Sinclair’s financial figures of spring 1985 revealed the impact of disappointing QL sales and the cost of producing the almost-universally derided C5 electric trike. The previous year’s profits of £14.28m on a turnover of £77.69m had turned into a pre-tax loss of £18m. In May, the company confirmed it was seeking up to £15m for restructuring and growth, and the following month Robert Maxwell announced a rescue bid. An agreement was made, but pulled in August and, by the end of 1985, Sinclair’s vehicle division went into voluntary liquidation. Sinclair the company was in crisis and desperately in need of cash.

The unlikely knight in shining armour, though, turned out to be none other than arch-rival Alan Sugar of Amstrad. Sinclair recalls hearing from Sugar while the Amstrad boss was on holiday. Sugar offered to buy Sinclair’s company and they met on Good Friday 1986 to hammer out a deal. Sugar emerged having paid £5m for the entire rights to Sinclair’s computer products, but he reckoned there was still plenty of money left to milk from the Spectrum and set his Amstrad techies about producing an improved version.

One such techie was Richard Altwasser, who designed the hardware for the original ZX Spectrum at Sinclair, before leaving in 1982 to develop the Jupiter Ace with Spectrum veteran Steve Vickers. When Jupiter went bust in 1984, Altwasser joined a technical consultancy firm and was later head-hunted by Amstrad. He was appointed in January 1986 and soon joined Amstrad as Engineering Manager.

Altwasser’s recruitment had been unrelated to the Sinclair purchase, but the timing proved fortuitous, joining as the ink dried on the buy-out. Altwasser recalls being asked into the office of Amstrad’s manufacturing director BobWatkins on his first day to look over some circuit diagrams and being surprised to see they were of the Spectrum, drawn and signed by himself some years before.

Almost inevitably, given the company’s history, Amstrad’s first enhancement for the new Spectrum would be a built-in tape deck. Amstrad also added joystick ports and a proper keyboard and set about improving Sinclair’s infamous reliability issues. Altwasser began re-engineering the hardware and setting up new production lines in Taiwan.

While the new Spectrum would be compatible with software for previous models, it still needed a certain amount of modification. Following the Sinclair purchase, a large box of Vax tapes and crates of paperwork turned up at Amstrad’s Brentwood HQ, and the project team realised they’d need someone who’d previously worked at Sinclair to make sense of it. They hired Rupert Goodwins who’d joined Sinclair in the autumn of 1985 and written much of the software for the UK Spectrum 128. Goodwins joined existing Amstrad employees Cliff Lawson and Vik Olliver to work on the new machine’s software.

GrahamWebber was responsible for the industrial design. The new Spectrum +2 was launched in early 1987 and, crucially, Amstrad adopted an entirely different marketing strategy to Sinclair. While Sir Clive strongly sold his Spectrum as a proper computer with proper computing capabilities, Sugar knew the Spectrum’s success was as a gaming machine.

Despite the growing 16bit market, Sugar believed there was life left in 8bit and ordered a second Amstrad Spectrum to be produced. Like Amstrad’s CPC line, the natural evolution meant the new Spectrum +3 would be equipped with a floppy drive and, again like the CPC-6128 and PCW, it would be a 3in model.

This time, the internal PCB was redesigned with a reduced chip-count and work was split between Altwasser and Steve Gane. The software was again written by Goodwins, Lawson and Olliver, now with additional input from Locomotive for the disk-operating system.

The Spectrum +3 launched in 1988 for £250, followed shortly afterwards by the +2A, a tapebased version using the +3 PCB in a black case. By this time, however, the 8bit Spectrum couldn’t compete with the 16bit Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. The +3/+2A would be Amstrad’s last Spectrums. Sugar’s strategy had paid off, though. He believed he could get a return on his investment in just one Christmas season and, after doing so handsomely, he went on to cream additional profits from the Spectrum over its final lifespan. Many people may have had their first taste of programming on a Spectrum, but Sugar knew the real money was in selling it as a games machine.