Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth by Ian Adamson, Richard Kennedy

some significant progress under Hewett in instituting businesslike systems, and Derek Holley still controlling the finance department, the NEB presumably thought things couldn’t get worse.
    The NEB wasn’t happy with the computer project, however. This had been, along with the flat-screen television, Sinclair’s future product, and design work had started some time in late 1977 or early 1978. Basil Smith and Mike Wakefield, who were the only two working on the computer, were not a heavy drain on resources, but the project would need significant investment to get it into production. This would include the purchase of custom chips that would be economical only if contracted in runs of 20,000 or so. Since the Commodore PET and the Apple II had been launched the year before, and had brought a new maturity to the computer market in the States, the proposed machine offered an early British entry into this new hi-tech arena, in line with the NEB’s avowed purpose. The decision of the NEB was to view the computer as, in Sinclair’s words, ‘not being within their realms of plausibility for the company at the time’ (interview, 6 November 1985). With total Apple II sales of only some 9000 machines in the US in 1978, the NEB, already nervous about the amount of money poured into Radionics, was wise to view this as not the sort of development likely to show a quick cash return.
    So to Sinclair’s disgruntlement the project, with its personnel, was passed to Newbury Laboratories, where it attracted NRDC funding. Newbury eventually sold it to Grundy Business Systems and the product finally emerged in 1982 as the NewBrain. Although a highly regarded and expandable machine, it came too late to the marketplace. Derek Holley contrasts this delay with Sinclair’s approach:
Those guys never developed that product, they kept redeveloping it. They were technically brilliant... but they didn’t have the same drive. Whereas Clive will get to a point where he says, ‘Well, we’ve looked at it enough, and now we’re going to put it into production and to hell with the consequences’, they kept looking at it and redesigning it. (Interview with Derek Holley, 13 November 1985.)
    Sinclair thought the cancellation of the computer short-sighted, but was already looking to hedge his own bets - his alternative company had already launched the MK14 microprocessor kit. The fact that this potential money-spinner wasn’t proposed to Radionics presumably shows that Sinclair saw little prospect of, or little point in, getting Radionics back on its feet. The mounting debts of Radionics, with trading losses of £1.29m in the last eight months of 1977, and a total of £1.98m for 1979, were hardly hopeful, and even Sinclair’s projection of ‘zillions’ of pocket television sales was not likely to get him out from under the control of the NEB. His obsession with the flat-screen project, with its NRDC funding enabling a team of some eight people to work on it, plus access to the lab facilities and his technical team kept him with Radionics, but his development of another corporate option was an open secret within the company. Norman Hewett was of the opinion that Sinclair, in parallel with the full-fledged NewBrain computer project, had a cut-down version, a ZX80 precursor, planned. We checked with Derek Holley whether Sinclair was doing work on this at the time (early 1979):
Well, we believed he was, but I don’t know whether there’s any evidence for it. He had this other company, Science of Cambridge, going. There was always a feeling within [Radionics] that although we had this computer under development we would never see it, that one way or another it would come out through Clive’s other company, (ibid.)
    Whatever else was going on at the time we shall leave to the next chapter. In Radionics Sinclair, free of Hewett, went merrily on his innovative way. At this point the efforts of the previous year to get the TV1A Microvision production up