Rick Dickinson, ZX Spectrum designer, RIP

[Adrian Graham]

> On 26 Apr 2018, at 22:13, Eric Smith via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 26 Apr 2018, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:
>> 
>>> Those Microdrives were such a Cheese design.
>>> 
>> 
>> The American Cheese Society (industry association) would probably resent
>> that comparison
> 
> 
> I was referring to a different, non-comestible Cheese. What I stated about
> the Microdrives was literally true, not a metaphor.


From my own Sinclair page (http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Sinclair/index.php <http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Sinclair/index.php>): 

"Interesting, if sad, trivia: courtesy of Andrew Owen comes a sad note - Ben Cheese, one of the QL Engineers has passed on.....a small reminder of Ben is in this paragraph:
>The Microdrives whirred at different speeds too. If you took eight,
carefully selected for tone, and hooked them up to a QL (I guess an
Interface 1 would do just as well, but never saw it) you could play tunes by
turning the appropriate motors off and on. Christmas carols were popular...
this particular silliness was cooked up by Ben Cheese, an incredibly
talented and even more incredibly nice chap who was one of the QL engineers.
He also did mildly subversive cartoons for the Sinclair in-house newsletter
(WHAM!, or What's Happening At Milton), and played saxophone. With Shakatak,
on one occasion. He went on to work at Flare with some other SInclair
engineers (Martin Brennan and John Mc… um*), who had their own Z80
Spectrumalike for a while, then did various oddities including the Atari
Jaguar <http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Atari/jaguar.php> and a disk drive chip for Amstrad that fully explored various
out-of-spec conditions in the ASIC process used to fab it."
(*John Mathieson)

-- 
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaurs    f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk