The Rainbow Stripe

1982 · Colour Home Computer Launch · Work 981 of 1,871

A conference room of a large hotel in London on a spring day, a table in plain dark blue cloth before a plain pale grey backdrop, behind it the man, a man of forty-one, bald crown, short ginger-red beard, metal-rimmed glasses, in a dark grey suit, holding up a flat black home computer twenty-three centimetres wide with forty small blue-grey rubber keys, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, four short diagonal stripes in red, yellow, green and cyan across one corner, in the foreground press photographers seen from directly behind, faces turned fully away, cameras raised, flashes lighting the room white.

Who
Clive Sinclair (1940–2021) was a British inventor and entrepreneur who made the home computer cheap and common in Britain. Born on 30 July 1940, he first worked as assistant editor of the magazine "Practical Wireless" and founded his first company, Sinclair Radionics, on 25 July 1961. In August 1972 came his Executive, the world's first slim-line electronic pocket calculator. In 1980 followed the ZX80, the first British mass-market home computer for under 100 pounds, on 5 March 1981 the ZX81, which sold half a million, and in 1982 the ZX Spectrum. Sinclair's company was the first in the world to sell more than a million computers, and many credit the Spectrum with starting the British games industry. Sinclair was knighted in 1983. His C5 electric tricycle of 1985, by contrast, was an expensive flop, and in April 1986 Amstrad bought the rights to his computers. Sinclair died in London on 16 September 2021, aged 81, after more than a decade with cancer.
The moment
On 23 April 1982, at the Churchill Hotel, Sinclair presented the ZX Spectrum to reporters and a barrage of camera flashbulbs. Designed by Rick Dickinson, the machine was a black box 23 centimetres wide with rubber keys and a rainbow in its right-hand corner. What was new was colour: on the family television the Spectrum showed fifteen hues, and it loaded its programs from cassette tapes. With 16 kilobytes of memory it cost 125 pounds, with 48 kilobytes 175 pounds. Sinclair compared it directly with the BBC Micro from his rival Acorn: it was obvious at a glance, he said, that the Spectrum's design was more elegant. It was built by Timex in Dundee, Scotland. The picture shows Sinclair in the flashlight with the small black computer, seen over the shoulders of the photographers.
The other side
The Spectrum was unveiled faster than it could be built. A month after deliveries began, in July 1982, 30,000 orders were waiting, and over the summer about 40,000. In September 1982 Sinclair apologised publicly and offered waiting buyers their money back. The rubber keys were mocked at the time as "dead flesh"; the pre-launch brochure had shown hard plastic keys, but they belonged to a mock-up.

What the sources leave open: The day is disputed: History (UK) gives 22 April 1982, the Centre for Computing History and The Register give the 23rd. The room, tablecloth, backdrop, clothing and the way he held the computer are not recorded. Sinclair's face follows a public-domain photograph of 1992, taken back to his age of 41.

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