Acorn Vs Sinclair

[RoboCop]

If you had known the famous ZX Spectrum and the Acorn BBC machines, then this is how it happened from where it started. You old timers may of remembered Sir Clive Sinclair who invented some great gadgets like calculators, watches, portable TVs and many more. But the ZX Spectrum is well remembered and CodeMasters, Ultimate Play The Game/RareWare, Ocean Software and Mastertronic published top rated ZX games.

CodeMasters were the makers of Dizzy series, CJ Elephant and also some sport games like BMX, Grand Prix and so on. Ultimate was a successful game developer ran by the Stamper Bros, who are now retired near 2008 after Microsoft took ownership in 2002 when Nintendo made their final game from RareWare: Starfox Adventures. Rare did made some GBA games back when Ultimate made Sabre Wulf, but nothing compares to Jetpak, and Lunar Jetman. I remember playing Jetman near 1988 and it was awkward having limited fuel and dodging asteroids I can tell ya!

But I also seen and played the BBC computer and Archimedes in schools. BBCs are more powerful, but bulky as well expensive. The 128k BBC Master was a common computer for school that were used for education purposes. Acorn was founded by ex-Sinclair employees, Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser who got asked to leave Sinclair Radionics due to the failure of the watch products, and had to develop their own company away from Sinclair.

But it was kinda a dead heat as both Sinclair and Acorn lost to compete near the 16-bit era onwards. The question is would Sinclair survived if Clive Sinclair hired better employees but not let them leave and compete Sinclair? Would it been better if Sinclair denied to let Alan Sugar (Amstrad) didn't bought Sinclair's shares near 1986? And would it been easy for customers to narrow their choices for the Acorn BBC, ZX Spectrum, C64 and the Amstrad CPC? But we cannot change the past.

[Hot Trout]

Another great fight between 8-bit rivals indeed. There was a fantastic TV program in the UK called 'Micro Men', have a look on youtube for it which explained some of the rivals antics.