You have to see the ZX81 (and the later Spectrum, which is the machine I remember) in their early 1980s context.

Yes, the ZX81’s membrane keyboard and the Spectrum’s “dead flesh” rubber keys were atrocious but the machine was cheap enough to be an affordable introduction to computing for a working-class family. And no-one at the time had experienced anything better!

Don’t forget, the UK was a less affluent consumer market in the early 80s with 12% unemployment and average household disposable income about 30% lower than in the US.

Sinclair was briefly celebrated by the Thatcher Government of the 1980s as a model of the kind of entrepreneurial innovator they wanted to encourage. This was a time of industrial contraction and high unemployment in the UK – while the ZX81 was hitting the market 25% of British manufacturing capacity was closing down in the devastating early 80s recession. (The Specials’ iconic song “Ghost Town” summed up that era). Ironically Sinclair Research itself ultimately failed and was bought out by Alan Sugar, a very different kind of entrepreneur.

Sinclair left a legacy of thousands of British bedroom programmers and gamers, but famously he disliked games – a more nimble, less self-regarding figure might have actually embraced that and reaped the profits. As Alan Sugar himself says, “you’ve got to smell what’s selling” – Sinclair, for all his tech vision, just didn’t.

I’ve updated the blog post.

Acorn launched Econet in 1981 so it was a bit later than ARCnet but around the same time as Ethernet, while being a lot slower than either of them. The BBC Micro only ran at 2MHz so luckily this wasn’t much of a problem.

Like ARCnet, Econet went away because Ethernet got faster and cheaper, and because businesses and even schools started buying PC clones rather than proprietary desktops like Acorn’s computers.