Sinclair Sovereign

History

The Sovereign was one of the last calculators produced during Sinclair's foray into the calculator market that had started with the Sinclair Executive in September 1972. The Executive had retailed for when introduced, but in little over a year it was possible to purchase a Sinclair calculator for and by November 1976 a model was available for . Cheaper calculators with liquid-crystal displays instead of light-emitting diodes were becoming more popular, and had much longer battery lives of months or years.

The Sovereign, released in 1976, represented an attempt to move upmarket in an increasingly saturated market. In December 1976, the chrome plated version of the Sovereign cost and the gold-plated version , including VAT, but profit margins on the Sovereign were so small that Sinclair ended up selling the Sovereign at a loss, and it was not a commercial success. The Sovereign was made in England, like every other Sinclair calculator except the President.

Sinclair would shortly stop producing calculators and instead focus on computers, starting with the MK14 in 1977. The loss of the calculator market was due in part to technological development leading to smaller and cheaper components, which put heavy pressure on profit margins. An import levy of up to 17.5% was placed on components, but the duty for calculators imported from Japan or Hong Kong could be as little as 5%, making it unprofitable to produce calculators in the UK.

Design

The Sovereign came in satin chrome and gold-plated models, with leather pouches and fitted wooden cases. The Sovereign measured 36 x, which made it small and sleek compared to other calculators of the time.

The Sovereign was unusual because the casing was made from pressed steel, which gave it a much higher quality feel compared to injection moulded plastic. This allowed a variety of paint and plating options, including black painted, chrome-plated, silver-plated, and gold-plated,

The design, by John Pemberton, won the Design Council Award in 1977, as the Executive had in 1973, and there are examples in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sovereigns are highly collectible, and used models command high prices.

Functions

As well as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, it had reciprocal and square-root functions, and the ability to multiply by a fixed constant. With an eight-digit display, the calculator could display positive numbers between 0.0000001 and 99,999,999, and negative numbers between -0.000001 and -9,999,999. A number outside that range leads to an overflow, and the screen flashes and all keys except the clear key are rendered inoperable to inform the user of the error. An independent memory register could read information from the screen, and information could only be taken from the memory onto the screen. Five keys were used for memory operations.

The Sovereign used a Mostek MK50321N main integrated circuit, the same as the Sinclair Wrist Calculator and some variants of the Sinclair Cambridge. Clive Sinclair had assumed that people would prefer attractive illuminated LED displays to LCD displays, which incidentally also required more expensive CMOS chips. However, his calculators were designed with the assumption they would be turned off between calculations, which did not prove to be the case.

References

Citations

Sources

References

1. {{harvnb. Dale. 1985
2. {{harvnb. Dale. 1985
3. Such calculators were available for well under {{GBP. Cambridge Scientific]], introduced in August 1975 at a price of {{GBP. Dale. 1985
4. {{harvnb. Dale. 1985
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6. "Sinclair Sovereign". boingboing.net.
7. Dale. 1985
8. (1977). "Design Council". Design.
9. {{harvnb. The Open University Press. 1986
10. "Sinclair Sovereign electronic calculator". Victoria and Albert Museum.
11. "Sovereign Calculator". Museum of Modern Art.
12. Gillilan, Lesley. (4 June 2005). "Yesterday's technology, tomorrow's antique". Financial Times.
13. "Sinclair Sovereign operating instructions". Sinclair Radionics.
14. "Hand Held Calculators". vintagecalculators.com.
15. "Sharp EL-120". vintagecalculators.com.
16. "Calculators: Handheld: Sinclair Cambridge Memory". vintage-technology.info.
17. {{harvnb. Dale. 1985
18. (9 March 1977). "At last, the Sinclair Sovereign. We took four long years to perfect it". Punch.