After incurring a £7 million investment loss, Sinclair was given a golden handshake and an estimated £10,000 severance package. He had a former employee, Christopher Curry, establish a "corporate lifeboat" company named Science of Cambridge Ltd, in July 1977, called such as they were located near the University of Cambridge. By this time inexpensive microprocessors had started appearing on the market, which prompted Sinclair to start producing the MK14, a computer teaching kit which sold well at a very low price. Encouraged by this success, Sinclair renamed his company to Sinclair Research, and started looking to manufacture personal computers. Keeping the cost low was essential for Sinclair to avoid his products from becoming outpriced by American or Japanese equivalents as had happened to several of the previous Sinclair Radionics products. On 29 January 1980, the ZX80 home computer was launched to immediate popularity; notable for being one of the first computers available in the United Kingdom for less than £100. The company conducted no market research whatsoever prior to the launch of the ZX80; according to Sinclair, he "simply had a hunch" that the public was sufficiently interested to make such a project feasible and went ahead with ordering 100,000 sets of parts so that he could launch at high volume.
After incurring a £7 million investment loss, Sinclair was given a golden handshake and an estimated £10,000 severance package. He had a former employee, Christopher Curry, establish a "corporate lifeboat" company named Science of Cambridge Ltd, in July 1977, called such as they were located near the University of Cambridge. By this time inexpensive microprocessors had started appearing on the market, which prompted Sinclair to start producing the MK14, a computer teaching kit which sold well at a very low price. Encouraged by this success, Sinclair renamed his company to Sinclair Research, and started looking to manufacture personal computers. Keeping the cost low was essential for Sinclair to avoid his products from becoming outpriced by American or Japanese equivalents as had happened to several of the previous Sinclair Radionics products. On 29 January 1980, the ZX80 home computer was launched to immediate popularity; notable for being one of the first computers available in the United Kingdom for less than £100. The company conducted no market research whatsoever prior to the launch of the ZX80; according to Sinclair, he "simply had a hunch" that the public was sufficiently interested to make such a project feasible and went ahead with ordering 100,000 sets of parts so that he could launch at high volume.