Sweet 16 And Making Mistakes: More Of The Computing Industry's Biggest Fails
The Register, Thursday, August 29th, 2024
As the hardware got more capable, the messes got more expensive
Part 2: The 16-bit era Welcome back to The Reg FOSS desk's roundup of the slip-ups and missteps from the dawn of the microcomputer industry onward - at least those that are most memorable to us.
In part 1 of this feature series, we took a look at some of the missed chances of the early era of mass-market microcomputers: the eight-bit machines. This overlaps substantially with the following generation of 16-bit machines.
Quantum Leaps. in wrong direc-TI-ons
Sinclair Research did very well with the inexpensive ZX81, and had another hit with the ZX Spectrum. The next machine it launched, though, was one of Sir Clive's most critical blunders.
Aside from references to George Orwell's totalitarian nightmare fuel, nerdier types remember 1984 as the year the first Apple Macintosh debuted. Apple launched it on January 24 - nearly two weeks after Sinclair Research launched its next-generation 16-bit computer, the Sinclair QL.