On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 06:13:24PM +0100, Thomas Harte wrote: > Oh, I don't know. Surely Sinclair's model works only if you can > establish yourself as the supplier of a proprietary computer aimed at > the price conscious end of the market? I don't see how that could > compete once a growing body of manufacturers were transferring to a > PC-style open architecture. At some point economies of scale amongst > the open people outweigh whatever economies you can achieve with a > custom design and there's no way back from there.
I'm slightly younger than the Spectrum -- I'm aware of some of the history, but never saw any of this first hand... It seems to me that Sir Clive would never have been hugely worried about maintaining a strong position within the market in the long term... of course, that's not to say that he wouldn't have appreciated having a 'cash cow' to fund his other project... I suppose the ZX8[01] and Speccy really did make computing accessible to a large number of people who would simply not have been otherwise able to afford a computer. On those terms, surely the Spectrum was a success, despite not being quite the success that it could have been, particularly in the education market? Cheers, -- Stuart Brady
