title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: Geelani condemned the killing of Osama Bin Laden by the US. After Bin Laden's death in May 2011, Geelani said that he would lead last rite prayers in absentia in Srinagar for the slain al-Qaeda leader. After holding prayers for Osama in congregation of thousands of Kashmiris, a European Union delegation snubbed Geelani by cancelling a scheduled meeting with him. He further supported 2001 Indian Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru and one of 2008 Mumbai Attacks masterminds and Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed.


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: Geelani said that while Pakistan supported "the indigenous struggle of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, morally, diplomatically and politically ... this does not mean Pakistan can take a decision on our behalf."


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: Geelani would only support a dialogue process aimed at resolving Kashmir issue in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the people of the state. But he believed that dialogue between India and Pakistan starts under diplomatic compulsions, and it is nothing but just a time delaying tactics. He was of the opinion that Kashmiris are not enemies of India or hold any grudge against its inhabitants. We are desirous of a strong India and Pakistan and it is only possible when Kashmir issue is resolved to pave the way for peace, prosperity and development in the region.


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: He said, "Kashmir is not any border dispute between India and Pakistan which they can solve by bilateral understandings. It is the issue concerning future of 15 million people. The Hurriyat is not in principle against a dialogue process but without involvement of Kashmiri people, such a process has proved meaningless in the past. We don't have any expectations of it being fruitful in future too." He further stated, "India should immediately and unconditionally release political prisoners, and withdraw cases against youth, which are pending in the courts for the past 20 years."


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: Geelani has been repeatedly criticised by Indian authorities for inciting violence in the Kashmir Valley and working as offshoot of Pakistan. Geelani said openly that he was not Indian. "Travelling on the Indian passport is a compulsion of every Kashmiri as Kashmir is an Internationally accepted Disputed region between India and Pakistan" are his words when applying for Indian Passport. "We are Pakistani; Pakistan is ours," he said in a +big gathering of his supporters.


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: While Geelani's personal opinion about Kashmir was that it be merged with Pakistan, he stood up against both Indian and Pakistani governments, including former President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, who did not support Kashmiri people's right to self-determination.


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: Sheikh Mustafa Kamal, a senior leader of Jammu & Kashmir National Conference and son of Sheikh Abdullah criticised Geelani for working on "dictations" given by Pakistan. He accused Geelani of being "a double agent" on "the payroll of Pakistan's ISI".


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: Pakistan also openly supported Geelani, the three-member delegation from Pakistan High Commission led by Abdul Basit met Geelani at his Malviya Nagar residence in March 2015. Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit assured Geelani of complete support conveying that the country's stand on Kashmir remains unchanged despite regime change in New Delhi. Abdul Basit also invited Geelani for Pakistan Day function on 23 March. Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi, ritually invites pro-separatist leadership of Jammu and Kashmir. On 14 August, the Pakistani government awarded him its highest civilian award, the Nishan-e-Pakistan.


title: Syed Ali Shah Geelani

text: In the last few decades, Geelani refused any proposal from Governments of India and Pakistan and was consistent in his demand for the United Nations promised plebiscite of 1948.


title: Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi

text: Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi ( "Player of Players") is a 1996 Indian Hindi-language action film starring Rekha in her first villain role, Akshay Kumar, Raveena Tandon and former WWF (now WWE) wrestlers "Crush" and Brian Lee as "The Undertaker". It was the 6th highest-grossing movie of the year 1996. It was the fourth installment in the Khiladi series.


title: Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi

text: The film is about a deadly game of survival in the ruthless world of crime and sleaze. A criminal don, Maya, hosts illegal wrestling matches in U.S (New York) and has the full support of the local Police Commissioner. Ajay Malhotra has relocated to US and has started his own orchestra with the help of some of his friends.


title: Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi

text: His brother, Akshay, decides to visit him on hearing that he wants to marry his beloved in Canada; on the airplane he meets Priya, and both fall in love. Once in the U.S., Akshay finds out that the police have a warrant for the arrest of Ajay and want to question him. Akshay's attempts to locate Ajay land him with Maya, who happens to be Priya's sister. Apparently Maya is holding Ajay and will only release him after he hands over incriminating documents. Akshay soon wins Maya's confidence by rescuing her from attempts on her life made by King Don, and Maya begins to like him and trust him. Akshay then proposes to her, to which Maya agrees, much to the disappointment of Priya.


title: Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi

text: Soon Akshay kills Maya's men when they get to know of his true identity. He also organises a fake kidnap drama with Ajay's friends, who kidnap him and demand that Maya come to meet them with Ajay. By now Maya realizes that Akshay is Ajay's brother, and Priya actually loves Akshay. Maya calls the kidnappers and arranges a meeting the following night. News of this has spread to a hospitalised Ajay, who decides to intervene in the meeting. But is again captured by Maya's men. Maya then stages a shootout threatening Priya, Akshay and Ajay, but are interrupted by the cops and King Don. King Don is then defeated by everyone else present. At the end, Maya commits suicide, and before dying she hands over her sister Priya and Ajay to Akshay.


title: Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi

text: The DVD of the movie was released by Eros International. The television premiere of the movie was occurred on Star Plus in 1997. The film has been made streaming available on Zee5 since 2022 .


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (21 July 1934 – 27 November 2019) was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue "Beyond the Fringe" with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller began directing operas in the 1970s. His 1982 production of a "Mafia"-styled "Rigoletto" was set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. In its early days, he was an associate director at the National Theatre. He later ran the Old Vic Theatre. As a writer and presenter of more than a dozen BBC documentaries, Miller became a television personality and public intellectual in Britain and the United States.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller grew up in St John's Wood, London, in a well-connected Jewish family. His father Emanuel (1892–1970), who was of Lithuanian descent and suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis, was a military psychiatrist and subsequently a paediatric psychiatrist at Harley House. His mother, Betty Miller (née Spiro) (1910–1965), was a novelist and biographer who was originally from County Cork, Ireland. Miller had an elder sister, Sarah (died 2006) who worked in television for many years and retained an involvement with Judaism that Miller, as an atheist, always eschewed. The young Miller was brought for assessment to several child psychiatrists, including Donald Winnicott. As a teenager he had many sessions with the psychiatrist Leopold Stein, whose sessions he enjoyed and in which they "simply conversed about philosophy and Hughlings Jackson's early neurological theories."


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller moved between several different schools prior to attending Taunton School, including for a time at the Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley (a Waldorf school) where he was taught by two of Ivy Compton-Burnett's sisters and says of that time that he "never learnt anything at all". Miller concluded his secondary school education at St Paul's School, London where he developed an early (and ultimately lifelong) interest in the biological sciences. While at St Paul's School at the age of 12, Miller met and became close friends with Oliver Sacks and Sacks's best friend Eric Korn, friendships which remained crucial throughout the rest of their lives. In 1953, before leaving secondary school, he performed comedy several times on the BBC radio programme "Under Twenty Parade". Miller studied natural sciences and medicine at St John's College, Cambridge (MB BChir, 1959), where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles before going on to train at University College Hospital in London.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: While studying medicine, Miller was involved in the Cambridge Footlights, appearing in the revues "Out of the Blue" (1954) and "Between the Lines" (1955). Good reviews for these shows, and for Miller's performances in particular, led to his performing on a number of radio and television shows while continuing his studies; these included appearances on "Saturday Night on the Light", "Tonight" and "Sunday Night at the London Palladium". He qualified as a physician in 1959 and then worked as a hospital house officer for two years, including at the Central Middlesex Hospital as house physician for gastroenterologist Francis Avery Jones.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller helped to write and produce the satirical revue "Beyond the Fringe", which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1960. This launched, in addition to his own, the careers of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Miller quit the show shortly after its move from London to Broadway in 1962, and took over as editor and presenter of the BBC's arts programme "Monitor" in 1965. The "Monitor" appointment arose because Miller had approached Huw Wheldon about taking up a place on the BBC's director training course. Wheldon assured him that he would "pick it up as he went along".


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller's first experience of directing a stage-play was for John Osborne, whose "Under Plain Cover" he directed in 1962. In 1964, he directed the play "The Old Glory" by the American poet Robert Lowell in New York City. It was the first play produced at the American Place Theatre and starred Frank Langella, Roscoe Lee Brown, and Lester Rawlins. The play won five Obie Awards in 1965 including an award for "Best American Play" as well as awards for Langella, Brown and Rawlins.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: He wrote, produced, and directed an adaptation for television of "Alice in Wonderland" (1966) for the BBC. He followed this with "Whistle and I'll Come to You" (1968) starring Michael Hordern, a television adaptation of M. R. James's 1904 ghost story "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad". He produced a National Theatre Company production of "The Merchant of Venice" starring Sir Laurence Olivier. He later resigned as associate director.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller held a research fellowship in the history of medicine at University College London from 1970 to 1973. In 1974, he also started directing and producing operas for Kent Opera and Glyndebourne, followed by a new production of "The Marriage of Figaro" for English National Opera in 1978. Miller's other turns as an opera director included productions of "Rigoletto" (in 1975 and 1982) and the operetta "The Mikado" (in 1987).


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller drew upon his own experiences as a physician as writer and presenter of the BBC television series "The Body in Question" (1978), which caused some controversy for showing the dissection of a cadaver. For a time, he was a vice-president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. In 1971, he defended multiracial immigration to the UK at length with Enoch Powell on "The Dick Cavett Show".


title: Jonathan Miller

text: In 1980, Miller was persuaded to join the troubled "BBC Television Shakespeare" project (1978–85). He became producer (1980–82) and directed six of the plays himself, beginning with a well received "Taming of the Shrew" starring John Cleese. In the early 1980s, Miller was a popular and frequent guest on PBS' "Dick Cavett Show".


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller wrote and presented the BBC television series, and accompanying book, "States of Mind" in 1983 and the same year directed Roger Daltrey as Macheath, the outlaw hero of the BBC's production of John Gay's 1728 ballad opera, "The Beggar's Opera". He also became chair of Edinburgh Festival Fringe board of directors. In 1984, he studied neuropsychology with Dr. Sandra Witelson at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, before becoming a neuropsychology research fellow at the University of Sussex the following year.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: In 1990, Miller wrote and presented a joint BBC/Canadian production titled, "". The four-part series looked into the acquisition of language, and complexities surrounding language production, with special focus on sign language used by deaf people. This interest was contemporaneous with his friend Oliver Sacks' immersion in, and writing/publishing a book about Deaf Culture and deaf people entitled "Seeing Voices." Miller then wrote and presented the television series "Madness" (1991) and "Jonathan Miller on Reflection" (1998). The five-part "Madness" series ran on PBS in 1991. It featured a brief history of madness and interviews with psychiatric researchers, clinical psychiatrists, and patients in therapy sessions. In 1992, Opera Omaha staged the United States premiere of the Gioachino Rossini's 1819 opera "Ermione", directed by Miller.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: In 2004, Miller wrote and presented a television series on atheism entitled "" (more commonly referred to as "Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief") for BBC Four, exploring the roots of his own atheism and investigating the history of atheism in the world. Individual conversations, debates and discussions for the series that could not be included due to time constraints were aired in a six-part series entitled "The Atheism Tapes". He also appeared on a BBC Two programme in February 2004, called "What the World Thinks of God" appearing from New York. The original three-part series aired on public television in the United States in 2007.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: In 2007, Miller directed "The Cherry Orchard" at The Crucible, Sheffield, his first work on the British stage for 10 years. He also directed Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" in Manchester and Bristol, and "Der Rosenkavalier" in Tokyo and gave talks throughout Britain during 2007 called "An Audience with Jonathan Miller" in which he spoke about his life for an hour and then fielded questions from the audience. He also curated an exhibition on camouflage at the Imperial War Museum. He appeared at the Royal Society of the Arts in London discussing humour (4 July 2007) and at the British Library on religion (3 September 2007).


title: Jonathan Miller

text: In January 2009, after a break of 12 years, Miller returned to the English National Opera to direct his own production of "La Bohème", notable for its 1930s setting. This same production ran at the Cincinnati Opera in July 2010, also directed by Miller.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: On 15 September 2010 Miller, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in "The Guardian", stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK. In April and May 2011, Miller directed Verdi's "La traviata" in Vancouver, Canada, and in February and March 2012, Mozart's "Così fan tutte" in Washington, D.C.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Miller married Rachel Collet in 1956. They had two sons and a daughter. From 1961 to his death he lived on Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town, north London. On 27 November 2019, Miller died at the age of 85, following a long battle with Alzheimer's.


title: Jonathan Miller

text: Over four decades, Miller has directed more than 50 operas in cities including London, New York, Florence, Milan, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Valencia and Tokyo.


title: Diabolo

text: The diabolo ( ; commonly misspelled "diablo") is a juggling or circus prop consisting of an axle () and two cups (hourglass/egg timer shaped) or discs derived from the Chinese yo-yo. This object is spun using a string attached to two hand sticks ("batons" or "wands"). A large variety of tricks are possible with the diabolo, including tosses, and various types of interaction with the sticks, string, and various parts of the user's body. Multiple diabolos can be spun on a single string.


title: Diabolo

text: Like the Western yo-yo (which has an independent origin), it maintains its spinning motion through a rotating effect based on conservation of angular momentum.


title: Diabolo

text: The Diabolo is derived from the Chinese yo-yo encountered by Europeans during the colonial era. However, the origin of the Chinese yo-yo is unknown. The earliest mention of the Chinese yo-yo is in the late Ming dynasty Wanli period (1572–1620), with its details well recorded in the book "Dijing Jingwulue" by the Liu Tong. The book refers to Chinese yo-yos as "kong zhong" ().


title: Diabolo

text: Chinese yo-yos have a longer axle with discs on either end, while the diabolo has a very short axle and larger, round cups on either end. Diabolos are made of different materials and come in different sizes and weights.


title: Diabolo

text: The first known mention of a diabolo in the Western world was made by a missionary, Father Amiot., in Beijing in 1792 during Lord Macartney's ambassadorship, after which examples were brought to Europe, as was the sheng (eventually adapted to the harmonica and accordion).


title: Diabolo

text: It consists of two hollow cylinders of metal, wood, or bamboo, joined together in the middle by a cross-piece. Each of the cylinders is pierced by a hole in opposite directions. The rope loops around the crossbeam. By holding this rattle in the air, and moving it with speed, a rapid current of air is established in each of the portions of the cylinder, and a snoring is heard, similar to that produced by the German spinning top.


title: Diabolo

text: The diabolo was part of a presentation of Chinese culture edited by stenographer in 1811-2 ("La Chine en miniature"). The toy's popularity waxed and waned throughout the 19th century. In 1812 the diabolo "was all the rage"; then it "enjoyed an ephemeral vogue" until it "finally fell into discredit" some time before 1861. Some consider the toy dangerous; injuries and deaths of players and bystanders have been claimed; and Préfet de Police Louis Lépine once outlawed the game in the streets of Paris.


title: Diabolo

text: The name "diabolo" was coined by Belgian engineer Gustave Philippart, who developed the modern diabolo in the early twentieth century, although credit has also been given to Charles Burgess Fry ("The Outdoor Magazine" in 1906) or Fry and Philippart. The ODE gives the term's origin as from ecclesiastical Latin "diabolus" (devil) via Italian, reflecting the older name, "The devil on two sticks".


title: Diabolo

text: Strong derives the name from the Greek "dia bolo", roughly meaning 'across throw': "In Greek, the term 'diaballo', means to throw across. It comes from a combination of 'dia' meaning across or through (as in the meter of a circle, a line that crosses circle), and 'bolla' or originally 'ballo' which means to throw..." However, Philippart's intention is clear in his 1905 patent, where he gives it the alternative French name "Diable", "Devil". The term "loriot" was also used in England early in the twentieth century, as well as "rocket-ball". The earlier name "The devil on two sticks" is sometimes still seen, although nowadays this more often refers to another circus-based skill toy, the devil stick: "In time 'diabolo' was retained for the spinning version of the Chinese stick toy while the hitting version of the stick toy was rendered into English as the Devil Stick."


title: Diabolo

text: Philippart claimed "Diabolo" to be his invention. In reality, he had improved a Napoleonic toy, which in turn had originated long ago in China." However, Charles Parker acquired the U.S. license for the term "diabolo" in 1906, and the fad for the toy lasted until 1910 (caricatures of public figures with the toy made it to newspapers), when it was hurt greatly by a glut of unsold poor quality off-brand versions (costs ranged from one to eight dollars). The toy was even removed from the Parker Brothers catalogue, a rare occurrence (its two-year return in 1929 also failed).


title: Diabolo

text: An earlier occurrence of the fad, in Paris, is mentioned in "Nature" in 1893. The Wright brothers became enamored with the toy during a lull in a trip to France they had taken to market their Wright Flyer III airplane.


title: Diabolo

text: A diabolo is described as "a double-coned bobbin that [is] twirled, tossed, and caught on a string secured by two wands, one held in each hand," and, more generally, as "an object that can be suspended on a string made taut by two held sticks". The Chinese yo-yo, often considered a type of diabolo, has been described as "a short round wooden stick with two round disks, 1.5 cm thick with a space between them, attached on either end of the stick...It will rotate on a string, each end tied to a thin stick," and as "two hollow discs of light wood, with openings in the sides, united by a peg tapering to its center".


title: Diabolo

text: As with the yo-yo, the design of the diabolo has varied through history and across the world. Chinese diabolos have been made of bamboo. Wooden diabolos were common in Victorian times in Britain. Rubber diabolos were first patented by Gustave Philippart in 1905. In the late twentieth century a rubberised plastic material was first used. Metal has also been used, especially for fire diabolos. "Parker Brothers used steel for the bobbins [axles], with molded rubber ends, and also made some versions out of hollow Celluloid--which, because of its 'frictionless' properties, spun even faster than steel." Holes and metal strips alter the sound of the spinning diabolo, but create friction.


title: Diabolo

text: The size and weight of diabolos varies. Diabolos with more weight tend to retain their momentum for longer, whereas small, light diabolos can be thrown higher and are easier to accelerate to high speeds. Rubber diabolos are less prone to breakage but are more prone to deformations. More commonly used are plastic-rubber hybrids that allow flex but hold their shape. The size of the disc or cone varies, as do the presence and size of holes in the discs or cones which may alter the sound produced. In yo-yos a cone is known as the butterfly shape. Regardless of the presence, size, and shape, "once a diabolo is spinning, the friction of the spinning diabolo against the string creates a whining sound; this is called 'making the diabolo sing.'" "When played hard, the [Chinese] yoyo will give out a sharp shrill sound...The shrill sound would add an exciting atmosphere to the [Shanghai winter] festivals...A skillful player can use a pot cover [with a round handle] as a yoyo [without sound]." A fast whirling kouen-gen produces "a shrill whistling sound...not unlike the note of the steam siren". Diabolos with only one cup ("monobolos") are also used.


title: Diabolo

text: The axle can be either a fixed axle or a bearing axle. The former does not spin, while the latter variety spins in one direction. Noticeable differences between the two include friction involved, the amount of time the diabolo can spin for, and tension. There are also certain tricks that are only possible with one type of axle.


title: Diabolo

text: The most basic act of diabolo manipulation is to spin it on the string. "The string is placed between the circles, but in order for the diabolo to balance, it must maintain a spinning motion, much like a yo-yo." However, "considerably more skill is needed to twirl a diabolo...than the Yo-yo it resembles." "Diabolo requires hard practice and highly developed skills"


title: Diabolo

text: Typically, the player pulls the stick in his or her dominant hand so that the string moves along the axle, turning it. "The player...swing[s] the string right and left." By doing this repeatedly and rapidly the diabolo rotates faster. The diabolo spin can be accelerated more quickly using various methods: the 'whip' rotates the diabolo faster by moving one handstick in front of the user's body and past the other handstick, the 'wrap' rotates the diabolo faster when the user wraps a loop of the string around the axle. Both methods increase the amount of string contact with the axle in any given time.


title: Diabolo

text: Once spin speed is increased to a sufficient level that the diabolo is stable, the user can then perform tricks. "Skillful players can set it whirling at a rate of 2,000 revolutions a minute, it is said." Depending on how long a trick takes to perform, the user will normally have to spend some time increasing the spin speed of the diabolo before performing other tricks. Skilled users can perform multiple tricks while maintaining the spin speed of the diabolo. "A skilled person [can] catch it, hurl it fifty or sixty feet into the air, then catch it again with little effort."


title: Diabolo

text: There are countless tricks and variations that fall outside the above categories; these are often more difficult and form the cutting edge of modern diabolo routines. Some examples are:


title: Diabolo

text: Perhaps the most active area of development for diabolo performance involves tricks with more than one diabolo on a single string. When manipulating multiple diabolos "low", the diabolos orbit continuously on the string in a "shuffle". Shuffles are either synchronous (commonly referred to as "sync") or asynchronous ("async"), depending on whether the diaboloist's hands' movements occur simultaneously or not; shuffles may also be performed with only one hand.


title: Diabolo

text: Juggling multiple diabolos "high" involves continuously catching and throwing a number of diabolos, never with more than one diabolo on the string simultaneously. Diaboloists have pushed the number of diabolos juggled at once up to six "high" (although there is some controversy as to whether this counts as the number of catches achieved is so small) and five "low". Most diaboloists, however, stick to using only two or three diabolos at once. The introduction of multiple diabolos on a single string allows for many new moves. Many are applications of one-diabolo moves to multiple diabolos.


title: Diabolo

text: Another advanced diabolo style is "vertax" (vertical axis; also known as "Excalibur"). This is where the diabolo is "turned vertically" by means of "whipping" and is continually spun in this upright state. The person spinning it needs to rotate their body to keep up with the constant whipping action due to the momentum and centripetal motion at which the diabolo spins. Although the number of tricks seems limited, people are finding more ways to perform with this style, including vertax genocides, infinite suicides, and many suns, orbits, and satellites. It is also possible to have two diabolos in one string in vertax; this feat has been achieved by a small number of diaboloists. It has also been done in the form of a fan. Most of these tricks are accomplished by street performers in competitions, notably the GEDC and the Taipei PEC. Some cutting-edge skilled vertax jugglers include William (Wei-Liang) Lin (in 2006, ranked #1 in the world), Ryo Yabe (multiple diabolos), Higami (a Japanese juggling group, noted for inventing the first 'infinite suicide vertax'), and Jonathan P. Chen (noted for inventing the vertax genocide); these jugglers are former and multiple winners of the above-mentioned cups. Eric and Antonin (France) and Nate and Jacob Sharpe (USA) have contributed greatly to the development of vertax passing techniques. Finally, Alexis Levillon invented many vertax tricks including vertax integrals, furthered multidiabolo vertax, and has also invented the "Galexis" style, where one diabolo is horizontal, while the other is in vertax.


title: Diabolo

text: This is a relatively recent style of diabolo that is gaining popularity. It utilizes the diabolo so that it has little or no spin at all. Then it can be caught and passed and manipulated with different parts of the body instead of just the sticks and string. It has new possibilities and new ideas are arising from this. Examples include catching the diabolo between one's arm and the stick before throwing it back. Tricks with multiple diabolos have also been developed.


title: Diabolo

text: Instead of having two sticks connected by a string, the diabolo is manipulated on a loop of string held around the hands. This opens up a variety of new tricks. Yo-yo type slack tricks can also be performed in a loop.


title: Diabolo

text: Monobolo is a variation of the diabolo where instead of having two diabolo cups, there is only one and a weight on the other side. The monobolo can be used in the same fashion as normal diabolos. However, if a monobolo is put into excalibur, or horizontally, monobolos can be manipulated to be like a spinning top. To start a monobolo, twist the string around the axle and then let it gain some speed.


title: Diabolo

text: Cirque du Soleil has combined diabolos with acrobatics during feature acts in five shows: "Quidam", "La Nouba", "Dralion", "Ovo" "and Viva Elvis."


title: Diabolo

text: In 2006 Circus Smirkus presented a duo diabolo act starring Jacob and Nate Sharpe, with advanced tricks including the first double sprinkler pass in a performance as well as some five-diabolo passing.


title: Diabolo

text: The diabolo programs of many Chinese schools provide performances during the Chinese New Year or near the end of the school year.


title: Leah Renee Cudmore

text: Leah Renee Cudmore (born 1 October 1985), often credited as Leah Cudmore or Leah Renee, is a Canadian actress and singer.


title: Leah Renee Cudmore

text: Cudmore has had recurring roles in television series including "MVP", "Runaway" and "Blue Mountain State". As a voice actress, she has performed in series including "Franklin" and "Growing Up Creepie". In 2011, she acquired notoriety co-starring "Bunny Alice" in the NBC series "The Playboy Club". In 2013, she starred as Maggie Bronson on the Canadian sitcom "Satisfaction".


title: Leah Renee Cudmore

text: As a singer, in February 2009, she released her first single, "iBF (Imaginary Boyfriend)". Some months later, she also released her debut CD, "Storybook", composed of eleven pieces, her first single included. She co-wrote all songs of her first album.


title: Leah Renee Cudmore

text: Cudmore is in a long-term relationship with actor Nick Zano. They have a son born in July 2016, and a daughter born in 2018.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: Juan Camilo Hernández Suárez (born 20 April 1999), known simply as Cucho Hernández, is a Colombian professional footballer who plays as a striker or winger for Major League Soccer club Columbus Crew and the Colombia national team.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: Born in Pereira, Hernández has been called "Cucho" since he was two years old because his father would shave his head leading him to be compared to a prominent Argentine soccer player at the time, Esteban "Cuchu" Cambiasso, who would also shave his hair off. Furthermore, people said he looked like an old man which is called "cucho" in Colombian slang.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: Hernández joined Deportivo Pereira in 2015 at the age of only 15 years old, after impressing with an amateur side. He made his first team debut on 6 April 2015 at 15 years old, starting in a 2–1 home win against Deportes Quindío for the Categoría Primera B championship.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: Hernández scored his first senior goal on 5 September 2015, netting his team's first in a 3–2 away win against Real Santander. After finishing his first season with three goals, he netted 20 times during his second, being the tournament's top goalscorer; highlights included a hat-trick in a 3–0 home success over Tigres F.C. on 3 July 2016.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: On 22 December 2016 Hernández joined América de Cali on loan from Granada CF, after signing for the latter side in September. He made his Categoría Primera A debut on 23 February 2017, coming on as a second-half substitute in a 2–0 home loss against Jaguares de Córdoba.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: Hernández scored his first goal in the main category of Colombian football on 3 June 2017, netting the game's only in an away win over Deportivo Pasto.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: After Granada was sold to Jiang Lizhang, former owner Gino Pozzo assigned his federative rights to Watford ahead of the 2017–18 season.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: On 8 July 2017, Hernández moved to Segunda División side SD Huesca on loan for one year. He scored 16 goals during the 2017–18 campaign, as his side achieved promotion to La Liga for the first time ever. On 4 June 2018, his loan was extended for a further season, and he made his top tier debut on 19 August by starting in a 2–1 away win against SD Eibar.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: Hernández scored his first goal in the main category of Spanish football on 2 September 2018, netting the opener in a 8–2 loss at FC Barcelona. He finished 2018–19 with four goals in 34 appearances, as his side was immediately relegated back.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: On 26 August 2019, Hernández signed a new long term contract with Watford and joined RCD Mallorca on a season-long loan.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: On 14 August 2020, Hernández remained in Spain and its first division, after joining Getafe CF on a season-long loan.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: On 14 August 2021, Hernández scored on his Watford debut in their league opener against Aston Villa, where Watford won 3–2.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: On 21 June 2022, Hernández agreed to join Major League Soccer club Columbus Crew for a club-record fee of USD $10 million, joining as a Young Designated Player when the secondary transfer window would open on 7 July 2022. Hernández made his debut on 9 July 2022, coming off the bench in the 62nd minute to score the game winning goal against Chicago Fire FC. The following two matches, both coming off the bench as second half substitutions, "Hernández" added three additional goals, becoming the first player in MLS history to score four goals in under 90 minutes.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: On 29 September 2022, it was announced that Hernández had been suspended one match for the use of offensive language in Columbus' match against the Portland Timbers on 18 September.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: After representing Colombia at under-20 level in the 2017 South American U-20 Championship, Hernández received his first call up to the senior side on 29 September 2018, for two friendlies against the United States and Costa Rica. He made his full international debut on 17 October, replacing Carlos Bacca and scoring a brace in a 3–1 win over the latter at the Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey.


title: Cucho Hernández

text: Hernández also played for the under-20s in the 2019 FIFA U-20 World Cup, scoring a hat-trick against Tahiti.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 is a home computer that was produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, by Timex Corporation. It was launched in the United Kingdom in March 1981 as the successor to Sinclair's ZX80 and designed to be a low-cost introduction to home computing for the general public. It was hugely successful; more than 1.5 million units were sold. In the United States it was initially sold as the ZX-81 under licence by Timex. Timex later produced its own versions of the ZX81: the Timex Sinclair 1000 and Timex Sinclair 1500. Unauthorized ZX81 clones were produced in several countries.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 was designed to be small, simple, and above all, inexpensive, with as few components as possible. Video output is to a television set rather than a dedicated monitor. Programs and data are loaded and saved onto compact audio cassettes. It uses only four silicon chips and a mere 1 KB of memory. It has no power switch or moving parts, with the exception of a VHF TV channel selector switch present in some models. It has a pressure-sensitive membrane keyboard. The ZX81's limitations prompted a market in third-party peripherals to improve its capabilities. Its distinctive case and keyboard brought designer Rick Dickinson a Design Council award.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 could be bought by mail order preassembled or, for a lower price, in kit form. It was the first inexpensive mass-market home computer to be sold by high street stores, led by W. H. Smith and soon many other retailers. The ZX81 marked the point when computing in Britain became an activity for the general public rather than the preserve of businessmen and electronics hobbyists. It produced a huge community of enthusiasts, some of whom founded their own businesses producing software and hardware for the ZX81. Many went on to have roles in the British computer industry. The ZX81's commercial success made Sinclair Research one of Britain's leading computer manufacturers and earned a fortune and an eventual knighthood for the company's founder Sir Clive Sinclair.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 has a base configuration of 1 KB of on-board memory that can officially be expanded externally to 16 KB. Its single circuit board is housed inside a wedge-shaped plastic case measuring wide by high. The memory is provided by either a single 4118 (1024 bit × 8) or two 2114 (1024 bit × 4) RAM chips. There are only three other onboard chips: a 3.5 MHz Z80A 8-bit microprocessor from NEC, an uncommitted logic array (ULA) chip from Ferranti, and an 8 KB ROM providing a simple Sinclair BASIC interpreter. The entire machine weighs just . Early versions of the external RAM cartridge contain 15 KB of memory using an assortment of memory chips, while later versions contain 16 KB chips, but the lowest addressed kilobyte is disabled.


title: ZX81

text: The front part of the case is occupied by an integrated 40-key membrane keyboard displaying 20 graphic and 54 inverse video characters. Each key has up to five functions, accessed via the SHIFT and FUNCTION keys or depending on context. For example, the P key combines the letter codice_1, the codice_2 character, and the BASIC commands codice_3 and codice_4. The ZX81 uses a standard QWERTY keyboard layout. The keyboard is mechanically very simple, consisting of 40 pressure-pad switches and 8 diodes under a plastic overlay, connected in a matrix of 8 rows and 5 columns.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81's primary input/output is delivered via four sockets on the left side of the case. The machine uses an ordinary UHF television set to deliver a monochrome picture via a built-in RF modulator. It can display 24 lines of 32 characters each, and by using the selection of 2×2 block character graphics from the machine's character set offers an effective 64 × 44 pixel graphics mode, also directly addressable via BASIC using the PLOT and UNPLOT commands, leaving 2 lines free at the bottom. Two 3.5 mm jacks connect the ZX81 to the EAR (output) and MIC (input) sockets of an audio cassette recorder, enabling data to be saved or loaded. This stores each data bit as a number of pulses followed by an inter-bit silence of 1300 µs. Each pulse is a 150 µs 'high' then a 150 µs 'low'. A '0' bit consists of four pulses while a '1' bit is nine pulses, so the baud rate varies between 400 bit/s for all '0's and 250 bit/s for all '1's. A file with equal amounts of '0's and '1's would be stored at 307 bit/s (38 bytes/sec). This provides a somewhat temperamental storage medium for the machine, which has no built-in storage capabilities. The ZX81 requires 420 mA of power at 7–11 V DC, delivered via a custom 9 V Sinclair DC power supply.


title: ZX81

text: The ULA chip, described by the ZX81 manual as the "dogsbody" of the system, has a number of key functions that competing computers share between multiple chips and integrated circuits. These comprise the following:


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81's built-in RF modulator can output a video picture to either a UHF 625-line colour or monochrome television (used in the UK, Australia, and most western European countries). France required a slightly modified version of the machine to match the positive video modulation of SECAM sets, while the US and Canada required a different ULA chip and modulator to cope with their 525-line VHF (NTSC) television systems. Both the ZX81 and its predecessor, the ZX80, have a significant drawback in the way that they handle visual output. Neither machine has enough processing power to run at full speed and simultaneously maintain the screen display. On the ZX80, this means that the screen goes blank every time the machine carries out a computation and causes an irritating flicker whenever a shorter computation – such as processing a keystroke – takes place.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81's designers adopted an improved approach, involving the use of two modes called SLOW and FAST respectively. In SLOW mode, also called "compute and display" mode, the ZX81 concentrates on driving the display. It runs the current program for only about a quarter of the time – in effect slowing the machine down fourfold, although in practice the speed difference between FAST and SLOW modes depends on what computation is being done. In FAST mode, processing occurs continuously, but the display is abandoned to its own devices – equivalent to the ZX80's standard operating mode.


title: ZX81

text: Another hardware quirk produced one of the most distinctive aspects of the ZX81's screen display – during loading or saving, moving zigzag stripes appear across the screen. The same pin on the ULA is used to handle the video signal and the tape output, producing the stripes as an interference pattern of sorts. The ULA cannot maintain the display during SAVE and LOAD operations, as it has to operate continuously to maintain the correct baud rate for data transfers. The interference produces the zigzag stripes.


title: ZX81

text: The unexpanded ZX81's tiny memory presents a major challenge to programmers. Simply displaying a full screen takes up to 793 bytes, the system variables take up another 125 bytes, and the program, input buffer and stacks need more memory on top of that. Nonetheless, ingenious programmers are able to achieve a surprising amount with just 1 KB. One example is the "Super Micro Chess Engine" by Stefano Maragò, which includes all of the rules of chess. The ZX81 conserves its memory to a certain extent by representing entire BASIC commands as one-byte tokens, stored as individual "characters" in the upper reaches of the machine's unique (non-ASCII) character set.


title: ZX81

text: The edge connector or external interface at the rear of the ZX81 is an extension of the main printed circuit board. This provides a set of address, control, and data lines that can be used to communicate with external devices. Enthusiasts and a variety of third-party companies make use of this facility to create a wide range of add-ons for the ZX81.


title: ZX81

text: The following table provides a comparison between the capabilities of the ZX81 and various other competing microcomputers that were available in June 1981, about the time that the first ZX81 orders were delivered. The prices given are as of June 1981 from Your Computer UK.


title: ZX81

text: N.B.: Commodore PET includes monitor and cassette recorder. The Video Genie includes a built in cassette recorder. The Compukit 101 is an Ohio Scientific SuperBoard made under licence in Britain. Compukit 101 and MicroTan are kit computers and are not supplied with a case.


title: ZX81

text: The Atari 400 and TRS-80 model I were officially only expandable to 16 KB, but expansion to 48 KB was available from third party suppliers.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 and the other systems referred to as having block graphics have a resolution of 256 × 192 pixels, there are 32 columns × 22 rows of text and graphics can be addressed in quarter character blocks.


title: ZX81

text: Clive Sinclair, a former radio kit salesman, established his first company, Sinclair Radionics, in 1962. The company made its name producing a wide range of cheap electronics aimed at the hobbyist market. Its products include amplifiers, radios, multimeters and other items which were generally sold in kit form to hi-fi enthusiasts and other electronics hobbyists. The company entered a new market in 1972 when it launched the first "slimline" pocket calculator, the Sinclair Executive. It was a major success that Radionics followed up by launching a wide range of pocket calculators. The company's subsequent expansion made it Europe's biggest calculator manufacturer by 1975.


title: ZX81

text: By the late 1970s, however, Sinclair Radionics was experiencing serious difficulties. It lost its ability to compete effectively in the calculator market following the launch of a new generation of Japanese-produced calculators with liquid-crystal displays, which were much more capable and power-efficient than Sinclair's LED calculators. Projects to develop a pocket television and digital watch turned out to be expensive failures. The company made losses of more than £350,000 in 1975–76, bringing it to the edge of bankruptcy. In July 1977 Radionics was rescued by a state agency, the National Enterprise Board (NEB), which recapitalised it, provided a loan facility and took effective control of the company by acquiring a 73% stake.


title: ZX81

text: Clive Sinclair's relationship with the NEB was fraught due to conflicting notions about which direction the company should go. Radionics had begun a project to develop a home computer but the NEB wanted to concentrate on the instrument side of the business, which was virtually the only area where Radionics was profitable. Sinclair disagreed vehemently with what he characterised as the view "that there was no future in consumer electronics". This and other disputes led to Sinclair resigning from Radionics in July 1979.


title: ZX81

text: While he was struggling with the NEB, Clive Sinclair turned to a "corporate lifeboat" in the shape of an existing corporate shell under his exclusive control – a company called Ablesdeal Ltd, which he had established in 1973 and later renamed Science of Cambridge. It became a vehicle through which he could pursue his own projects, free of the interference of the NEB. Despite his later success in the field, Sinclair saw computers as merely a means to an end. As he told the "Sunday Times" in April 1985, "We only got involved in computers in order to fund the rest of the business", specifically the development of the ultimately unsuccessful TV80 pocket television and C5 electric vehicle. In an interview with "Practical Computing", Sinclair explained:


title: ZX81

text: By the late 1970s, American companies were producing simple home computer kits such as the MITS Altair and IMSAI 8080. This aroused interest among electronics hobbyists in the UK but relatively high prices and lower disposable income reduced the appeal of the American products. "New Scientist" stated in 1977 that "the price of an American kit in dollars rapidly translates into the same figure in pounds sterling by the time it has reached the shores of Britain". Off-the-shelf personal computers were also available for the high end of the market but were extremely expensive; Olivetti's offering cost £2,000, and the Commodore PET, launched in 1979, sold for £700. There was nothing for the hobbyist at the low end of the market. Sinclair realised that this provided a useful commercial opportunity.


title: ZX81

text: Sinclair's first home computer was the MK14, which was launched in kit form in June 1978. It was a long way from being a mass-market product. Its very name – MK standing for "Microcomputer Kit" – was indicative of its origins as a product developed by, and for, hobbyists. It had no screen but instead used an LED segment display (though Science of Cambridge did produce an add-on module allowing it to be hooked up to a UHF TV); it had no case, consisting of an exposed circuit board; it had no built-in storage capabilities and only 256 bytes of memory; and input was via a 20-key hexadecimal keyboard. Despite the limitations of the machine it sold a respectable 10–15,000 units; by comparison, the much more expensive Apple II had only sold 9,000 units in the United States, a much bigger market, in 1978. This success convinced Clive Sinclair that there was an untapped market for low-cost computers that could profitably be exploited.


title: ZX81

text: Sinclair followed up the MK14 by producing the ZX80, at the time the world's smallest and cheapest computer, which was launched in January 1980 costing £99.95 (equivalent to £390 at 2021 prices.) The company conducted no market research whatsoever prior to the launch of the ZX80; according to Clive Sinclair, he "simply had a hunch" that the general public was sufficiently interested to make such a project feasible and went ahead with ordering 100,000 sets of parts so that he could launch at high volume.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX80's design introduced many key features that were carried over to the ZX81; as Sinclair himself later said, "the ZX80 was very much a stepping stone to the ZX81". The design was driven entirely by the desired price – the machine had to cost less than £100 but still make a healthy profit. Its distinctive wedge-shaped white case concealing the circuitry and the touch-sensitive membrane keyboard were the brainchild of Rick Dickinson, a young British industrial designer who had recently been hired by Sinclair. As he later recalled of Sinclair's approach, "Everything was cost driven. The design was the face of the machine." The unconventional keyboard was the outcome of Sinclair's cost-cutting. It made use of a sheet of plastic, on which the keys were printed, overlaying a metallic circuit that registered when a key was pressed. This avoided the expense of providing a typewriter-style keyboard, though the design had many drawbacks when it came to usability and "feel".


title: ZX81

text: Inside the case, there were many more similarities with the ZX81. Like its successor, it used the Z80A microprocessor and had only 1 KB of on-board RAM. It came with a specially written BASIC interpreter on a dedicated ROM chip and could use a television as a display. It relied on an ordinary cassette tape recorder for data storage. The main difference between the two machines lay in the internal software; when the ZX81 was released, ZX80 owners were able to upgrade by the relatively simple expedient of plugging a new ROM onto the circuit board.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX80 was an immediate success, selling 20,000 units over the following nine months. Science of Cambridge was producing ZX80s at the rate of 9,000 a month by the end of 1980 and within 18 months of its launch the company had sold 100,000 units. The commercial success of the ZX80 made a follow-up product inevitable. The company was renamed Sinclair Computers in November 1980, reflecting its new focus, and became Sinclair Research in March 1981.


title: ZX81

text: The launch of the ZX81 was catalysed in part by the BBC Computer Literacy Project's plan to produce The Computer Programme TV series, to be broadcast in 1982, aimed at popularising computing and programming. The BBC intended to commission an existing manufacturer to provide it with a BBC-branded home computer to tie in with the series. When Clive Sinclair heard of the project in December 1980, he wrote to the BBC informing them that he would be announcing a new version of the ZX80, to be called the ZX81, in early 1981. It would remedy some of the ZX80's deficiencies and would be both cheaper and more advanced. Sinclair wanted the ZX81 to be a candidate for the BBC contract and lobbied for its adoption. He pointed out that there were already 40,000 users of the ZX80 and that by the time the series was broadcast there were likely to be upwards of 100,000 ZX81 users (which turned out to be an underestimate by over 400,000 – an indication of how the ZX81's success exceeded even Sinclair's expectations).


title: ZX81

text: A prototype ZX81 was demonstrated to BBC representatives in January 1981, while Sinclair's local rival Acorn Computers put forward their proposed Proton computer, a design – of which a prototype did not yet exist – based on the Acorn Atom. To Sinclair's dismay, the contract to produce the BBC Micro went to Acorn, which launched the machine in January 1982. Paul Kriwaczek, the producer of "The Computer Programme", explained his reservations in a March 1982 interview with "Your Computer:"


title: ZX81

text: Sinclair was critical of the BBC's decision, accusing it of incompetence and arrogance. Shortly after Acorn won the BBC contract the Government issued a recommended list of computers, including the BBC Micro and Research Machines 380Z, that schools could purchase, with the aid of a grant, for half price; Sinclair's computers were not included on the list. Sinclair responded by launching his own half-price deal, offering schools the chance to buy a ZX81 and 16 KB RAM pack for £60, plus a ZX Printer at half price, for a total cost of £90. As the cheapest Government-approved system was £130, this was an attractive offer for some schools and about 2,300 bought Sinclair's package, although 85% adopted the BBC Micro.


title: ZX81

text: The development of the ZX81 got under way even before the ZX80 had been launched. Sinclair's chief engineer, Jim Westwood, was given the task of improving the ZX80's hardware to reduce the number of components and thus bring down the cost. He also sought to fix some of the more annoying problems with the ZX80. Westwood and his colleagues found that the component count could be reduced greatly by combining eighteen of the ZX80's chips into a single uncommitted logic array (ULA), a type of general-purpose chip full of logic gates that were connected up as the customer required during chip manufacture. This short-lived technology of the day was cheaper and quicker than the design of a customised logic chip, which typically required very high volumes to recoup its development cost. Ferranti produced the new chip for Sinclair, who hailed Westwood's design as a triumph of innovation: "The ZX81 had four chips when our nearest competitor in this respect, the TRS-80, had 44." Only 70% of the logic gates on the ULA were supposed to be used, but Sinclair decided to use them all to squeeze more functions in. This resulted in the machine becoming uncomfortably warm during usage. Computing folklore held that the ZX81 had to be refrigerated by balancing a carton of cold milk on top of the case.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81's ROM was doubled to 8 KB, from the ZX80's 4 KB ROM. This enabled a fuller implementation of a version of ANSI Minimal BASIC (termed Sinclair BASIC by the company). Clive Sinclair re-commissioned a company called Nine Tiles, which had produced the ZX80 ROM, to develop the new ROM software for the ZX81. The code was written by John Grant, the owner of Nine Tiles, and Steve Vickers, who had joined the company in January 1980. Grant concentrated on the software that drove the ZX81's hardware, while Vickers developed the new BASIC and the accompanying manual. Sinclair's brief to the pair was fairly non-specific but primarily concerned remedying a key defect of the ZX80 so that the new machine could be used for practical programming and calculations. Vickers later recalled:


title: ZX81

text: The new ROM incorporated trigonometric and floating-point functions, which its predecessor had lacked – the ZX80 could only deal with whole numbers. Grant came up with one of the ZX81's more novel features, a syntax checker that indicated errors in BASIC code as soon as it was entered (rather than, as was standard at the time, only disclosing coding errors when a program was run). Unfortunately for Vickers, he introduced a briefly notorious error – the so-called "square-root bug" that caused the square root of 0.25 to be returned erroneously as 1.3591409 – as a result of problems with integrating the ZX Printer code into the ROM. Although it was eventually fixed, the bug became the subject of controversy and Sinclair was forced to replace some of the ZX81s sold to early customers. On a more positive note, Vickers' work on the manual was received favourably, being described in 1983 as "one of the classic texts on BASIC". Max Phillips commented in a "What Micro?" retrospective:


title: ZX81

text: The task of designing the ZX81's case again fell to Rick Dickinson, who produced an updated version of the ZX80's wedge-shaped case. This time round, the design team were able to use injection moulding, which enabled them to deliver a higher-quality case. Dickinson originally envisaged the ZX81 as "an expandable range of boxes following a vaguely modular approach with a common width", though this approach was eventually dropped. From start to finish, the design process took about six months.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 was launched on 5 March 1981 in two versions (though with identical components) – a pre-assembled machine or a cheaper kit version, which the user could assemble himself. Both versions were manufactured in Dundee, Scotland by Timex Corporation at the company's Dryburgh factory. Timex had not been an obvious choice of manufacturing subcontractor, as the company had little previous experience in assembling electronics. It was a well-established manufacturer of mechanical watches but was facing a crisis at the beginning of the 1980s. Profits had dwindled to virtually zero as the market for mechanical watches stagnated in the face of competition from the digital and quartz watches. Recognising the trend, Timex's director, Fred Olsen, determined that the company would diversify into other areas of business.


title: ZX81

text: This shift by Timex came at an ideal time for Sinclair. The ZX80 had proved more popular than expected and Sinclair's existing manufacturer, a small electronics company in St Ives, lacked the resources to deal with the demand. Timex took over production of the ZX80 late in 1980. The arrangement worked well for both companies and Timex took on the manufacture of the ZX81, aided by capital investment in its Dundee plant. Sinclair initially planned to produce 10,000 ZX81s a month, rising to 30,000 a month within a year. However, Timex initially had significant problems in producing enough ZX81s to satisfy demand. As a consequence, it took up to nine weeks for ZX81s to be delivered by mail order. It was not until September 1981, five months after the launch of the ZX81, that the delivery times finally came down to the promised twenty-eight days. Those who already owned or had recently ordered the ZX80 were not excluded; anyone who had ordered a ZX80 in the two weeks before the ZX81's launch would receive the newer machine, while existing owners were able to upgrade their ZX80s by plugging an extra £20 ROM chip into the circuit board.


title: ZX81

text: The reliability of the ZX81 was controversial. W.H. Smith, one of the machine's key distributors, had a company policy of ordering a third more ZX81s than were actually required for sale, so that it would have enough replacements for faulty machines. Similar problems were reported in the US market, where contemporary reports suggested that only a third of the ZX81s shipped actually worked. However, figures released by Sinclair claimed that only 2.4 per cent of pre-assembled machines were returned, although 13 per cent of kits were returned. Clive Sinclair strongly denied any problem with reliability:


title: ZX81

text: Sinclair attributed the higher failure rate of the kits to customers breaking the components by inserting or soldering them the wrong way, though the company admitted that there was a persistent problem with power supplies that affected both kits and pre-assembled ZX81s. The bigger problem was perhaps Sinclair's lack of after-sales service, which Robin Clarke of "New Scientist" described as "one of the worst after-sales performance records of any company ever established." The "Financial Times" observed that "Clive Sinclair's offices are filled with returned computers which can take months to be repaired." The company's slowness in replacing returns and delivering freshly ordered machines meant that Sinclair Research gained a reputation for poor customer service.


title: ZX81

text: The marketing of the ZX81 was handled by Sinclair's long-standing marketing agency Primary Contact (now part of Ogilvy & Mather), which had provided marketing services for Sinclair since 1971 and was to continue doing so until 1985. Sinclair's entry into the nascent home computing market gave Primary Contact a major challenge – how to market a product simultaneously at hobbyists and at the "man on the street", who probably had little or no computer literacy. The answer was to pursue what the journalist David O'Reilly of "MicroScope" magazine described as a single-minded "user-friendly strategy." Chris Fawkes, one of Primary Contact's directors, explained: "We brought personal computers to the mass market by showing that you didn't have to be a whizzkid to use one." As Clive Sinclair put it in a 1982 interview with "Your Computer",


title: ZX81

text: According to Ben Rosen, by pricing the ZX81 so low, "Sinclair has opened up a completely new market among people who had never previously considered owning a computer." Clive Sinclair acknowledged the role that guesswork had played in his decision to launch the ZX81 on such a large scale: "It was a surmise that the man in the street would want such a computer. He does, and our information is that a lot of people are using the machines avidly." A "New Scientist" retrospective published in 1986 commented:


title: ZX81

text: High-profile advertising was central to the marketing campaign. Although Sinclair Research was a relatively small company, it had a long-standing policy of using large-scale advertisements that stood out in stark contrast to the more muted advertisements of other manufacturers. Superlatives, exhortations, appeals to patriotism, testimonials, eye-catching drawings and photographs on double-page spreads, varying from month to month, were used to drum up mail order business for Sinclair. The launch advertising for the ZX81 illustrates this approach. A photograph of the ZX81 alongside the official Sinclair peripherals dominated the centre of a double-page spread. The value for money of Sinclair's products was emphasised by the prices being printed in larger type than any other text on the spread. The ZX81's benefits were promoted with the aspirational slogan "Sinclair ZX81 Personal Computer – the heart of a system that grows with you". The advertisement highlighted "ZX81 BASIC Programming", the manual written by Steve Vickers, as "a complete course in BASIC programming, from first principles to complex programs." The educational benefits of the ZX81 were stressed ("it's still very simple to teach yourself computing") and its technical advantages were explained in relatively non-technical terms. For instance, the ZX81's idiosyncratic method of typing commands with a single keystroke – the result of the memory-saving method of using one-byte tokens to represent keywords – was presented as "eliminat[ing] a great deal of tiresome typing". The ZX81's British character was emphasised; it was "designed by Sinclair and custom-built in Britain." Sinclair's advertising in the United States provides an illustration of how the company perceived the ZX81's purpose:


title: ZX81

text: This approach to advertising was driven by Sinclair's reliance on mail-order marketing. It came with a high up-front cost in terms of purchasing space in publications but it had the advantage of ensuring that all sales were firm and pre-paid. A big splash on launch produced a large influx of cash at the outset of a campaign, though it did also depend on the advertiser having enough product to satisfy the initial surge in demand. The advertisements served an additional purpose of priming the market for over-the-counter sales by "getting the story across", as Clive Sinclair put it: "Not that big a proportion do buy on mail order, but they see the ads, and that helps to prepare them for buying when the item appears in the shops."


title: ZX81

text: Sinclair himself became a focal point for the marketing campaign, putting a human face on the business, while Sinclair Research was portrayed in the media as a plucky British challenger taking on the technical and marketing might of giant American and Japanese corporations. As David O'Reilly noted, "by astute use of public relations, particularly playing up his image of a Briton taking on the world, Sinclair has become the best-known name in micros." The popular press soon latched onto the image. His "Uncle Clive" persona is said to have been created by the gossip columnist for "Personal Computer World", while the media praised Sinclair as a visionary genius (or even, in the words of "The Sun", "the most prodigious inventor since Leonardo.") As Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy put it, Sinclair outgrew "the role of microcomputer manufacturer and accepted the mantle of pioneering boffin leading Britain into a technological utopia."


title: ZX81

text: Pricing was central to the marketing strategy, as it had been through Sinclair's career. The ZX81 had been designed to meet a £70 price point and was launched at a price of £69.95 (built) or £49.95 (kit). One Sinclair brochure presented a side-by-side comparison of the ZX81 with the four machines that Sinclair considered its main rivals – the Acorn Atom, Apple II Plus, Commodore PET and TRS-80. The comparison highlighted the vast differences in cost, from £630 in the case of the Apple II Plus to just £70 for the ZX81, though even by Sinclair's own comparison the Apple was by far the more capable machine.


title: ZX81

text: According to Sinclair himself, the £69.95 price was chosen after applying the "experience curve" developed by the Boston Consulting Group. Sinclair's prior experience in the calculator market had highlighted the fact that a product will be more profitable selling at (for instance) twice the manufactured cost than at three times. He could have launched the ZX81 at a higher price, marketing it in a more traditional way as a premium product, but chose not to. In effect, he used the lower price to establish an unassailable lead before the competition moved in.


title: ZX81

text: An essential part of Sinclair's marketing strategy was to use regular cost-cutting at strategic intervals to maintain market share. Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy comment that Sinclair's approach was "to secure and extend [his] market lead and panic the competition. While most companies reduce prices when their products are in steep decline, Sinclair tends to discount shortly after sales have peaked. The advantage of his approach is that vacillating customers are drawn into the fold while the product's promotion retains a commercial urgency, and the costings of the competition are thrown into utter disarray."


title: ZX81

text: This tactic proved highly successful, with Sinclair announcing by March 1982 that it had sold 250,000 ZX81s worldwide. 50,000 computers were sold each month, 60% outside the UK, despite Sinclair and W. H. Smith being the only distributors. When sales fell in the wake of the launch of its successor, the ZX Spectrum, Sinclair reduced the price of the pre-assembled version to £49.95 in May 1982. It was cut by another £10 the following April. Despite the increased competition from much more capable computers, the ZX81 was still shipping in excess of 30,000 units a month even as late as July 1983, more than two years after it had been launched. By that time, according to Sinclair Research, over 1.5 million ZX81s had been sold.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81's distribution arrangements were an essential part of its success and marked a watershed in the way that computers were sold in the UK. Sinclair had previously made its name as a mail-order retailer – the ZX81 was initially available only through mail-order – but the only truly effective way to reach the mass market was via high street stores. Fortunately for Sinclair, an opportunity to do just that was provided by W.H. Smith, a venerable book- and magazine-seller and stationery chain. The company had stagnated in the 1970s and was looking for ways to revitalise its image and expand its product range.


title: ZX81

text: Smith's had begun selling audio and photographic equipment and calculators at the end of the 1970s, with a modest degree of success. In 1980 its marketing development manager, John Rowland, hit upon the idea of creating "Computer Know-How" sections in major branches to sell computer books and magazines. Most of the items on display were imports from the United States but their relatively high cost reduced their attractiveness to the casual buyer. The commercial success and mass market potential of the ZX80 caught Rowland's interest; he approached Sinclair, saw a prototype ZX81 and agreed to market the machine through Smith's on an exclusive basis for the first six months after launch. As Rowland put it, "what we've done now is bring the computer-orientated publications together with an actual computer, to create the Computer Know-How section of the store", alongside computer software and blank cassette tapes. The ZX81 would be sold in 112 stores around the UK and would serve as the centrepiece of the "Computer Know-How" sections.


title: ZX81

text: Selling the ZX81 over the counter was seen as something of a gamble and Rowland's colleagues were initially unenthusiastic about the scheme. Branch buyers thought that the ZX81 was unlikely to sell more than 10–15 units per branch at launch. Rowland himself thought that the ZX81 would sell about 10,000 units during the first five months of the retail agreement, equivalent to one month's mail order sales by Sinclair. In the event, the ZX81 was a massive success for Smith's, it went on sale for making it the first home PC in the UK to retail for under . The "Computer Know-How" sections were swamped with eager customers, overwhelming the 300 staff who had been trained to demonstrate the machines; a "Financial Times" correspondent wrote of being "dazed and bewildered by the crowds of schoolchildren clustered round the ZX81 in your local branch of W.H. Smith." Within a year, Smith's had sold 350,000 ZX81s, making an estimated net profit of . Sales of peripherals, software, books and magazines netted even more profit.


title: ZX81

text: The British chain stores Boots, John Menzies and Currys began selling the ZX81 as soon as Smith's exclusive distribution deal expired and a number of companies secured overseas distribution rights for the ZX81, which was being sold in 18 countries by March 1982. Sinclair launched the ZX81 in the United States in November 1981 at a price of assembled and in kit form, initially selling directly to the American market by mail order. To be useful the computer needed an extra RAM pack which cost . Sales reached 15,000 a month by January 1982, while American Express sold thousands more to its own customers. In February 1982 Timex obtained a licence from Sinclair to sell the ZX81 directly through thousands of retail outlets in the US, paying Sinclair Research a 5 per cent royalty on all Sinclair hardware and software sold by Timex. The company was later to produce its own licensed clones and variants of the ZX81. By August 1982 Sinclair had lowered the American mail-order price of the assembled ZX81 to and kit to , and its advertisements stated that "more than 10,000 are sold every week". In December 1981 Mitsui obtained rights to distribute the ZX81 in Japan, selling it by mail order for (equivalent to £83 in 1982 prices), and had sold 5,000 units by July 1982. The Japanese market's favourable reaction to the ZX81 led Mitsui to begin selling the ZX81 over the counter in large bookshops from September 1982, with annual sales of 20,000 units predicted. In the Netherlands, the regular Sinclair ZX81 was for sale as well as a Bang & Olufsen branded version called "Beocomp".


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 was also sold for a while in duty-free shops at UK airports. However, this fell foul of government export restrictions aimed at preventing the Soviet bloc countries from obtaining Western high technology goods. It was not uncommon for visitors from the Soviet Union and other eastern European countries to pick up gadgets in Western countries with the aim of transferring their technology to their own states' industries. In 1983 the government ordered that the ZX81s were to be withdrawn from sale at airports. There was no such restriction on sales to communist China and in November 1983 Sinclair Research announced that it had signed an agreement to export ZX81 kits to a factory in Guangzhou, where they would be assembled for the Chinese market.


title: ZX81

text: Reviews of the ZX81 highlighted the great value for money offered by the machine but noted its technical shortcomings. As Tim Hartnell put it in "Your Computer", "the ZX81 is both a delight and a disappointment". He applauded the improvements that had been made over the ZX80, such as a much better manual, display and string handling, and called the ZX81 "a very good first computer" that "will open the world of computing to many who would be denied access to it by cost." However, the built-in memory was so small that use of a memory expansion pack was "mandatory for any worthwhile use". He also found the ZX81 to be alarmingly unreliable, having to have his first two test machines replaced before getting one that worked properly.


title: ZX81

text: "New Scientist's" Malcolm Peltu commented that it was "great technical value for money particularly for computing enthusiasts" but thought that others were "likely to be bored very quickly by the basic system". He highlighted weaknesses in the manual and Sinclair's accompanying software, criticising them for "a misconceived design and sloppiness in execution which make the machine seem harder to use and more limited than it should" and questioned whether it might be more worthwhile to save up for a more powerful computer such as Acorn or Commodore's offerings. Overall, he concluded, the ZX81 might have a limited value in helping to teach BASIC programming and overcoming psychological barriers to computing, but "the Sinclair systems have a long way to go before they raise the quality and level of understanding of the nature and use of computer-based information systems among computer unbelievers."


title: ZX81

text: While the editor of "Personal Computer World" was on holiday in May 1981, his colleagues publicised the magazine's review of the ZX81 with a cover showing a chimpanzee with the machine above the strapline "Editor benchtests the ZX81". (The chimp returned in later issues to "benchtest" all of Sinclair's subsequent computers.) The review, which was written by "PCW" staffer Dave Tebbutt, acknowledged that the machine had significant shortcomings but nonetheless represented "absolutely amazing value for money". He described the ZX81 as "a lovely product which will have enormous appeal to people wanting to find out more about computers, but without it costing them an arm and a leg" and concluded: "If you know nothing about computers and you want to enjoy finding out about them, then this machine offers a value for money way of doing just that. Children will love the ZX81, there can be no question about that, and I suspect that more than a few people who are already familiar with computers will buy one, just to have a bit of fun."


title: ZX81

text: Paul Taylor of the "Financial Times" found the ZX81 to be "a powerful and flexible little computer ideally suited as a fun introduction to the mysteries of home computing" but cautioned readers about its limitations. It lacked ready-made software, the keyboard was not easy to use, it did not have sufficiently advanced graphics to be able to replicate arcade-style games and its built-in memory was inadequate. Even so, he suggested, "the ZX81 is a unique British product, part toy, part puzzle, part learning tool and I think that, provided one accepts its limitations and recognises that any computer will only do what it is told to do, it is good value as an introduction to the hobby of home computing."


title: ZX81

text: "The Age" described the ZX81 as "not extremely sophisticated, and its memory capability is rather limited. It also has a rather toy-like appearance". It concluded that the computer was "an ideal toy for youngsters who want to become acquainted with the computer world. It is responsive, cheap, and very easy to use".


title: ZX81

text: Billy Garrett of "Byte", who already owned a ZX80, complimented the Timex/Sinclair 1000s manual (although he regretted the removal of the British original's humour), the "state-of-the-art circuitry", and the BASIC for being "remarkably powerful" despite the small ROM size. He concluded that "the major use ... will probably be for learning about BASIC or computers in general. [It] has limited expansion capabilities, and the keyboard is too small and cramped for any serious work".


title: ZX81

text: David Babsky described the ZX81 as "a wonderfully brainy little micro which won't let you waste your time and make a fool of yourself". In a comparison between the ZX81 and IBM PC published in "Which Micro?", he commended the ZX81's user-friendliness and its on-the-fly syntax checking of BASIC programs, which he described as "the feature that I, as a newcomer to computing, want to see incorporated into every micro."


title: ZX81

text: The success of the ZX81 led almost immediately to enthusiasts producing a huge variety of peripherals and software. Clive Sinclair was "amused and gratified" by the attention the machine received but other than what Clarke described as "a few remarkably poor programs on cassette", his company made little effort to exploit the demand, effectively ceding a very lucrative market to third party suppliers, a decision that undoubtedly forfeited a lot of potential earnings. W.H. Smith, for instance, was able to exploit a peculiarity of the ZX81; owners found that technically obsolete low-fidelity mono tape cassette recorders worked better as storage devices than higher-quality music systems. Smith's purchased cheap "shoebox" cassette recorders in the Far East and sold them with the W.H. Smiths logo as "data recorders". Over 100,000 were sold in 18 months.


title: ZX81

text: Sinclair released only two official peripherals for the ZX81, a 16 KB RAM pack (actually the same one previously released for the ZX80, but rebadged) and the ZX Printer, both of which plugged into the edge connector at the rear of the ZX81. They retailed at a launch price of £49.95 each but both had notable flaws. The RAM pack was top-heavy and was supported only by the edge connector. It had a habit of falling out of its socket at crucial points and crashing the ZX81, losing anything that the user had typed in. Users turned to using sticky lumps of chewing gum, double-sided tape or Blu-Tack to cure what became known as the "RAM pack wobble" problem. The ZX Printer was a tiny spark printer that used two electrically charged styli to burn away the surface of aluminium-coated paper to reveal the black underlay. It worked reasonably well at first but its output deteriorated rapidly after a time.


title: ZX81

text: Many non-Sinclair peripherals aimed to remedy the ZX81's flaws and provide many new capabilities. These included RAM packs providing up to 64 KB of extra memory and promising to "fit snugly ... giving a firm connection" to the computer, typewriter-style keyboards, more advanced printers and sound generators, and even a hard disk interface, which Clive Sinclair thought was "quite overgilding the lily". A wide range of software was also published. Within only a year of the ZX81's launch, around 200 independent companies had been established to manufacture and sell Sinclair-compatible hardware. The people behind the ZX81 cottage industry were very often not computer professionals but were, as the "Financial Times" noted, "school teachers, civil servants, electrical engineers and technicians [who] have set up small operations in their own time".


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81's popularity was publicly demonstrated in January 1982 when civil servant Mike Johnstone organised a "ZX Microfair" at Westminster Central Hall. Seventy exhibitors set up stalls with only a few hundred visitors expected in a hall with a capacity of 650 people. Tens of thousands, mostly youths, came from around Britain, and the police had to control the crowd. They queued for three hours around the hall, with a group of 50 entering as another group left. About 12,000 entered the hall; Clarke, who was only able to enter after identifying himself as a journalist, wrote that "no one knows how many gave up in despair". The exhibitors sold thousands of pounds' worth of software and hardware "as fast as three pairs of hands on each stall could hand them over and stuff the fivers into improvised overflowing cash boxes", he added. The fair also showed Sinclair Research's relatively unimportant role in the computer's success, with only small crowds at its booth compared to the "rugby scrum" elsewhere. By August 1983 seven more ZX Microfairs were held, with the 14th ZX Microfair at Alexandra Palace in November 1984, still organised by Johnstone.


title: ZX81

text: Thousands of ZX81 programs were published, either as type-in programs or as ready-made applications that could be loaded from cassette tape. Many computer magazines featured ZX81 program listings – some, such as "Sinclair Programs", were dedicated entirely to listings – while many individuals became the archetypal "bedroom programmers", producing games and applications which they produced, marketed, recorded, and sold from their own homes. Some went on to found their own software houses, employing teams of programmers – some still at school – to produce programs for the ZX81 and other computers. Existing companies also sold software; Psion produced a series of ZX81 programs in close association with Sinclair, including a flight simulator, while ICL's range of ZX81 programs sold over 100,000 cassettes in less than three months. Psion's success with the ZX81 had a profound effect on the future of the company. Its work on the ZX81 database program "Vu-File" led to Psion switching its focus to the development of personal digital assistants, which resulted in the launch in 1984 of the Psion Organiser, the world's first handheld personal computer. Some of the most popular ZX81 games (Psion's "Flight Simulation" being an example) were rewritten for the Spectrum to take advantage of the newer machine's colour and sound capabilities.


title: ZX81

text: Enterprising programmers were able to produce games for the ZX81 using nothing more than text characters and the machine's limited text semigraphics. Some ZX81 games achieved lasting fame, such as "3D Monster Maze", a tense first-person perspective game that involved the player escaping a labyrinth with a "Tyrannosaurus rex" in pursuit. Written in a combination of BASIC and machine code, its innovative design led it to be hailed as the first home computer 3D game and a landmark in the history of computer and video games.


title: ZX81

text: One of the more bizarre software products for the ZX81 came about as a result of music companies attempting to capitalise on the popularity of Sinclair's computers. In 1983, EMI released a single by Chris Sievey that had a ZX81 program recorded on the B-side. Island Records responded with "XL1" by Buzzcocks frontman Pete Shelley, packaged with a program for the ZX Spectrum.


title: ZX81

text: Sinclair's licensing agreement with Timex enabled the American company to produce three clones or offshoots of Sinclair machines for the US market. These were the Timex Sinclair 1000, Timex Sinclair 1500 (both variants of the ZX81) and the Timex Sinclair 2068 (a variant of the ZX Spectrum). The TS1000 was launched in July 1982 and sparked a massive surge of interest; at one point, the Timex phoneline was receiving over 5,000 calls an hour, 50,000 a week, inquiring about the machine or about microcomputers in general. It was virtually identical to the ZX81 save for re-branding and the addition of an extra 1 KB of memory, totalling 2 KB. In the five months following the TS1000's launch, the company sold 550,000 machines, earning Sinclair over $1.2 million in royalties.


title: ZX81

text: Timex produced a second version of the ZX81 in the form of the TS1500, essentially an Americanised ZX81 launched in August 1983. It dispensed with the membrane keyboard and used a case similar to that of the ZX Spectrum, incorporating 16 KB of on-board memory. It was effectively a stopgap between the ZX81 and Spectrum. However, it was unsuccessful due to increased competition from rival US machines and the after-effects of Timex's botched marketing of the TS1000. Although the TS1000 had initially been a great success, Timex failed to provide the essential RAM pack upgrades to the market for two or three months after it launched the TS1000. Consumers would take the machine home, plug it in and find that it would not do anything useful due to the lack of memory.


title: ZX81

text: In addition, consumers' attitude in the US was quite different from that in the UK. Clive Sinclair told "Informatics" magazine in June 1981 that "our competitors thought that consumers didn't want to learn programming. We [Sinclair Research] think they failed because of this and because of price." Timex evidently shared this belief but events proved it to be a false assumption. The TS1000/ZX81's price advantage was erased when its main rivals – the TI-99/4A and the VIC-20 – had their prices cut to below the all-important $100 mark. Competitors such as Apple, Atari, Commodore and Texas Instruments promoted their machines as being for business or entertainment rather than education, highlighting the value of computers with ready-made applications and more advanced features such as graphics, colour and sound.


title: ZX81

text: By late 1983 Wayne Green reported a "rising chorus of frustrated Timex users who are telling friends not to waste their money." "Hard core" early adopters, he wrote, "became discouraged with the quality of the product, with the poverty of software available and with the almost total lack of information on how to cope with it." Consumers deserted the TS1000 once its novelty value had worn off and, as publishers of programming guides found to their cost, the American public showed little interest in using the machine to learn about computer programming. American retailers were left with large stocks of unsold machines. Burned by this experience, many were unwilling to stock the later Timex Sinclair machines in large numbers and the big chain stores dropped the Timex Sinclair line altogether.


title: ZX81

text: Some companies outside the US and UK produced their own "pirate" versions of the ZX81 and Timex Sinclair computers, aided by weak intellectual property laws in their countries of origin. Several Brazilian companies produced ZX81 clones, notably the TK series (such as the TK85) from Microdigital Eletronica of Brazil) and Prológica's CP-200. Czerweny Electrónica of Argentina produced the CZ1000 and CZ1500, clones of the ZX81 and TS1500 respectively. Lambda Electronics of Hong Kong produced the Lambda 3000, based on the ZX81, which was itself widely copied by other Chinese manufacturers.


title: ZX81

text: The machines were not all straight copies of the ZX81; some, such as the CP-200, came with extra memory and a larger case (often with a chiclet keyboard in place of the original membrane keyboard). One clone, the TL801 from TELLAB of Italy, could emulate either the ZX80 or ZX81 and switch between the two machines via a jumper.


title: ZX81

text: The ZX81 had an immediate impact on the fortunes of Sinclair Research and Clive Sinclair himself. The company's profitability rose enormously, from a pretax profit of £818,000 on a turnover of £4.6 million in 1980–81 to £8.55 million on a turnover of £27.17 million in 1981–82. Clive Sinclair became one of the UK's highest-profile businessmen and a millionaire, receiving a £1 million bonus on top of a salary of £13,000. He received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours and the Young Businessman of the Year award in 1983.


title: ZX81

text: The machine also had a widespread and lasting social impact in the United Kingdom, according to Clive Sinclair, purchasers of the ZX81 came from "a reasonably broad spectrum" that ranged from readers of the upmarket "Observer" and "Sunday Times" newspapers to the more downmarket but numerous "Sun" readers. The largest age group was around 30 years old. The "Financial Times" reported in March 1982 that most Sinclair computers were being bought for educational purposes, both for adults and children, though the children were usually able to learn much more quickly. Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy note that the popularity of the ZX81 was "subtly different from the run-of-the-mill social fad"; although most enthusiasts were in their teens or early twenties, many were older users – often parents who had become fascinated by the ZX81s that they had bought for their children. However, the ZX81 boom was overwhelmingly male-dominated.


title: ZX81

text: One of the ZX81's key legacies was that it spurred large numbers of people to try programming for the first time. The ZX81 plays a significant part in the plot of William Gibson's 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition". One character, an artist using old ZX81s as a sculptural medium, explains the cultural and intellectual impact that the machine had on British society:


title: ZX81

text: Among those whose first experience of home computing was provided by the ZX81 are Terry Pratchett (who used it for "very primitive word processing"), Edward de Bono and – perhaps proving William Gibson's point – many video game developers including Charles Cecil, Raffaele Cecco, Pete Cooke, David Perry (whose first published game, a driving game, involved "a black blob avoiding other black blobs"), Rhianna Pratchett, and Jon Ritman.


title: ZX81

text: New hardware and software continue to be developed for the ZX81, including a ZX81-based webserver; the "ZXpand", a combined SD card interface, 32K configurable memory expansion, and optional joystick port and AY sound interface; and new games on cassette tape by Cronosoft, such as "Tut-Tut", "Virus", "One Little Ghost", and many more, as well as releases by Revival Studios, such as "Avalanche", "Mayhem", "Down", "Stairrunner" and more.


title: Park Han-byul

text: As a student at Anyang Art High School, Park posted photographs of herself on the internet, becoming an online celebrity due to her close physical resemblance to actress Jun Ji-hyun. After being signed by an entertainment agency, she made her acting debut in the 2003 horror film "Wishing Stairs", her part requiring her to learn ballet over a two-month period of rigorous training.


title: Park Han-byul

text: Having since appeared in a succession of television drama series, Park returned to the big screen with a role in the 2008 film "Fate". She then went on to star in the horror film "Yoga" later the same year. In 2010, Park starred in the coming-of-age film "My Black Mini Dress", based on the same titled chick lit novel by Kim Min-seo.


title: Park Han-byul

text: In July 2012, Park co-starred with Kim Ji-seok in horror film "Two Moons", playing the role of So-hee, a horror fiction novelist with a hidden secret. Park then starred in another horror film "Bunshinsaba 2" directed by Ahn Byeong-ki, marking her acting debut in China.


title: Park Han-byul

text: Park returned to TV, starring in the daily drama "One Well-Raised Daughter". In 2015, she starred in the melodrama "I Have a Lover", where she attracted attention with her portrayal of a morally ambiguous woman. In 2017, she took on the titular role in MBC's variety drama "Borg Mom".


title: Park Han-byul

text: In 2019, Park is set to star in the romance melodrama "Love in Sadness", a remake of the 1999 TBS drama "Beautiful Person".


title: Park Han-byul

text: In June 2009, K-pop singer Seven acknowledged on his website that he and Park had been in a relationship for seven years, with the couple having first met when they were seniors in high school. Seven had previously denied rumors that they were a couple in order to protect Park's privacy and let the relationship grow naturally. On December 23, 2014, a statement was released by Park's agency stating that she and Seven had ended their 12-year relationship earlier on in the year.


title: Park Han-byul

text: On November 24, 2017, it was announced that Park had married a non-celebrity earlier that year, and that they planned to have the ceremony in 2018 with family and friends. The couple had met three years prior and entered into a relationship sometime in the beginning of 2017. It was also announced that Park was 15 weeks pregnant. On April 30, 2018, it was reported that Park had given birth to a son. On May 31, 2022, the agency announced that Park is pregnant with a second child.On August 17, 2022, it was announced that Park had given birth to a second child.


title: Brain as food

text: The brain, like most other internal organs, or offal, can serve as nourishment. Brains used for nourishment include those of pigs, squirrels, rabbits, horses, cattle, monkeys, chickens, camels, fish, lamb, and goats. In many cultures, different types of brain are considered a delicacy.


title: Brain as food

text: The brain of animals features in French cuisine, in dishes such as "cervelle de veau" and "tête de veau". A dish called maghaz is a popular cuisine in Pakistan, Bangladesh, parts of India, and diaspora countries. In Turkish cuisine, brain can be fried, baked, or consumed as a salad. In Chinese cuisine, brain is a delicacy in Chongqing or Sichuan cuisine, and it is often cooked in spicy hot pot or barbecued. In the southern part of China, pig brain is used for "tianma zhunao tang". In South India, goat brain curry or fry is a delicacy. Even in Mumbai, the local indigenous East Indian community has their own version of brain masala curry.


title: Brain as food

text: Similar delicacies from around the world include the Mexican "tacos de sesos". The Anyang tribe of Cameroon practiced a tradition in which a new tribal chief would consume the brain of a hunted gorilla, while another senior member of the tribe would eat the heart. Indonesian cuisine specialty in Minangkabau cuisine also has a dish consisting of beef brain in a coconut-milk gravy named gulai banak (beef brain curry). In the Philippines, tuslob buwa is a popular street food in the regional capital of Cebu City made from fried pig brain. In Cuban cuisine, "brain fritters" are made by coating pieces of brain with bread crumbs and then frying them.


title: Brain as food

text: In the Ohio River Valley fried brain sandwiches are popular, especially in the Evansville, Indiana area.


title: Brain as food

text: DHA, an important omega-3 fatty acid, is found concentrated in mammalian brains. For example, according to Nutrition Data, 85g (3 oz) of cooked beef brain contains 727 mg of DHA. By way of comparison, the NIH has determined that small children need at least 150 mg of DHA per day, and pregnant and lactating women need at least 300 mg of DHA.


title: Brain as food

text: The makeup of the brain is about 12% lipids, most of which are located in myelin (which itself is 70–80% fat). Specific fatty acid ratios will depend in part on the diet of the animal it is harvested from. The brain is also very high in cholesterol. For example, a single 140g (5 oz) serving of "pork brains in milk gravy" can contain 3500 mg of cholesterol (1170% of the USRDA).


title: Brain as food

text: Beef brain consumption has been linked to Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease outbreaks in humans which lead to strict regulations about what parts of cattle can be sold for human consumption in numerous countries. Another prion disease called kuru has been traced to a funerary ritual among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in which those close to the dead would eat the brain of the deceased to create a sense of immortality.


title: Social Security Disability Insurance

text: Social Security Disability Insurance (SSD or SSDI) is a payroll tax-funded federal insurance program of the United States government. It is managed by the Social Security Administration and designed to provide monthly benefits to people who have a medically determinable disability (physical or mental) that restricts their ability to be employed. SSDI does not provide partial or temporary benefits but rather pays only full benefits and only pays benefits in cases in which the disability is "expected to last at least one year or result in death." Relative to disability programs in other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the SSDI program in the United States has strict requirements regarding eligibility.


title: Social Security Disability Insurance

text: People frequently confuse Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Unlike SSDI (as well as Social Security retirement benefits) where payment is based on contribution credits earned through previous work and therefore treated as an insurance benefit without reference to other income or assets, SSI is a means-tested program in the United States for disabled children, disabled adults, and the elderly who have income and resources below administratively mandated thresholds. A legitimately disabled person (a finding based on legal and medical justification) of any income level can receive SSDI. ('Disability' under SSDI is measured by a different standard than under the Americans with Disabilities Act.)