Sinclair C5 to guide development. Gus Desbarats, the C5's industrial designer, attributes the vehicle's flawed concept to Sinclair operating in a "bubble" and believes that Sinclair "failed to understand the difference between a new market, computing, and a mature one, transport, where there were more benchmarks to compare against". He comments that the experience of working on the C5 convinced him of the need for industrial designers such as himself to get "involved early in the innovation process, shaping basic configurations, never again [being] satisfied to simply decorate a fundamentally bad idea". Sinclair himself said in 2005 that the C5 "was early
Clive Sinclair kit, the MK14, based on the National SC/MP chip. By July 1978, a personal computer project was under way. When Sinclair learned the NewBrain could not be sold at below £100 as he envisaged, he turned to a simpler computer. In May 1979 Jim Westwood started the ZX80 project at Science of Cambridge; it was launched in February 1980 at £79.95 in kit form and £99.95 ready-built. In November, Science of Cambridge was renamed Sinclair Computers Ltd. In March 1981, Sinclair Computers was renamed again as Sinclair Research Ltd and the Sinclair ZX81 was launched at £49.95 in kit form