We also had computers that'd fall over at the drop of a hat, with a crapton of low level code that'd cause all sorts of havok because not everyone who writes code is a genuis or infallible.
I think he's remembering the TSR battles of the early IBM PCs under DOS. You had to be careful what you ran because they'd conflict with each other, resulting in bizarre failure modes.
The Sinclair was a species all by itself in that respect. I'm thinking along the lines of the bbc micro, the dragon / color computer and the TRS-80. Compared to those the Sinclair was incredibly cheap but that was definitely reflected by the build quality. I remember the microdrive, that was a funny little design, very creative but very flawed. Like an 8-track endless tape but for data.
I was (still am?) the proud owner of a microdrive. It was supposed to fill the niche between tape and floppies. Tape is interesting media but somehow it keeps losing (spoken by someone who still has tons of audio tapes lying around).
It would be cool to do a teardown of the microdrive.
