Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 19:26, Adrian Graham via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> My first was a ZX80 which my Dad borrowed from my physics teacher at
school. That spurred me on to get my own ZX81 which had just come out, then
the Research Machines 380Z at later school, then the 48K ZXSpectrum.
Amazing little machines for the money but I never discovered the name of
the designer until much later.

Same here!

> You could’ve stopped after ‘flopped’ though the Oric went on to do very
well in France and the Dragon still has a good userbase today. Strictly
speaking they all do apart from the Lynx, but the Dragon is alive and well.
The biggest Enterprise group is still in Hungary where the unsold machines
were dumped after Enterprise Computers went bust in 1986.

I'm in the Hungarian Enterprise owners group on FB -- machine translation
is an amazing thing -- and I still hope to own one.

The Oric did relatively well, yes -- better than the Dragon. But neither
achieved more than a _fraction_ of the success of the Sinclair range, and
as for the others -- Camputers, Memotech, Jupiter, Newbrain, even
foreigners such as Mattel, Spectravideo, Sord -- they all put together
probably sold fewer than Sinclair.

In fact, I suspect that Sinclair and Commodore together outsold every other
home micro vendor put together. And there were a _lot_.

> Yep. RIP. I missed him doing ‘an evening with…’ last year at the Computer
Museum in Cambridge, naturally I thought there’d be another one.

:-(

-- 
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