makes about the 128 only being in Spain for quite a while because of large stocks of 48k plus models sounds right, that would make the 48k Plus the 32x of the home computer world and the 128 the Saturn (better sound, more RAM, bug fixed BASIC, more expandable etc). I think her comment about joystick port is fair, if they stuck in a 'sinclair joystick' compatible port you wouldn't be able to use it for Manic Miner in 84 I think, Kempston was the only option. Also even the Amiga used the RS232 port for MIDI, only machines to have MIDI standard were all STs and the Commodore CDTV. I had to watch it to find out his first question to Allison, "why did they bother?", which is a very confrontational comment considering the Commodore 128 and MSX 2 are the only 128k 8bit models compatible with older models with
@@madcommodore I have an Interface 1 (and 2, and microdrive, and "official" (but crucially unlabeled) on/off switch) for my Spectrum (I have 2 x 48k rubber keyed, 1x 128k toastrack), and I understand the Interface 1 can "link up" with either 15 or 31 (or maybe even 63) other Interface 1 Spectrums to create an intranet. Whether or not they can provide "collective" printing capability, I don't know. Perhaps the RS232 port on the back of Interface 1 can provide this for all of them?? Perhaps they lack enough power... An *_old_* Spectrum I _used_ to have, was always plugged in using an RF cable to a CRT, but I never really had issues with dot crawl. I didn't mind - it was a sentimental gift given to me by a close relative who surprised me by taking me out to buy one secondhand (we were poor 😔), so I was really grateful for it anyways. I used a BBC in school as well, though never really felt that I got to use it as much as I would've liked. I think that had a disk system as well (it was the 80s - I can't remember too well!). Clive Sinclair was somebody I ALWAYS looked favourably upon - you just got the impression that he was somehow looking out for your best interests (and not in a false marketing way either). This may be why he pushed for the QL as much as he did - he didn't want people to get distracted by entertainment all the time, he wanted you to learn and do well. :) Never once got that impression from Salt. I mean Sugar. Never had a +2, so I don't know about the quality of the integrated cassette player. Perhaps it was down to people not using TYPE II Chrome tapes to SAVE programs to?? I don't know. The only (I _think)_ Commodore I ever used, was my neighbour's Amiga c.1988, which was of course a huge improvement on the Spectrum, but I tend to prefer the underdog in this case! ;)
@@letsdiscussitoversometea8479 Nah the CPC and hence +2 had the same bottom of the barrel mechanisms built in. The only Sinclair I don't have is that PC20/PC200 thing from Amstrad (an PPC1512 motherboard in some case to take on the ST/Amiga with CGA and beeper sound for the same price). Dunno if they all work but generally I tried to get complete collections. Don't really collect this stuff since about 2018. Don't even use them really, very rare now I do AI stuff as a hobby instead.
Any serial port can be used as a MIDI in/out port really. It's how all Amigas apart from the CDTV did it, but the serial port is not buffered like the MIDI ports on an Atari ST or commercial audio equipment. I wonder if he ever got an Amiga 1000, you could tell he was really impressed by that machine.
