Richard Altwasser

Richard Francis Altwasser is a British engineer and inventor who was responsible for the hardware design of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. A Cambridge engineering graduate of 1978, he joined Sinclair Research in 1980, worked on the printed circuit board of the ZX81 and then on the Spectrum development team, where his main contribution was the graphics mode that fits in under seven kilobytes of memory. He left Sinclair in May 1982 with Steve Vickers to found the company that became Jupiter Cantab, maker of the Forth-based Jupiter Ace home computer, which failed commercially and went bankrupt in November 1983. He later became engineering director at Amstrad in 1986 and held other executive posts after leaving in 1992.