Chris Curry talks about Clive Sinclair, Sinclair Radionics and Acorn Computers
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 พ.ค. 2024
- Jason Fitzpatrick talks to Chris Curry about his early days at Sinclair Radionics, working with Clive Sinclair, Acorn Computers and the development of the BBC Micro. Filmed in 2015.
- วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
You can tell Chris was a leader as he hardly lets the interviewer finish his questions.
This was a terrific interview. Hadn't heard mention of the Newbrain in a long time. I was fond of those, and used to demo and sell them along with the Dragon, apple's and other makes in the early 80's before heading of to Uni. Was a great time.
I remember drooling over the idea of a Newbrain - as I recall it had so much more ram than competition - and ram was the 0-60 of computing at the time! These days it would be nothing of course :D. Happy days !
Nah, Trash-80 clone person myself (Video Genie). Yes, great interview & his fairly measured & not overly trumpet-blowing style helped
"(...) proud to say nobody's ever left us" - there you go. All these "professional managers" of today should learn from this gentleman who achieved more than "modern" managers could even imagine.
I could listen to Chris Curry talk for hours.
Great memories. In 1982, I took on a job, "Yeah, I can do that" sort of thing, but I had no idea how I was going to make it work. That was to control 32 channels of special effects, part of a multimedia show. It had to be completely automatic with no human input, be reliable and effects had to synchronise to beats of music etc. I knew a little, and I mean very little, BASIC programming so bought an Acorn Atom and an expansion card. This fed into a big box full of solid-state relays. I used a spare audio track on this big Teac 8 channel tape recorder to record a time-code (PUT), and afterwards used the time-code (GET) to programme the various effects. It worked perfectly - no idea if MIDI existed but I never heard of it at the time. The Atom was probably the only bit of kit in the place that didn't ever break down! The rest of it was AVL Dove controllers and a bank of 30 Carousel projectors. I couldn't have done this without Chris and the Atom.
Hearing the sound a BBC Model B makes when you turn it on takes me back to being 10 years old again. Funny how such a little thing can mean so much.
I think the BBC B set the benchmark for a good keyboard aswell. I can still hear the sound it makes and I also remember how the keyboard felt.
Thank you Chris and the Acorn team for doing what you did so well it made my childhood.
As a child of the 80s, I missed out on this but thanks to my Dad I got into soldering, knew how to wire up a mains plug and such fun ensued. To this day I build controlled laser modules from single diodes with my own power supplies, controls, optics and boxes which is analogous to the day this good man is talking about. I know there's only a few of us techies around even with the advent of the internet!
Wonderful to hear one of the unsung heroes of my childhood telling the inside story. Brilliant interview. I owe my 26 years in IT to this man's tech
People like Chris , are legends. They deserve a lot respect for bring these ideas they had on electronics , especially when Acorn start blossoming with home computers like Electron and Archimedes .
I bought the calculator kit when I was about 16 , soldered it together, it didn't work , sent it off for repair £5 postal order, got it back working with my PO for £5! , the transistor was blown they said. Imagine Apple doing that!
Wow, that's honesty. It would, like you say, be just as easy to pocket the money, & deny the faulty transistor, which would be today's model.
I had the same experience with the IC10 amplifier chip. It got very hot, I sent it back and got it replaced with my PO returned. I then went on to the Project 60 amp... which saw me through my schooldays until I earned real money to by a real hifi system.
@@grahamrousell691 yes same here, my ic20 blew up got a voucher or something!
tempted to say a company with those ethics would never make it really big 🙂
So he was a scrapper becomes the greatest developer for a national licensed computer , what a success
R. I. P Sir Clive.
Great to see you Chris. I'd only every read articles and seen pictures of you in the magazines of the 80's/90's, but this is the first time I've heard you speak.
Many many thanks to the Centre for Computing History for ALL these interesting people and their story's, that you have presented to us.
* stories
The wry smiles are flashback of those memories :)
52 minutes isn't long enough. I could listen to this guy all day long. I don't think he'd ever have anything uninteresting to say.
An interview with Alan Sugar talking about Amstrad and his links with Clive Sinclair would be very interesting.
Would he even remember it? Curry's comment about Sugar in a Transit van is just golden.
Sugar probably didn't have the same tech-enthusiasm, he was more of a box-shifter with a willingness to try new niches or grow the niches
Sugar didn't care about computers. It was just another trending product for him to flog. It would be better to get one of the engineers who actually designed the CPC in for a chat.
What a great guy, sure many of us in IT today have a big thank you to say to Chris
"The advertising had been booked, but the product hadn't been developed". Lol. These guys pioneered so many aspects of the IT industry.
Indeed, and hello Diakatana!
My first proper job in software development had the sales folk promising features we didn't have yet to one-off small clients, and sometimes even that were impossible to develop, let alone within a reasonable time given our smaller startup nature. So yeah.
@@jgbreezer🍞🧀####22×🧀🥒🥥 aZA,CSSWĄFČ🥜🥜♨️🏬⛪️🗽🥞3',qwqąąąqąązYYFW ,Z, XČFĄ😭
@@jgbreezer ahh its sales staff in general. Like when the stock is on a ship and only just left the country of origin, yet the sales staff promise the customer next day delivery before mid day 🤣
What?? That 1 hour was like 10 mins !!! I want more, fascinating as hell!
The Retro Hour podcast interviewed Steve Furber of Acorn if you want to know more about the BBC Micro. They also interviewed Nigel Searle, MD of Sinclair who relealed a lot about Sinclair.
My hero, I learn so much from Chris, re electronics. We meet occasionally for cup of tea :-)
Really? I'm jealous :-) He comes across as a nice guy.
Knowing the details of the story between Chris, Clive and Alan now as I do, why do we have Sir Clive and Lord Sugar? They wouldn't be anywhere without Chris, it's about time HE got a knighthood.
To be fair, this is Chris' view of things. He seems a great chap so I'm sure he is being honest but everybody sees things from their own perspective.
He didn't have that something that made Sinclair stand out. Sinclair is a little like the era of great engineers like IKB when they took risks with their own money. As a result, he made it and lost it. Few do that anymore.
Sugar is like the modern 'entrepreneur' where marketing is key in order to make a success of other peoples ideas.
Could make a good film.
TOTES ‼️😻‼️GO SIR CLIVE 🐨
I think Alan Sugar may actually have started his business growth where I first saw him - on a London street market flogging supposed wonder radio aerials for 2/6d each! They were just a short piece of stiff wire with a random old capacitor wired across one end to make it look like it wasn't just a piece wire. Even at 12 I could see it was a scam!
Surely you aren’t saying that awards are driven by politics rather than merit?
The BBC Micro Men program Chris talks about here is very good. Well worth watching if you haven't seen it. Cracking interview. The BBC Model B was a big part of my teenage years and I still have one.
Chris is sharper than a serpent's tooth ;-)
Mark Keen micro men is a nice drama, but somewhat loosely rooted in fact
There was a subtle class difference between Speccy owners and Beeb owners there would have been a lot more heated arguments but the C64 was the real contender as far as the microcomputer market was concerned .. great days indeed Alan Sugar may have been pushing out cheap sort of radiogram Hi Fi's using parts supplied from Radionics but later on of course in 1986 ironically purchased the Sinclair brand of computers for a cool 5 million quid.
If it wasn't for the C5 vehicle being a flop, Sugar wouldn't have got the Spectrum and QL tech so cheap and I may have not been the proud owner of a Spectrum 128+2 (grey) which I still use from time to time. I don't think Mr Curry is too keen on Alan Sugar :) I can understand why it's probably because Sugar used a very simplistic wheeler dealer approach to business and he got away with it ..THEN waits for Clive Sinclair to make an epic fail and scoops up his lifes work for pretty damn cheap then makes a fortune out of it.
There were a lot more Spectrum 128's (+2/+3/+2a) etc flying off the shelves when the 8 bit market was at it's peak than any other 8 bit (at least in Europe and the UK)
Clive still walked away with a few quid and is regarded as one of Britain's most incredible clever inventors of all time.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum is still in production www.specnext.com/
"Clive Sinclair the man who brought you Jet Set #&£!ing Willy!"
@@dubsy1026 I'd love to see a scene for scene breakdown to see how much was dramatized. Great film regardless. Watched it twice and will watch it again. It's a shame the BBC wont release to DVD/BR
This is great. I've watched Micro Men again and again, but I've never seen an actual interview with Chris Curry. Great video guys! :)
Jason Fitzpatrick, doing the interviewing, is also in the film too, as an Acorn engineer. You can see him in the scene where they're eating takeaway with tools lol
@@robinw77 Sophie (Roger) Wilson is in the film too. She plays the barmaid who calls last orders at the end of the film.
same,with the movie and this fab interview.
@@nebularain3338 Sophie (roger) what does this mean?
Same here!
As a teenager in the 70s this is a great memory for me. Mid 70s for me it was the Signetics 2560 and the IM6100
Thank you Chris ! You are a a LEGEND! I may had Amstrad 6128 (and still have it, ) , but without you, many home computers wouldn't exist today. Especially the creation of ARM CPU. The idea 'System on a Chip' was far ahead from its time. Your intelligence 'live' in the chips on the mobiles today.
Many don't know that Apple was a major shareholder in ARM at its start. Steve Job sold that equity off when he returned to save Apple from certain death throes.
Great interview. I really appreciated hearing the back story.
How very interesting, yeah I was one of those 60's kids playing with valves & transformers ETC. The valve chris was talking about in the first part was talking about with the ecc83 (double triode) was probably an EL84 ish, an output pentode! Good old days 😍.
Down to Earth and terribly honest. Enjoyable to say the least!
This is fantastic! Sorry I'm 6 years late, love this!
what a nice guy with fun and interesting stories. that headteacher persona conceals the heart of a mischief-maker
Superb, Chris is a gent, and the interviewer is really tuned in to the topic and gets the most out of the interview....
what a great video. His description of getting that first calculator up and running is terrific.
Absolute respect and admiration for this generation of pioneers and visionaries. To me, these guys are the real heroes of the computer revolution... not the charlatan corporate sharks like Gates and Jobs.
My husband is an engineer and worked for Sinclair from the mid 1970s for some years.
Hi Renee, Do you happen to live anywhere near the museum in Cambridge, UK? It would be great if you could get in touch : www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/1777/Contact-Us/ as we would love to speak to him.
We presently live in Southern California. We have been working in the unmanned aircraft industry. He travels to Europe on business a few times a year. We may be in the UK in Norfolk next year for the holidays as well. I will ask him if he would contact you. I noticed a few links on your contact page. Which would be the best to use? Or would a phone call be best?
renee neale hi, that’s great! Use the jason@ email address. Thanks :)
Does your husband know how to build strucutred water purification HIGHLY Advanced magentic Technology without fliters with radionics? I would love to know , thanks
Very pleased to see Christopher Curry, such a great teacher!
wow! thank you so much for this amazing interview about this incredible formative time in the history of computing! sorry that i've showed a regrettable lack of restraint in repeatedly commenting, but please take that as a reflection of the adulation and respect that i hold for for this superb piece of work! thanks again!
WHAT a great video! Years ago I wrote an article for Radio Bygones magazine about my experiences with Sinclair products, including the Micromatic, the Z30 (we used a pair for a mobile disco, talk about living dangerously!), the calculators and of course the lovely ZX81, and I made the same point that Chris makes about Sinclair customers being 'a good bunch'. Most were electronics enthusiasts and understood that things blow up from time to time and especially if you take liberties with them. Their customer service was quick and fair, and even if it was obvious that you'd blasted the thing to death they would cheerfully fix it and send it back and charge you almost nothing. Sir Clive is still a hero as far as I'm concerned.
I made a stereo with z30 !
Fascinating ! Interviews with Chris are few and far between. Really enjoyed watching this. Now we need to hear Sir Clive's side of the story :) Thanks for sharing
Making the specifications of amps look way bigger than they actually are was a speciality of Tandy. They used to give the pmpo (peak music power output) rating. For a stereo amplifier they would give the total of both channels together so a 2 watt rms per channel amplifier would have a pmpo rating of something like 100KW.
RIP Clive Sinclair, gone to silicon heaven.
Had an Acorn Electron and loved it. Then had a Spectrum +3 (from Sinclair's "Amstrad" days) and loved that. Then had a Commodore Amiga 500 and adored that. Now ask me which "PC's" I've "loved" or "adored". There are none.
Sinclair ZX81…. THAT is what got me going, and haven’t stopped. And now electronics and IC’s are so cheap and easy. These guys are part of the pioneers 😁👍🏻
Chris Curry is really interesting in this........thanks this was enjoyable..........I wonder if the Microbit will capture the same excitement we had back then.
Really important slice of oral history here. Well done!
I bet he made some amazing amps. Mix and match that creates the most unique sound.
OMG, my first ever computer (I mean true pc, like with sounds and games) was BBC Micro B. IDK how it get to Moscow, but it was bloody fantastic machine! I remember those strings
BBC Computer 32K
Acorn DFS
BASIC
>
That's not a PC.
codemagician, I have made a version 1.1 of your code...
10 PRINT "YOUR NAME ";
20 GOTO 10
Simon Richard
Yes it is dumbass
PC is a catchall term for PERSONAL COMPUTER
?&FE60=0
BBC Computer 32K
Watford Electronics DFS 1.44
BASIC
>
The beeb was a brilliant machine, but the team over at Jessa House raised some bars yet further - their DFS was a masterpiece!
Superb ! If it wasn't for Chris I wouldn't have had a lifetime working in IT. Thankyou Chris :-)
My Dad used to buy EE / PE / PW in the hope I would take an interest. The most I could afford at the time was a Crystal Set Kit. I remember the ads for the Scamp and the MK14, Black Watch etc. When I was 14 I spent all my saved pocket money over 2 years on a Sinclair Cambridge Calculator. I was the first kid in my Sec Mod to own a calc and for 2 weeks everyone asked me for a look at it. It ate AA's for breakfast and used to go haywire if you tried to to divide by zero. In the end I couldn't even afford to run it. I never got my MK14 but I reckoned the cost of all the mags Dad bought I could of had one.
Loved my Speccy 48
less than 50K people for this video
this man built our world
Fantastic interview. Thankyou so much!
Fantastic interview. Thanks.
I love how you could choose to build your own stuff if you didn't want to pay insane prices for electronics, like Chris did with the amplifiers.
There's quite a bit of this still ongoing in the classic computer communities - with modern stuff like FPGA signal converters for flat TVs and input devices, CF and SSD interfaces, and complete motherboard re-issues, just add components!
Simply superb. Thanks :-) Shared.
Still got my Atom, brilliant machine. It taught me all the basics about computers.
Stan Whattmore I've still got mine, too!
Thoroughly enjoyed that, thank you!
Fantastic interview! I wish there was more of this!!!
Very interesting. Loved to see this interview - part of my history. I remember well the excitement of those new computers coming out.
A very interesting video. Enjoyed it a lot.
Thanks for sharing this...excellent.
As a former Advance (Gould) employee, I found this inteview extremely fascinating. Always sad when things have to end.
Very interesting and fascinating chat
This chap is really very typical of the guys that worked at Malvern back in the day. A lot of them went on to do interesting things.
Legendary years of British computing.. excellent video.
Interesting interview. The 1st computers I programmed were my Grandpa's 6809 computer (he built it himself) and the Sinclair ZX80 with 16KB of memory! I later bought the Acorn Atom and programmed the BBC micro at Hills Road Sixth form college, Cambridge. I have met both Clive Sinclair & Chris Curry when I was working for an accounting practice called Vlieland-Boddy & Co. I think Chris & Sir Clive had a punch-up in the Barron of Beaf in Cambridge. Both very intelligent people.
Really interesting Interview . . .
great interview
Just twigged he worked in Malvern where I used to live... don't know how I missed that first time around!
Thank-you for this - very interesting
Great interview - hope to see more!
The shade he throws on Sugar is delicious
These people had real skills and deserve credit for what they had achieved. The new generation with their smartphone have no appreciation.
Take your statement, replace "smartphones" with "microcomputers" and you are basically repeating what all the oaf-Dads and regressive old moaners said in the 1980s.
Don't be that "back in my day" guy who shits on an entire generation just becasue they aren't young any more and can't handle it. If you are, then it's you that has no appreciation.
brilliant, very informative and interesting video well done
Thank you :)
What a fascinating video, watching the father of my BeeB...we need pt 2!
I have both my original Spectrum 48k.. and my BBC Model B.... alas the spectrum no longer works... but the BBC micro soldiers on....a testament to the guys at Acorn.
Its also great to see your room of BBC micro's all lined up, reminds me of s10, the computer room in Medina high school 1990!
I was a computer shop manager when Spectrums were all the rage. They were so unreliable (40% of them new from the factory didn't work) that I made sure the customers only got 3 months warranty.
@@gasgas2689 yeah my Spectrum died years ago....but the beeb carries on.....that said I have a sinclair calculator that my uncle gave me in the 80s....last time i checked it still worked.
I owned an Acorn Atom for about a week. I had to use a component freezer on the ROM chip to get the Assembler code to work, and my first program ran out of memory. The Keyboard also disassembled itself. I returned it and bought a Sharp MZ-80K for a lot more money.
Having been both a Sinclair and Acorn customer multiple times, I was thrilled to see this interview. I would have loved to have heard Chris' thoughts on the C5. It seemed that was a major division between him and Clive. Shame it was left out.
Hey Howard. There's always next time :) Hopefully we'll be talking to Chris again soon ...
@@TheCentreforComputingHistory Fascinating and important to get this history on the net!
We need a part 2
great to interview next stop clive
Strange point to end on. Interesting interview.
Great Video :)
Mark my words Chris Curry is a genius with Acorn computers with R.I.S.C. ✔
Great ! Now where is part II ?
Exactly what I just thought!
I've been happily watching away and it just suddenly ended! Where's the rest of it?!?!?! :o
Brilliant interview - now can it be finished please?! ;)
@@robinwilliams1751 I panicked for a second when I saw your comment, thinking I'd been drunk-commenting again and forgotten :-)
"...microcomputer out of calculator chips..." in my teens, i had many wonderful electronics books. one in particular was far-too-well-thumbed, virtually falling apart, called "from calculators to compulators." it offered many ideas for using glue logic, interfacing 7-segment displays, keyboards, power supplies, etc. gosh it was eye-openeing. tab books was virtually an electronics education, well before college. no surpise i'm a licensed professional electrical engineer, hmm? but, sadly, without the ground-breaking experience chris had, bringing incredible opportunities like electronic calculators and the bbc micro to the rest of us : )
Excellent :)
iam from the USA and as i born in the late 80s kind of geek girl my self i find how UK had all these Micro computes and in the states when did not a lot from what i have learn but i got say I love Chris Curry and Acorn computers the made Chip we still use today ARM (Acorn Risk Machine ) while from all i know i think Chris Curry was a better man then Sir Clive whale they both were smarter than most of us i got say i would not mine collecting few Acorn computers my self even know they won't run right in the states i want to get one that started ARM chip i forget the name of that one i think i might have watch micro men again anyways take care peace and love
You had the Apple II, totally unaffordable in the UK at the time. From the US, the only computer that sold was the Commodore 64.
Fantastic interview. ZX fan checking in. Just worried about screen burn on the BBC monitors behind...
I too was worried about the screen burn! Pretty sad really, but the equipment in the background looks to be in such great condition.
That's the gorgeous Cub multisync monitor for you! 4 years permanently on in the Econet lab and yet the burn in was only just noticeable :-)
At last, Chris Curry's view on the Acorn story! Thanks for this - an interesting watch. Seems like it ended quite abruptly - any more footage from the interview post the Acorn flotation?
Yes ... there is ... watch this space ;)
Right answer :)
Agh! I need to know more :)
@@TheCentreforComputingHistory 5 years later......?
would be good to show a shot of the electrostatic tube version of the micro vision when Christopher Curry mentions it. although not a commercial success, that was a very innovative design - still used years later in entryphone systems.
I bought the MK14 - I think it had 256 bits of RAM, not Bytes!
I'm sure you are probably joking but no, it actually was 256 bytes, expandable on-board to 640 bytes by fitting two more optional 2111 RAM ICs and the 8154 I/O RAM IC. Still not a lot of memory by modern standards.
The bloke was handsome too, look for the oct 82 practical computing interview photos, sexy devil.
44:30 Woah.... Oundle School.... I never expected my interest in the BBC Micro and my interest in Throbbing Gristle to meet each other.... This chap from Oundle must have been quite the futurist in many ways. (although, on the subject of TG.... you really could have done with turning the volume up on Chris's mic.)
Great example of working together.
Lovely to hear the name Richard Russell. A very talented BBC engineer, I think his own personal career speaks very loudly. I believe he did the digital network clock (GNAT) and later the digitals for COW. The orginal spinning globe we may know this as.
22:20 Has Chris got his chronology right here? He's talking about the 'black watch' in the same breath as the NEB period, and apparently dating it to 1968-69, but the NEB was only formed (under Harold Wilson's 3rd Labour Government) in 1975, and took a stake in Sinclair Radionics in 1976.
Yes, I recall the Black Watch being advertised around ‘76 / ‘77 time.
When computing was fun as fuck...
Who remembers Sinclair's first product, a DIY kit of parts to make yourself a 10 transistor audio amplifier? They were only sold as kits because he bought skip loads of scrap transistors from Plessey Semiconductors in Swindon. If the amplifier didn't work (which of course it didn't, being built from scrap) you could send it back to Sinclair with a large amount of money which paid for genuine transistors, they would fix it and return it to you. Not many people did, because they were marketed implying (by the inclusion of a soldering iron and soldering instructions) that anyone could build an amplifier on their kitchen table. The builder would then think they had done something wrong and didn't want to admit it.
hello does any 1 know if lander on the risc os 2.01 in 1989 had sound at all?? the fred harris video had sound in lander does any1 know if it did have sound at all? i noticed that it had sound in the 1989 video - todays emulators have no sound in lander - does any 1 know why maybe? thanks
Chris should have been knighted, he deserved it. My brother purchased his Acorn for £99 in February 1986 when the home computer market had collapsed and stock remained unsold. I was not aware of the rivalry with Sinclair until Micro Men came out or that Acorn had been sold to Olivetti in 1985. I still feel a UK "IBM" giant could have been created, neither Sinclair nor Acorn focused on Corporates where the long-term money was. Maybe an alliance with Apricot Computers to diversify sales revenue. Lack of vision.
In retrospect, Sinclair, Acorn and Apricot should all have merged and unified around the Archimedes platform to forestall the threat from IBM compatibles, and open sourced the Archimedes operating system, which would probably mean it would occupy the Linux space today. But that's 20/20 hindsight, there's no way any executive at the time could have antipated the IBM compatible space would come close to vanquishing every other platform by 1994, even the Apple Macintosh almost died by the mid 90s.
Excellent
2 of 2, Siclair Raidonics also programed a special calculator 1978 "..The Sporting Life" is a British weekly sports newspaper, and a "Settler" is the person behind the counter in a betting shop. The newspaper sponsored the development of this calculator. ...."
LOOK at the calculator.. 4 x10 keys,Text?, Vacuum Fluorescent Display, 16 segments, text?, reprogram again ( Basic? ) and this led to the Newbrain Computer.Just THINK, portable computers could have been normality INSTED of Domestic TV's and ZX80 etc..
www.vintagecalculators.com/html/the_sporting_life_settler.html