On its launch in 1982, though, the ZX Spectrum was still just the latest in a long line of products from Cambridge’s Sinclair Research Limited. Its instantly recognisable palette of 15 garish colours. The fleshy quality of the first generation computer’s keys. The bleep and chirp as games loaded – slowly – from yards of unspooling audiotape. The clunk and click of a cassette going into a player. And then there were the indelible memories it left behind. At a time when computing was insanely expensive, it brought programming and video games within the reach of just about everyone. The ZX Spectrum went through several iterations in its lifetime, from the tiny issue one pictured here to the chunkier +2, +2A, and +3įor a generation that used it, the ZX Spectrum was the gateway into a whole new medium. “A wee while later,” Croucher says now, “the Sinclair ZX Spectrum changed the world for everybody at that party, and a whole bunch of people beyond.” “Don’t mind him – that’s Clive Sinclair.”
Puzzled, Croucher tapped another party-goer on the shoulder and asked “who that miserable bald bloke with the shiny round specs was.” Not long after this exchange, the bespectacled man made his excuses and headed for the bathroom. “He looked at me as if I was bonkers, which indeed I was.” “I told him that the purpose of home microcomputers was to be very silly and play games,” Croucher says. With this in mind, Croucher was openly amused by the bespectacled party-goer’s argument that computers were for boring things like accounts. That December, Croucher used a local radio station to broadcast a blast of data, which listeners could then record onto audio cassette and load into their computer. Despite his befuddlement at the ZX Spectrum’s success as a games machine, Sir Clive Sinclair was a regular sight in magazines covering the formatĪt this point, Croucher had recently already set up what is widely credited as the first video games company in the UK, Automata, which made titles for the Commodore PET.