Better QA on original ROM, which was pretty buggy and cheaper Microdrive cartridges would have helped a lot. I hear people were put off by lack of on/off switch, which made people worry about quality. Sad it didn't do better. I really like QL and it's BASIC was excellent.
I know, was being a bit tongue in cheek there! I don’t think I’d change much, other than fix early production issues and ship them to customers on time.
If he had dropped the idea of going for businesses and instead accepted games were the reason the Spectrum was a massive hit and built on that, a 16bit gaming based computer.
Not "Doing a Sinclair" and over promising and under achieving on delivery would have helped enormously. I also remember lots of press about the ROMs not fitting in the case in the early version which was a symptom of the delivery fantasy and gave more ammunition for mockery.
For us a better keyboard since we were big fans of type-ins. While an upgrade from the Speccy’s, it would’ve fared better with a fully functional mechanical keyboard.
Comments
In '84 that would have been a Macintosh without the GUI.
He failed to do that with the ZX81 and failed to do that with the Spectrum too. :-)
With the Spectrum, a few "lucky" people got an Issue One three months late and half of those didn't work. People forget this.
Off the shelf keyboard would have been cheaper, quicker & better user experience.
Those tiny changes would have meant more time in development to refine everything else.
(marketing the C5 as a toy would have saved the QL)
Not sure anything would have helped in terms of hardware with sales.
(Not having the keyboard processor do sound would have helped with games though. Even bitbanging a port better.)