Hi all, Came across this forum while doing a bit of research / finding out if I was sad and alone, at least I'm not alone ;-)) I was a serial offender for purchasing small and more cutting edge stuff from the 70's right through until I retired, now I need a magnifying glass just to read a CD. I traveled worldwide so size and weight was always an issue. I had a JVC - 3060UK which was a portable Multi Band Radio / TV / Cassette player / recorder (still got it somewhere), then migrated to smaller cassette kit (various Sony & Aiwa mostly) over the ensuing years. Then the first "Portable" CD player, I think it was a Sony, it was slim but the battery pack that it slid into was huge and only lasted a couple of hours play time. Latterly I moved into Micro Cassettes, I liked the idea of being able to compile my own cassettes, they could also be used for notes or recording meetings, the size and weight while snow skiing was a great benefit and lastly nobody wanted to borrow / nick my music. Finally I ended up using a Sony NT-1 (a much under rated piece of kit), just as the digital revolution started to take off. Now I find myself at an age where clearing out all my old kit is becoming a major hobby and that's how I ended up here. I might not be here for a long time as all my gear will eventually go and if I'm honest I may not last a great deal longer! But until then I hope I can share some of information on the stuff that you rarely see now and I will probably learn some cool stuff I didn't know about the kit I had.
Belated welcome Twopotjock, for some reason the introduction threads always show up late for me and usually don't show up under the "new posts" button, I'm just seeing this thread. You were buying the equipment that as a young kid, inspired me into getting a degree in design, although I've never used it professionally. Most of the equipment was way too expensive for the neighborhood kids but we'd spend a lot of time at the malls and electronic shops looking at all of the new gadgets. It was such an exciting time, we had so many different genre's of music, tons of new releases and all of this equipment to play it on. Luckily a lot of equipment was saved, I passed by several full-size components in the late 90's that people laughed at and most likely ended up trashed but I save a fair portion. I started on this forum years ago when the early members used to talk about very seldom seen higher end portables. I was looking around to see if anybody still liked this stuff in the early days of the internet. We're now seeing a revival of this beautiful equipment and the music that we played on it, I give a lot of credit to this forum, the boombox and Walkman Collectors held on to the little gems and still talked about them, while most of the world laughed at cassettes.
As I mentioned, I traveled a lot in those days, mostly in the Far East, was single and had a decent paying job, so I was very fortunate from that perspective. Trawling the electronics malls in Japan, HK and Singapore was great fun and being as transient as I was, more domestic issues hadn't gotten a grip on me. I'd still enjoy a mooch around if the opportunity arose but I'd probably be so far out of touch with so much being software based these days, it much not be so much fun.
I missed your introduction as well, so welcome and thanks for doing the catalogue scans. I think I am between your age and Mister X. You are right about living through the golden age of gadgets. After reading your post earlier I was thinking about the first time I ever saw a pocket calculator. I was about 12 or 13 when my Father bought a Commodore using a staff discount scheme they had at work. I was impressed that it displayed the numbers as you keyed them in. Having only seen pictures I just assumed that like a mechanical calculator only the answer would be displayed. Another memory from around that time was a kid in the year below me at school (who was also interested in electronics) who I would refer to as "The Kid with the Digital Watch". If I ever knew his name I don't remember it. In a school with about 1300 pupils, the other members of the electronics club knew exactly who I meant. Finally you might not have seen http://www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/ That was the site that Stereo2Go came out of many years (and several webhosts) earlier.
I confess I was also a geeky kid. I built one of the very early Sinclair radio kits while in school, built the Sinclair digital watch and the calculator, I think there were only three or four of us in my engineering section who had calculators and I was the only self build. Reverse Polish notation confused the hell out of the navigators but made perfect sense to engineers I've still got both the watch and the calculator somewhere, probably in the same box as the owners manuals for the M-50 and the TC-MR2
If the Black Watch still works it is worth quite a bit these days. Of course things like that weren't cheap back then, especially compared to the £12500 the bungalow I live in cost new in 1974. If you have a look through https://worldradiohistory.com/Practical_Electronics.htm I'm sure you will find plenty of Sinclair adverts. They used to have Practical Electronics in the school library, but 90% of the projects were unaffordable for a schoolboy.
I'd better get rummaging. I was a serial Sinclair offender, also had the ubiquitous ZX81 and even the first "bent electron gun" Sinclair TV, wish I could remember what I did with that. I had two paper rounds, helped on a milk round and variously worked in Halfords and was a petrol pump attendant on weekends, that's what porridge does for you, how things have changed. Genuinely appreciative people would give you a tip, without asking, for cleaning the windscreen, checking fluids or fitting a roof rack.
We were first exposed to the Sinclair ZX80 in kit form, then we started hearing stories of this guy that made micro-tv's, mini-cars and all kinds of other cool stuff. His computers after the ZX Series looked impressive from magazine ads but were very rare over here, although I did have a ZX81 and, like a lot of early programmers, learned BASIC on it. It was fun trying to squeeze programs into 16K or not bump the RAM pack but it was all about innovation in those early days. People look at my boombox and Walkman collection and ask which I had when I was a kid, back then mine were all mid-level, the stuff on my walls was pretty expensive back then, you'd get one and take really good care of it. Feel free to post photos of your equipment Twopotjock, I've only seen the TV in old magazine reviews. Did you own his micro-oscilloscope, I found ads for that, it looked pretty neat and very small.
My parents wouldn't let me have a part time job while I was at school as they both worked and didn't want any extra hassle. However, they fully supported my decision to start an Apprenticeship when I was 16. Then, compared to Pocket Money, my disposable income increased about 20 fold. A friend had the ZX80, which I wasn't impressed with due to the flashing, rolling, screen whenever you pressed a key. However, as soon as the ZX81 was announced I placed an order for a kit. Each morning the local radio station has a "Golden hour" in which you have to work out the year which isn't given until the end. A couple of weeks ago I got the date as 1981 before they even played a record due to a clue they gave about the Space Shuttle. In the same eight weeks in the Antenna Design department I got my ZX81 kit working (with a bit of help from one of the engineers who spotted an error in the build instructions) and watched the first attempt to launch the Space Shuttle on a TV with a big kink in the picture someone had brought into repair and never got around to doing. In between all that I produced the artworks for three aerofoil shaped PCBs to go in an antenna which bolted onto the side of a helicopter using the old method of Letraset and drawing film. A few months later, just before Christmas I was in a different department, which had a full Tandy TRS80 system which cost about £3000. I took my ZX81 in to show the guy I was working for, hooking it up to the TRS80 monitor. He was so impressed that he immediately decided that was what his kids were getting for Christmas, phoned around various branches of WH Smith to find where they had stock, then took the afternoon off to go to the next town and buy one. At the same time there was a circuit diagram of a 16K RAM pack going around work, so as the Apprentice I was given the job of making one on stripboard. So a week before Christams I was busy making part of his kids/his Christmas present! I never did get my own 16K RAM pack but did upgrade my ZX81 to 2KBytes RAM before moving on to a Texas TI99/4A. I too have one of the flat screen TVs but it was bought at a Radio Rally for £30 many years later. I was quite keen on it when it was announced but, like many Sinclair products the release date slipped and slipped and in the meantime I bought myself a normal TV. A different colleague bought a QL when they were being sold off cheap after Sinclair got sold to Amstrad.
That's a tale for your grand kids, if they'll believe you. Guys who come up with so many good ideas ahead of their time rarely have the business acumen to take them forward and either make bad decisions often based on emotional attachment or get ripped off by big business / screwed over by government. Ican only think of the one who got it right and though I'm not a huge fan of the way he works, he does make it work and went through all the pain and criticism to get there, Dyson. I only tip when I feel a person has done the job with their heart and taken pride in doing it well enough to be recognised, I was a nightmare in the US
The buyer of Sinclair Computers, Alan Sugar hasn't done too badly for someone who started out selling car aerials from his van. TooCool didn't believe me when I said he is now a Billionaire, but it's true. Admittedly his ideas were usually high level, like including everything you needed with the CPC computer while other people (the same people who founded Ambit) did the design work. Have you ever watched Micromen, a Docu-drama about the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn? You might not know that Acorn designed the ARM processor, updated versions of which are now used in about 99% of Smartphones. There are a couple of subtle references to that at the end of the program.
I knew vaguely about the ARM story. There are a lot of back stories that are geekily fascinating, like how Purple software (early Geo Nav) which I had on my Psion III and was using it with some freeware text to voice software and an early marine GPS receiver patched into the Psion with a homemade connector on a NULL Modem cable for voice guided road driving in the mid 90's, evolved into what we now know as TomTom. Then the Psion story, after early collaboration with Sinclair, of how from their Psion Organiser platform developed their SIBO OS forward through the EPOC OS and later the SYMBIAN software got into phones with Nokia, Ericson and Motorola. There was a documentary I saw the later half of (might have been BBC) telling the story of Nokia and how they went from Hero to Zero in a heartbeat. That looks like an interesting watch, thanks for the pointer, saved for later.
That just reminded me about a BT Tonto I once owned. (one of the many computers that fleetingly went through my collection). The hardware wasn't great, but I was impressed by the software, written by Psion, which allowed you to do things like dial numbers from an address book. Cutting edge stuff for the 1980s. I didn't know about the connection between Psion and Symbian. My Sony Satio "Smartphone" still runs that OS!
