 Walking on , he explains to her that Sinclair , the British inventor , had a way of getting things right , but also exactly wrong . Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers , Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming . The ZX81 , marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000 , cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars , but required the user to key in programs , tapping away on that little motel keyboard @-@ sticker . This had resulted both in the short market @-@ life of the product and , in Voytek 's opinion , twenty years on , in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom . They had their heads turned by these little boxes , he believes , and by the need to program them ... 
