Today 30 years ago it all ended, at least officially...

QLvsJAGUAR

Today 30 years ago what was announced to the press resulted in a new start for almost the entire crew of Sinclair Research Ltd.

At 20 seconds there's a short scene of how work in the Sinclair offices was.

slenkar

Did spectrum manufacturing stay in the UK?

Grunaki

It's all ghastly barrowboys like this Amstrad fellow..

guesser

slenkar wrote: »

Did spectrum manufacturing stay in the UK?

Amstrad did some a little bit of UK manufacturing. But what do you mean stay? Sinclair had some stuff made overseas too.

http://hardware.speccy.org/imagenes/ordenadores/spectrum+48k-Samsung(back).jpg

:p

Zup

slenkar wrote: »

Did spectrum manufacturing stay in the UK?

AFAIK, +2A/B and +3 were manufactured in Asia. I don't know if grey +2 were still manufactured in Europe or Asia.

1024MAK

Some grey +2 were made in the UK. Some were made in Asia.

slenkar

He did have a decent reason for locating it there, if the government listened to the businessmen and removed the tariff then the +2 would have been british made.

Mysterion

guesser wrote: »

Amstrad did some a little bit of UK manufacturing. But what do you mean stay? Sinclair had some stuff made overseas too.

http://hardware.speccy.org/imagenes/ordenadores/spectrum+48k-Samsung(back).jpg

:p

Interesting. I'd always assumed all the pre Amstrad era Spectrums were made in Dundee in the Timex factory. I'm guessing that's where we are in at 0:37 in the clip. I also seem to vaguely remember about Sugar saying something along the lines of how the Spectrum should do better now it was in the hands of a real businessman. That, of course, being Mr Sugar, himself. Hmm....

I'm still amazed that he bought Sinclair. The CPC line was already well established at that point. Why bother?

M

MatGubbins

best of both worlds
- having both the CPC range and Spectrum range and surplus stock to earn from.

To take out the competition
- stop all production of the Spectrum range, eliminating it from sale, thus hopefully the CPC range would look a better option.
- Or Sugar saw that the Spectrum had better sales than the CPC and wanted to kill off the CPC range.... but then the CPC Plus was also released...


As it seems that Amstrad already had the +2 on the design table and probably in production when he bought out Sinclair then having the best of both worlds to earn from was on the books.

The world of business can be strange indeed.

guesser

http://tinyurl.com/hkbg2m5

guesser

grr, stupid forum embedding of youtube links strips the offset in the link.

peteprodge

I think it's important to watch this - a very informative video made this week by ChinnyVision on this very subject.
It highlights how Sir Alan Sugar negotiated the deal for Sinclair. It's pretty obvious he only wanted the Spectrum - it gave him 60% of the home computer market. He had his team costing up and sourcing the parts well before the deal was in place.

We learn the cost price of the Spectrum was haggled to £48. And you learn why SirAlan wasn't keen to publicly air his views on British manufacturing. You'll see that he got Samsung in South Korea to manufacture +2s under license from his acquired Sinclair Research Ltd...

BuzzySounds

Good thing Alan Sugar stepped in when he did.