The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Timex set the clock on computer boom
Dundee watchmakers started making computers 40 years ago which would spawn the birth of the city’s video games industry.
The ZX81 computer was manufactured at the Timex factory which was the UK’s largest supplier of watches and the city’s single biggest employer with 5,000 workers.
It was a workforce which had skilled, nimble fingers that were perfect for watch manufacture and produced generations of the most skilled engineers in the country.
The market for Timex mechanical watches had evaporated and chairman Fred Olsen attempted to find other products to keep the plant going.
There was already some production being carried out at Timex for companies like IBM and more was added in the form of the Nimslo 3D camera.
Mr Olsen persuaded Sir Clive Sinclair to let the Dundee plant handle the assembly of the ZX81 computer which was the successor to the ZX80.
Sir Clive had invented pocket radios, pocket TVs and electronic watches before he had a brainwave while watching one of his children play with a Tandy Radio Shack.
He was sure that if a working computer could be made for a reasonable price then there was potentially a mass market for it.
The ZX80 was released in 1980 as a cheap introduction to home computing before the ZX81 in March 1981.
The ZX81 progressed beyond its initial mailorder-only policy and was shipped out from the Timex factory to WH Smith shops for sale at £69.95.
The ZX81 became an instant hit which went on to sell over a million.
Whereas most applications today load almost instantly, programmes and games had to be loaded using a cassette recorder connected to the computer or typed in word for word in the computer language BASIC.
The two models that followed it – the ZX Spectrum 16k and 48k – captured the public’s imagination and turned home computing into a mass-market hobby.
Professor Gregor White, dean of the School of Design and Informatics at Abertay University, said: “Timex and the ZX81 played a hugely important role in Dundee’s tech history, and this period marked one of the key moments in the city’s rebirth as an important hub for the UK video games industry.
“So many of Scotland’s games designers will have cut their teeth creating games for machines like the ZX81 or similar early consoles, and the story of these being manufactured in Dundee by a predominantly female workforce is one that is very much to be celebrated.
“Abertay’s success as Europe’s number one institution for video games education can be linked back to the commercial success of innovative products like the ZX81, which sparked a surge in the popularity of gaming and, in turn, generations of programmers, artists and designers.”
Despite competition from higher-powered computers such as the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad, price cuts ensured the Spectrum remained Britain’s most popular model.
Timex in Dundee was now producing a computer every four seconds by February 1983 and games like Football Manager kept them rolling off the production line.
In March 1983 Sir Clive sold some of his shares in Sinclair Research to raise £12 million and form a new company, Sinclair Vehicles.
Sir Clive had had an interest in electric vehicles for a long time and wanted to develop his own.
The product was named the Sinclair C5 and the machine was built by a group of engineers and production line workers in a washing machine factory in Merthyr Tydfil.
Sir Clive unveiled the electrically powered pedal car in 1985.
It was a disastrous failure including the contraption’s launch in Dundee where the C5 travelled only a few yards after the drive chain fell off twice.
The huge financial losses from the venture forced Sir Clive to sell the Sinclair name and the rights to his computers to Sir Alan Sugar’s Amstrad for £5m in 1986.
It signalled the end of Spectrum manufacturing in Dundee as Amstrad moved production to Taiwan before the line was discontinued in 1992.