In an exclusive interview with PC Plus magazine, Sir Clive Sinclair remembers how he'd once planned to make a "hugely parallel computer" back in the 1980s.

Sinclair revolutionised home computing with the ZX80, ZX81 and hugely popular ZX Spectrum machines. He inspired thousands of pre-geeks to dabble with BASIC programming, even if it was limited to: 10 Print "Hello"; 20 Goto 10. But, as he says in the PC Plus interview, he had much grander plans than rubberised keys and Jet Set Willy.

Parallel home computing

"There was one thing back in the early 1980s, which never quite came to fruition. The idea I had was to make a hugely parallel computer.

"We had this chap, called Ivor Catt, who had invented the idea of taking complete wafers and, instead of cutting them up, having huge numbers of computing cells and linking them up logically, avoiding the bad ones.

"We actually did make - or rather had made for us by Fujitsu - whole wafers of memory. The plan was that this was going to be a stepping stone to whole wafers of processors: thousands of processors, each with its own memory. So I worked on the architecture of that, but we didn't quite manage to get that done."

Back to the future

What Sinclair describes is the concept of Wafer-scale integration.

"There'd be a sort of core chip that modelled everything," adds Sir Clive Sinclair, "and the other chips would buzz away in parallel. The core chip wouldn't be modelling the computation in any depth, but it would know when the results should be in.

"It's how computers ought to be made, to this day, and it's just bloody stupid that they're not. If I had the money, I'd do it tomorrow. Ivor Catt was brilliant. Yes, you could certainly have made hugely powerful personal computers at a consumer price. And now all this time later, computing hasn't got anywhere."

You can read the full interview with Sir Clive Sinclair in the October issue of PC Plus, on sale now.