Originally Posted by
bigdjiver
The ads for my shop offered a computer, joysticks, some games and some other accessories - a "bundle". At the time just about everybody else sold those products as single items. I was well ahead of my time there. The computer I sold did not have a joystick option, so I wired joysticks across the keyboard matrix, giving me a unique selling point. I believe that Sinclair should have used that technique with the Spectrum which would have allowed it to use two joysticks for about 50p on the cost. Instead he opted for an expensive add on interface which she could not deliver on time. I spotted that market opportunity, and told Abtaar Pandaal of Kempston Microelectronics how to fit joysticks to the Spectrum. A few oldies might remember the Kempston Joystick interface.
Here we had an un-authorised add-on, and a chicken and egg situation. Nobody would buy those joysticks because there were not any games set up to use them. None of the games writers would write programs to use them because nobody had the joysticks. In the space of two hours on a wet mid-week afternoon I designed the interface, wrote a demo program, and solved that marketing problem at no cost. Mr. Pandall financed racing cars on the income from that.
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