The Rubber Keyed Wonder tells the story of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This film goes into all the finer details of how | dG1fT1F1bEx1Z3VLcTA
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00:00My object is to find people's real needs, to develop products which are of real benefit
00:28to people in whatever way, and to do that at a price that they can afford, to do for
00:3410p what anyone can do for a pound.
00:36So Clive Sinclair, you knew who he was, some great British inventor, but I don't think
00:42we sort of realised at the time the significance of what he was innovating in and what it would
00:47lead to.
00:48My father was always thinking about the next invention, new ideas, that was where his heart
00:54was.
00:55He wanted to come up with something completely new that everybody would adopt, that's really
00:59what his goal was, to have a product that everybody wanted and everybody needed.
01:03Clive was an innovator, you need these people, they're the engines of industry, people that
01:08are prepared to take a risk, stick their neck out, and Clive Sinclair was a risk taker in
01:14the best way.
01:15I think of him as a boffin who understood what was important to people and how he could
01:22bring the future into their lives at a decent price.
01:27One of the strengths of Clive was that he was newsworthy, he was a personality, he was
01:31a bit of a maverick, people wanted to know what was he going to say, what was he going
01:35to do next.
01:46The spectrum was there at the time when it was affordable for parents to say, yeah, we
01:50can stretch it out.
01:52The spectrum was ideal, you'd go to a shop, pick it up, you'd unbox it, you'd plug it
01:55in.
02:00I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
02:03The rainbow stripe on the bottom right, it's a thing of absolute beauty.
02:07And the Sinclair logo itself, the font, get out of town.
02:10It was just so successful.
02:17The amount of games that we used to get to was just incredible.
02:22The games playing really made the spectrum the success that it was.
02:29To me, it just made it possible to get into computing.
02:33That's the spectral experience.
02:36It's one of the few times that I dug my heels in and said, Clive, we're hiring her or I'm
02:41leaving.
02:42When Clive was targeting those early adopters, innovators, he was happiest.
02:48This was cheap.
02:49It was in everyone's houses.
02:50It was colour.
02:51Beautiful.
02:52It gave the tools of production to the hands of millions.