Sinclair Home Computers

Sinclair Home Computers covers the budget British microcomputers that Sinclair Research designed and sold in the early 1980s before selling its computer business to Amstrad in 1986. Sinclair Research, founded by Clive Sinclair, entered the home computer market with the ZX81 in 1981, a stripped down machine sold as a low cost kit or assembled unit that introduced home computing to a generation of British buyers and sold more than 1.5 million units through mail order and retail. Sinclair followed it in 1982 with the ZX Spectrum, which became the United Kingdom's best selling computer and competed aggressively against rival machines from Commodore and Amstrad on price and software library size. Both machines shared Sinclair's characteristic minimalist design philosophy of stripping components to the bare minimum needed to run BASIC and keep retail price low, membrane or rubber keyboards, and a cassette tape interface for loading software, features that shaped the wider British home computer market of the era and made Sinclair machines a common entry point into programming for a generation of UK schoolchildren before financial troubles led Sinclair to sell its computer product range and brand name to Amstrad in 1986.