Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (19 page)

Although the manufacture of low-cost, miniature televisions has been a relentless obsession throughout Sinclair’s career, the flat-screen project must be regarded as a new development on a path of consistent folly. The idea was initially offered for public consumption in the summer of 1979 while Sinclair was still with Radionics. One of the many problems of earlier Sinclair televisions was that their portability was seriously impaired by the size and weight of their tubes. The viability of the flat-screen solution occurred to Sinclair when he came across the 25-year-old research carried out by Professor Denis Gabor of Imperial College. The following extract from an Economist feature (21 February 1981) outlines the principles behind the technology Sinclair had decided on for the development of his flat screen:

A normal cathode-ray tube has electrons fired from the back. The Sinclair design has the electron gun firing its beam in from the side instead. Inside the set, the electron beam is then bent through a right-angle by an electrostatic field so as to strike a phosphor-coated screen mounted on the inside of the set’s backplate. The viewer thus sees the picture, not darkly through the thick phosphor screen (as in a conventional set), but directly through a clear glass window in the front of the set ... Not having to look at a piece of thick phosphor-coated glass makes the picture appear much brighter. So less power is needed - in fact, about five times less than in a conventional set.

In a further effort to minimize power consumption, Sinclair decided that his flat screen would be less wide than it was high. The television’s picture was to be restored to normal shape by means of a Fresnel lens mounted in front of the screen.

Since the NEB had no interest in pursuing yet another of Sinclair’s miniature visions, flat-screen development was deferred until revenue from the ZX80 provided funds for research. A team of engineers at St Ives worked on both the development of the flat-screen tube and the design of the automated production processes that would be used in its manufacture. By the time Sinclair announced that Timex had been awarded the flat-screen and ZX81 contracts, a prototype television was up and running for the consumption of a generally enthusiastic press. Ever optimistic, Sinclair confidently predicted an annual output of a million tubes a year, and an extra thousand jobs at Timex by 1985. In the event, production difficulties and industrial unrest ensured that the appearance of the Microvision would be delayed for more than two years.

In January 1982, Sinclair Research announced a licensing deal with Timex, allowing the former watch manufacturer to market Sinclair technology in the States. Although the success of the ZX81 and imminent Spectrum mania spelt phenomenal growth for Sinclair’s company, Research was still far too small to make a sustained impact on the enormous American market. The deal with Olsen’s floundering giant offered Sinclair a satisfyingly economic solution. Although Timex had very little to offer the States in terms of product, the company had maintained its network of 170,000 retail outlets, including the Sears, K-mart and Service Merchandise chains. On signing the licensing deal, Sinclair was able to tap into a vast distribution network without the enormous capital outlay such an operation would normally require. The terms of the arrangement were to prove extremely profitable for Sinclair. Timex would pay a 5 per cent royalty on all Sinclair hardware sold in the US. In addition, Olsen had agreed to fork out a further 5 per cent on all Sinclair-originated software and 2.5 per cent on any software marketed by Timex but produced by companies other than Research.

Prior to signing the licensing deal, Sinclair’s business in the States had been conducted almost exclusively on a mail-order basis. In spite of the limitations of such an approach, Research had done surprisingly well with the American hobbyists. Promoted by what Informatics magazine described as a ‘cheeky’ advertising campaign, Sinclair satisfied a gap in the US market that had yet to be addressed by home-based companies. By June 1981, Sinclair Research was shipping 18,000-20,000 ZX81s a month to the States, which in those days exceeded the combined unit sales of market leaders Tandy, Apple and Commodore. As a footnote to this impressive performance, a number of contemporary reports suggest that on arrival only one in three of the machines shipped actually worked.

In October 1981, Sinclair finalized a deal that proved to be the perfect promotional vehicle for the company and its products. American Express undertook to test market the ZX81 to its 9.5 million mail-order customers, who were offered the privilege of picking up the machine for $150. In a statement from Sinclair’s Boston office as empty as it was optimistic, a spokesman proclaimed, ‘The demographics are right. Sinclair believes that American Express cardholders are representative of the kind of people who will want to buy his products, and American Express think the same.’

Latching on to Sinclair’s self-promotion as the paradigm British eccentric, the American financial press generously heralded him as a maverick dark horse of the new technology. Having relished steady but profitable incursions into the US market by England’s ‘thin, unprepossessing inventor’, those in the know anticipated a wealth of colourful copy when the Olsen deal was announced.

No one could suggest that at the beginning of the campaign the advance publicity failed to make the transition into an appropriate volume of dollars. When Timex announced the launch of the TS1000 in July 1982, the company adopted the standard promotional approach of establishing a toll-free phone line to answer the queries of potential customers. No one could have predicted the 50,000 calls a week prompted by the campaign. It seems that many people dialled the Timex number simply to discuss their queries about microcomputing in general; nevertheless there were few at Timex inclined to scepticism over any promotion that at one point generated a staggering 5200 inquiries an hour.

By the time Olsen’s company launched the TS1000 in the States, Sinclair had already creamed the lucrative hobbyist market via his adverts in the specialist magazines. According to market researchers Future Computing, Sinclair’s company had sold 150,000 ZX81s into the US by the time the licensing deal with Timex was formalized. Under the terms of the agreement, even when the TS1000 became available in the States, Sinclair Research was still permitted to sell the ZX81 as a mail-order item until Timex sales reached an undisclosed volume.

Although the outward appearance of the ZX81 was modified for the US market, the TS1000 made precious few concessions to the demands of a transatlantic crossing. Nevertheless, in the five months following the launch, Timex sold more than 550,000 units into an enthusiastic market, earning in excess of $1.2m in royalties for its British partners. It looked as if a solution had been found to the $14m trading loss projected for Timex in 1982. Then the bubble burst. Timex’s inexperience in the consumer-electronics market - let alone the home-computer market - took its toll. We’ll let the Wall Street Journal (17 August 1983) take up the story:

Although [Timex] quickly sold thousands of computers in the heady days last fall [autumn 1982], early Timex Sinclair buyers faced an immediate disappointment. Almost all the programs written for the Timex computer required a $50 memory unit. But Timex didn’t supply that unit in great numbers until two or three months after it introduced the computer. Many new owners would take the computer home without software, plug it in and find it didn’t do anything useful. ‘It was a disaster,’ says the computer buyer at a large discount store chain ... The model 1000 is also irritating to use. If it is jiggled when the memory unit is attached, the television screen hooked up to it sometimes goes blank. The keyboard, drawn on a piece of hard plastic, doesn’t have separate keys. The computer also can’t produce color graphics or sound and isn’t much good for playing games. Consumers who wanted to learn about computers were willing to ignore such shortcomings when the unit was the only one selling for less than $100, but now sales have plummeted.

A partial explanation for the short-lived success of the Timex campaign centres on the conflicting demands of the embryonic home-computer markets in the U S and U K. When assessing the character of this particular commercial conjuncture, it is important to remember that prior to the Spectrum’s launch the only real application for a Sinclair micro was as a learning tool for would-be BASIC or Z80 (machine-code) programmers. In the halcyon days when an inexperienced Sinclair confided to the American press that he’d rather be ‘a pirate than a captain of industry’, he was also tempted to pontificate on the failure of any single American company to dominate the fledgling US micro market:

Our competitors thought that consumers didn’t want to learn programming. We [Sinclair Research] think they failed because of this and because of price. (Informatics, 29 June 1981.)

American market response to the TS1000 revealed that the competition was perfectly correct in its pessimistic assessment of the general public’s interest in computer programming. Certainly there was a market for a learning machine among electronics hobbyists and students of computer science. This group would account for a substantial proportion of the 150,000 mail-order sales fulfilled by Sinclair Research prior to its licensing agreement with Timex. There was also an interest in programming among a minority of the affluent middle classes who, possibly intrigued by the technology littering their offices, considered the cost of a TS1000 a small price to pay to satisfy their curiosity. This group almost certainly made a healthy contribution to the 550,000 sales in six months that convinced Timex it was on to a winner.

Unfortunately, while the TS1000 was satisfying the demands of a studious minority, the competition was defining the role of the micro in the lives of the American people. According to the gospel of companies like Apple, Atari, Commodore and Texas Instruments, home computers were about either business (including wordprocessing) or arcade games. Programming was the province of egg-head hobbyists or the professional. Why would any layman want to grapple with computer languages like BASIC when any game or application program could be had for the asking?

Although the US approach to microcomputer application eventually came to dominate the UK market, at the time the TS1000 began to flounder a significant proportion of Spectrum owners in Britain regarded their investment as an entree into the mysteries of programming. As a graphic illustration of this conflict in consumer demand, it is necessary only to examine the sluggish attempts by mass-market publishers to stumble aboard the microcomputing bandwagon. In the States, the only mass-market books that made money were those that simplified hard- or software manuals or offered listings of arcade games. By contrast, publishers in the UK supplemented revenue from listings books with high-level programming tutors, introductions to machine code and alternative user guides that demolished the limitations of design.

As far as Sinclair Research was concerned, Timex’s launch of the TS 1000 had generated a significant return which surpassed its most optimistic projections. Given that the company had enough on its plate satisfying UK demand for the Spectrum, there was little incentive to embark on a comprehensive survey of market trends in the States.

The backlog of unsatisfied mail-order customers ensured that Sinclair was forced to hand over a significant proportion of Christmas trade to the competition. Although in November W. H. Smith finalized an exclusive retail deal for high-street distribution of the Spectrum, Sinclair Research could come up with only 3000 of the company’s initial order of 6000 machines.

There can be little doubt that the early success of the TS1000 was largely attributable to the low price of the product coupled with the initial novelty value of a home computer as a consumer-electronics artefact. Within twelve months, the concerted promotions of home-based companies clarified the consumer’s image and expectations of a computer, and in the process transformed Timex’s commercial salvation into a dubious gimmick. Sales of the TS1000 took an irreparable nosedive when companies such as Commodore and Texas Instruments slashed the prices of their down-market machines to below the $100 mark. Unlike the TS1000, the decidedly limited TI/99A (Texas Instruments) and the VIC 20 (Commodore) boasted standard keyboards and generally gave the impression of being ‘real’ computers. Under pressure from the veterans of the US computer market the inexperienced Timex didn’t stand a chance. The company dropped the price of the TS 1000 to around $40, but no one seemed to notice.

As the Timex-Sinclair partnership stumbled towards a fall in the States, back in Dundee events struggled to keep pace with the trend. Having shifted Nimslo 3D-camera production to Japan, in January Fred Olsen announced 1900 redundancies at Timex’s Scottish plant. Management maintained that the remaining 2300 jobs would be at risk unless the unions complied with the decision. Unsurprisingly, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) was disinclined to suffer the dismissal of almost half the plant’s workforce without a struggle. The threat of industrial action followed hot on the heels of the redundancy announcement.

The ‘petulant’ response of the AUEW could hardly have come at a worse time for Sinclair Research. Apart from the disruption to computer production that would result from any kind of a strike, there was a distinct danger that worker caprice would threaten the entire commercial viability of the flat-screen television project. Sinclair was well aware that Sony was on the verge of launching its Watchman product, and that unless he was careful Research would become an also-ran in the miniature-television market. With so much at stake, Sinclair made it clear in January that, unless the Timex workforce saw sense, the plant was in danger of losing both ZX81 and flat-screen production.

Although 1700 workers accepted voluntary redundancy pay-offs, the remaining 200 employees took the decision to fight for their right to work. The AUEW militants took control of the Dundee plant on 8 April, and their five-week sit-in disrupted all Timex production until the third week in May. Sony launched its Watchman in the first week of June, three months ahead of Sinclair’s Microvision. ‘Sick as a parrot,’ is how Sinclair summed up his response to the Japanese invasion.