MK14 - the only low-cost keyboard-addressable microcomputer!

This is the second-earliest reference in this collection - and the first to mention an actual computer - to the company that would become Sinclair, which did so much to kick-start the UK home computer industry.

In its various corporate forms, Sinclair released revolutionary pocket calculators like the Sinclair Cambridge, the infamous LED "Black Watch", the world's smallest TV - the Microvision - the ZX range of computers and, er, the Sinclair C5. 

This particular advert is for its MK14 microcomputer kit - a kind of early system-on-a-chip (or 15) which was originally put together largely from scavenged calculator parts - and it looks it - and which could be used to experiment with programming or be used as a hardware controller. 

It came about largely thanks to Chris Curry, who had been working for Clive Sinclair at his existing Radionics company, based up the road in St. Ives. 

<h3>Clive's "lifeboat" company launches</h3>

Radionics was founded by Sinclair in 1961, thanks to his commercial success in buying, grading, testing and re-selling Plessey transistors[source: "Clive Sinclair", Practical Computing, July 1982, p. 56].

The company, which was known for its digitial multimeters and kit hi-fi like the [=prac_ele_1971-03_001b|Project 60], ended up being partially nationalised in 1976 by the National Enterprise Board[source: https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/sinclair/corphist.htm], a situation which Sinclair frequently complained as being "intolerable", even though it meant more funding to continue developement of Clive's Microvision portable TV project.

However, plagued by conflict with the NEB management - which frequently disagreed with Sinclair's visions - Sinclair started looking to the future and bought an "off the shelf" company called Ablesdeal Ltd as a potential "lifeboat". 

He encouraged Chris Curry to leave Radionics in order to manage this new company - which was swiftly renamed to Westminster Mail Order Limited, and then Sinclair Instruments - with the new company's first product being a wrist calculator.

This was a product made to such un-generous tolerances that it was said there was only a "fair to middling chance" of getting all the components to actually fit in the case, let alone actually work.

There were however not many more ideas floating around at the new company, largely because Clive was the ideas generator and he was tied up fire-fighting at Radionics. 

<h3>Williamson's prototype</h3>

So perhaps luckily for the company, Ian Williamson, an engineer from Cambridge Consultants Ltd - a well-known and successful consultancy on Cambridge's Milton Road Science Park, of which Clive was a board member - was looking for a home for his prototype budget kit computer, before taking a new job with automotive basket-case British Leyland.

Curry was apparently impressed enough to provide the resources so that Williamson could build another prototype, but this time using as many of the old Radionics calculator components as possible[source: https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/mk14/mk14_sst.htm]. 

It was this prototype that led to the eventual MK14 - based on the cheap and simple-to-program National Semiconductor SC/MP - in a process that nicely explains how the finished product ended up looking like it did. 

However, Williamson never got to sign a contract with Science of Cambridge, as it was then known, as National Semiconductor came up with a redesign of its own which - unsurprisingly - was made almost entirely with National Semiconductor components. 

This move - made at National's own expense - was designed to get more exposure for the Scamp processor in the UK, and came with a convenient single-source-supplier deal that Sinclair would have found hard to refuse. 

Williamson was clearly a bit annoyed by this at the time, saying in an interview published on Planet Sinclair that:

~"I was never particularly pissed off with Clive. If anything I think I was pissed off with National Semiconductors. You see, considering what NS were offering and the state of the company [Science of Cambridge] at the time, they [Sinclair/Curry] were faced with an offer they couldn't really refuse. I was pissed off with NS for having the sense to offer Sinclair a design which only used components which could be ordered from one place[source: "Scamps and Scams: the ballad of the MK 14", Planet Sinclair - original interview 29th October 1985, https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/mk14/mk14_sst.htm]".

The National Semiconductor-designed MK14 finally went on sale in June 1978, with the first batch of 2,000 selling out quickly. That was followed by a classic Sinclair-style delay as it waited for more units to be manufactured. 

It's thought that up to 15,000 MK14's were sold, whilst Sinclair seemed to feel guilty enough about how it treated Williamson to pay him £2,000 - or about [[2000|1978]] in [[now]] - for rights to his original documentation, which still applied to what was functionally an almost identical machine to the original prototype.

<h3>The end of Radionics</h3>

Early in 1979, the NEB lost its pro-Microvision head Lord Ryder, who left amidst claims that development of Sinclair's Microvision portable tv had already cost the NEB nearly £8 million. 

In a move which was the final straw for Clive Sinclair, the NEB sold off the calculator and tv parts of Radionics, with the Microvision going to Hong Kong's Binatone, which found it couldn't make a profit on it either.[source: "Master Profiles", Personal Computer World, October 1983, p. 208].

Sinclair finally left Radionics in July 1979 with a modest golden handshake and moved to Science of Cambridge full time.

Meanwhile, although the price and specification of the MK14 looks the same as in the advert that appeared later this year, the image of the board is quite different - this is an artists impression and looks even more like a calculator than the real thing.