ZX Computings - OpenLibra

Quicksilva —
The man behind it
In August 1 980, Nick Lambert
wanted additional money for
his ZX80. Sinclair's 3K pack
was too expensive so Nick
decided to build his own. This
was the beginning of
Quicksilva, a company which
now has four full-time
employees, and which has led
the way in providing imaginative
hardware modifications
for the ZX81.
Nick was an electronics enthusiast
mainly interested in
electronic music, when he
bought his ZX80 - the only
computer he could afford.
"I realised quickly that the
memory as supplied on the
ZX80 was very limited, and being
unwilling to endure any
more Sinclair delivery delays,
and because the price was high,
I decided to make my own 3K
pack", Nick recalled.
"It took a couple of weeks to
produce the first prototype, and
I then decided that as I was
building one for myself — and
there didn't seem to be any
others on the market at the time
— I should make it a real project
and produce the memory packs
as a business."
Nick had had some experience
with PCBs, and with
getting production lines moving.
His first advertisement for
the 3K pack appeared in the
users' club magazine Interface,
and Quicksilva was underway.
Nick swapped a memory pack
to pay for that first ad, and sold
around 50 of the initial design.
"I was charging around £40
at first — Clive's 3K pack was
£64 at that stage — but after
Clive released his 16K for
£49.951 gradually dropped the
price. It is now £15. Overall I
guess I've sold around 400 3K
packs."
The electronic organ
business was fairly quiet, and
Nick began to see the possibilities
of making computer peripherals
as a business.
"Although my memory pack
business was OK, and it supplemented
my income nicely, it
was not something I could do
full time at that stage", said
Nick. "Nevertheless, I was enjoying
it. I realised then that
working for myself in this way
was the only way I would be
happy.
"I was doing some contract
testing work on Winchester
discs when the ZX81 came
out. I'd always thought of
myself as 'testing the water' by
selling the 3K packs, and that
had gone OK. so I thought I
should expand my line and get a
Hardware support
QuicksHva
Tim Hartnell interviews Nick Lambert,
who started out building electronic
classical organs for a living, and now
runs his own company stretching ZX81
hardware beyond Sinclair's
specifications.
few more products together to
go with the ZX81."
One of Nick's secret vices is
arcade games.
"I thought a good moving
graphics game would go well,
and decided to do Defender,
because it was my favourite. At
about the same time, I came up
with a sound board for the
ZX81. It had been in the back of
my mind for quite a while."
Nick soon discovered that
between admiring a game in an
arcade, and producing a version
for a somewhat limited home
computer lies a vast gulf, filled
with blood, sweat and tears.
"Defender took three
months to write. I did most of it
myself. By the end I was getting
pretty sick of it, and needed
considerable moral support to
get the thing completed. Three
months it took, before I finally
got it running properly."
But the trouble was worth it.
"I reckon we've sold four or
five thousand", said Nick,
"Most of our subsequent software
products have been based
on arcade games. After Defender
we produced the programmable
character generator
board. It came out just before
the South Bank Sinclair Show.
It has gone well, just about
anybody seems to buy it.
"Schools, in particular, have
shown great interest in the
character generator", said
Nick. "There are many educational
applications, such as
drawing equations, where the
character generator goes down
well."
High Resolution
But white 'just about anybody'
appeared to find a use for
the character generator, Nick
noticed a difference with the
next product his company
developed, a high resolution
board.
74 ZX COMPUTING SUMMER 1982
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