Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (5 page)

There’s rarely a shortage of technical talent in Cambridge. The university had run the world’s first computer science degree, and as
excitement about computing technology grew in academic circles, students in other disciplines sought to join in. Steve Furber was studying for his PhD in Aerodynamics when he learned that some
students were forming a society to explore microchip technology: the Cambridge University Processor Group. He got involved from the start – it was an entry to this heady new world, filled
with enthusiasts and ideas. They were held back only by their lack of computers.

So, like many other members of the group, Furber started building one for fun. Buying components from abroad, he built a simple machine using a modest 2650 chip and ‘verowire’, an
amateur circuit-building tool that he later learned gave off toxic vapours.

Curry had a friend researching physics at the university, an Austrian called Hermann Hauser, and through him, he recruited Furber to build and test the first MK14 kit. Having verowired it in his
house, Furber discovered the bug that might have stalled the first British home computer before it started. It came from the chip design that Science of Cambridge had miscopied from the National
Semiconductor development kit, a problem that had been missed by the entire design team. As Furber recalls, ‘I sorted it and got that going,’ and in the summer of 1978, the MK14 –
the first microcomputer kit in Europe – went on sale through magazines such as
Practical Electronics
and
Practical Wireless
. Steve Furber had just debugged Britain’s
entire home computer industry.

The MK14 was programmed using HEX, a laboriously manual method requiring advance planning and saintly patience with the calculator-style keyboard. There was also, at first, no
means of storing the programs, so when the machine was released it came with a booklet containing a suite of twenty applications that could be typed in by the user. They were a mixture of utilities
and demos, but three of them were games.

Of these, the best remembered is
Moon Lander
. An MK14 games designer had to think laterally to overcome the limitations of the screen. It was a rudimentary
calculator-style display with eight digits – and
Moon Lander
used them to show the simulated stats for a module descending to a lunar landing. The speed, height and fuel consumption
of the module were updated in real time, and it would be fair to say the game was one of the most popular uses for the new owners of the machine.

There are plenty of landmarks in the history of computer games, but this one seems to have been overlooked.
Moon Lander
and its two companions were the first commercial games for a
British home computer. Unnoticed, the British computer games industry had started.

Curry’s friend Hermann Hauser is a charismatic presence, whose lilting Austrian accent holds listeners’ attention with compelling charm. After recruiting Furber,
Hauser had started to spend more and more time with Curry in the Science of Cambridge offices, both of them fascinated by the future that microchips promised. Curry was by now running the company
with barely any input from Sinclair and, with Hauser urging him on, it was no surprise when Curry started to pull away from his old employer.

The MK14 had been as successful as any of Sinclair Radionics’ products. In two years, Europe’s first microprocessor kit sold 90,000 units at £30 apiece – a fair
week’s wages at the time. To Curry it looked like the birth of a new industry. Clive Sinclair’s view is harder to make out: he may have thought that Science of Cambridge was fulfilling
its role, and that computers should be treated like any other fad electronics kit of the month. However, Curry believes Sinclair wanted to focus on his own project, the ‘Newbrain’
computer. ‘There came a point where it was quite clear that Clive wanted to move into computers in Sinclair Radionics,’ Curry says. ‘So Science of Cambridge would be a bit of a
difficult place to work because it would be in direct competition.’

Hauser represented the Cambridge University view – that computers were exciting and inevitable, and that there was already a nearby talent pool determined to get
involved – and he encouraged Curry to make his own start. When Furber was building the first MK14 he had invited his friend and fellow University Processor Group member Sophie (then Roger)
Wilson over to see it. Wilson was unimpressed. ‘Sophie looked at the MK14 and gave a characteristic “I could do better than that” reaction,’ Furber says. ‘And she went
home over the Easter Holidays and came back with a design for the Hawk.’

The Hawk was inspired – a real improvement on the MK14. When Curry and Hauser saw it, it was obvious that this was the future, regardless of Sinclair’s plans. At the end of 1978,
they set up a new company to sell it, named Cambridge Processor Unit, a jokey riff on the central processor unit at the heart of their computers. It is doubtful Sinclair knew much of their
activities, but they were certainly happening on his premises, as Curry admits: ‘Hermann came to spend a lot of time in the office in King’s Parade. It started before we had a chance to
move into CPU’s own offices.’

Sinclair finally shook himself free of the NEB by quitting Sinclair Radionics, with a golden handshake of £10,000. It wasn’t enough to prevent him from having to
sell his house and his Rolls Royce, but it did leave him able to take full control of Science of Cambridge, where Curry’s efforts gave him a running start: there was product line to extend,
and a consumer base to leverage. Curry’s absence also meant there was no objection to renaming the company once again, and it soon became Sinclair Research Ltd.

The MK14 had been a great success for a small outfit, but with its open circuitry and Heath Robinson component list, it didn’t look like a consumer product. Sinclair’s previous
business had been built on compactness and smart design, and he carried that philosophy over to Sinclair Research, along with a crucial third pillar: the products had to be cheap.

Sinclair brought Jim Westwood over from Radionics, to weave his magic and minimise both the size and cost of a home computer. The
Financial Times
had run an
article in 1979 that daringly predicted the appearance of a proper consumer computer for under £100 – meaning a machine with a QWERTY keyboard and full screen display. The newspaper set
the timeframe for this at five years. Sinclair told his team that they had to make it happen within six months.

Meanwhile, the Cambridge Processor Unit needed premises, staff and money. The core members were recruited gradually. Chris Turner, a well-regarded design engineer from Philips,
was employee number one, and Hauser’s persuasive character and university connections helped CPU to assemble an excellent team. Furber started spending more time with the company, as did
Sophie Wilson, who now had a completed prototype of the Hawk, her rival to the MK14. For premises, they found a small office squeezed down a rather forbidding alley. Money was harder to come by.
The new company had yet to generate any income from products, so the team set about selling their sole asset: their expertise.

Sophie Wilson’s first electronics job had been to make an automated cattle feeder, and in a sense CPU’s first consultancy job covered similar ground. A Welsh one-armed bandit
manufacturer called Ace Coin wanted to make its machines more attractive to punters and statistically more precise in their payouts. Furber set about building a sound-and-light show, and then with
a ‘possibly over-complicated arrangement’, used another processor to control the reels. There was a problem with this approach, though: the electronics of the era were susceptible to
being shorted by nearby electrical pulses. In practice this meant that the machines could be made to pay out a flurry of coins simply by flicking on a cigarette lighter, and unfortunately this
trick was becoming rather well known. Wilson devised a typically ingenious solution. An FM receiver was built into the casing that would detect these attacks and cut out
the mechanism. Ace Coin was satisfied that it was now only the customers who would play against the odds.

As a consultancy, CPU surfed a wave of quite random contracts – one they pitched for was to provide the graphics for the computer screens in the film
Alien
– but its core
product was a set of modular circuit boards developed from Wilson’s Hawk design. It made sense to Curry to sell these to the same hobbyist market that had bought the MK14, and an expandable
kit was put together.

The £20,000 earned from Ace Coin was enough to put Sophie Wilson’s Hawk design into production as the ‘System 1’. It was sold in the form of modular cards that could be
mounted on a rack. This approach allowed its users, mainly university labs but also some home hobbyists, to add floppy disc drives and more memory to the machine as well as – for the real
computer experience – a monitor and keyboard. And it was all assembled by the user; in this market, knowledge of soldering and debugging was a given.

But CPU needed a brand name to market its products, one that would reflect the company’s potential for growth and also lend itself to a logo that would look good as a silhouette in the
smudgy, black-and-white adverts of electronics magazines. Although it had few competitors in Europe, CPU wanted to stand out in a global market rapidly filling with manufacturers, of which the most
prominent was Apple – not least because it was always at the top of alphabetical lists. Curry and Hauser chose the name Acorn.

CPU and Science of Cambridge were selling similar products into similar markets, and like Sinclair, Curry realised that although there was clearly a huge interest in computing,
the ‘boffin’ user base was reaching its limits. There was a charm and a teasingly futuristic feel to their output – the System 1 featured as a prop in the
Blake’s 7
BBC TV series – but US products, such as the Apple II and the Commodore Pet, were professionally packaged with built-in keyboards and branded monitors. Beside them, the British kits would be
forever trapped in the world of
Practical Wireless
, and Curry knew it: ‘We
realised after a year or so that selling modules that were really intended for the
industrial market was not going to get far in the consumer market.’ With their exposed circuitry and the technical know-how required for assembly, kit computers were also forbidding and
impractical for the markets with most profit potential: homes and schools.

After his departure from Radionics, Sinclair had lost control of the Newbrain, but the same compact, cost-saving mantra that had driven its development was now echoing around the offices he had
taken over in King’s Parade. The magic price point target was £100, psychologically important to consumers, but also fixed in Sinclair’s mind by that prophetic
Financial
Times
article. His vision was of a single, smart box that would overcome the hurdle of high hardware costs by using a cassette recorder for storing programs, a clever trick for a built-in
keyboard and, most challengingly, a home television for the display.

Jim Westwood was given the job of making the computer send its pictures to the television through the analogue aerial input. The technology was known, but not at this price point – a
modulator that could send a digital image to the analogue scan lines of a home television had never needed a mass market before. But eventually Westwood summoned Sinclair to witness a stable screen
that read ‘Jim has done it’, a nod to the BBC’s
Jim’ll Fix It
programme. It was the first practical demonstration of the way that British players would see their
computer games for the next decade.

The rest of the machine was a collection of compromises. It had one kilobyte of memory – four times that of the MK14, but tiny compared to its American rivals. The processor was so slow
that the screen went black when it was asked to do anything at all. And the miraculous money-saving keyboard consisted of a pressure pad broken up into 96 sections, each representing a key, which
had to be pressed with real force to provoke a response. It worked, and had three parts instead of the hundreds of a fully moving keyboard, but was only barely usable.

The computer was finished within Sinclair’s bold six-month timeframe, though, and it would sell for the uniquely desirable price of £99.95. A young
industrial designer called Rick Dickinson had devised a sleek white plastic case, about the size of a hardback book, which made it look like a slice of the future. Sinclair called it the ZX80.

For as long as computer games have existed, the ‘platforms’ – the computers or consoles that play them – have determined the boundaries of the medium.
Most obviously this flows from the technology, as graphical and computational power lifts games or holds them back. But the platforms also segment the games’
players
– once
they own a particular computer, they are locked into buying only the games that computer can play. This affiliation with a particular platform often feels deeply personal, like supporting a
football team, and their chosen machine can subtly influence a gamer’s habits and tastes.

Another, hidden distinction between platforms happens under the hood, one that was especially true of the computers used in 1980s Britain. Only a handful of microprocessors were widely available
to computer manufacturers at the time, and even fewer that would make sense used in a home computer. Machines that looked entirely different on the outside could have identical technology at their
heart and, wrinkles aside, converting a game from one of these to another would be quite straightforward. But where the processors were different, the game’s programmer may as well have been
rewriting from scratch – the step change in effort could be the difference between a couple of days of tweaking and months of hair-tearing frustration. The boundary lines that gamers saw
between machines could look very different from a developer’s perspective.

The early eighties computer games industry – the ‘8-bit’ era – is a story of two chips: MOS Technology’s powerful but pricey 6502 chip, and Zilog’s cheaper
workhorse, the Z80. The choice between them was often made at the whim of a developer, or due to the hard
realities of cost. But each individual decision would help set the
landscape of British computer games for a decade.