Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming.

The ZX81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs. This had resulted, in Voytek's opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them...

..."But if Timex sold it in the United States," she asks him, "why didn't we get the programmers?"

-"You have programmers, but America is different. America wanted Nintendo. Nintendo gives you no programmers."