Twenty years ago, you'd buy an electric guitar, hitch to London, and try to be a rock and roll star. Nowadays the young hopeful is more likely to get a Spectrum and a ZX printer, then hit the stardust trail. There are a lot more of them, and it doesn't cost as much as a good electric guitar.

More than any other micro manufacturer, Sinclair has produced the people's computer - first with the ZX81, then with the Spectrum. Low prices have bred volume sales, which have bred excellent software support - and a whole new generation of young computer users and programmers.

It's easy to see the impact the Spectrum has had on the micro market - the machine hasn't been in existence long, and became generally available still more recently, yet a new software manufacturer like Quicksilva has been able to tap a well of programming skill no-one suspected existed.

The machines already has "state of the art games" like Timegate and the Psion Flight Simulator to its credit, and software production in general is moving away from the Space Invaders/PacMan clones towards genuine originality.

But the fact that the machine has gone down so well with games manufacturers is only partially attributable to its wide availability.

It offers good high-resolution and user-defined colour graphics. The first reaction of the new Spectrum owner is invariably to rush ahead and design 21 different varieties of Space Invader - great fun, yes, but there's more to it than that.

It's also relatively simple to use the same facilities to redesign the Spectrum's alphabet - so you can tap (well OK wobble) away in almost any arcane script you care to mention.

It's all too easy to get over-enthusiastic about the Spectrum's games and graphics capabilities. When the machine first came out, the pundits hailed it with cries of "Uncle Clive's done it again". It was seen as the best you could get for the price - and it's still a lot better than many machines at twice the price - and reviewers toyed with the possibility of it being used as a small business machine.

But much of this hinged on the Microdrives which, on passing their first birthday, were still to all intents and purposes a pious hope. (More details on the Microdrives next week.)

Business software manufacturers held fire, waiting for the storage revolution, and the Spectrum spiralled off into the - still highly lucrative - ghetto of games/hobbyist machine.

But what a ghetto! The Spectrum is cheap, available and well-supported by software. Its Basic is workmanlike and thoroughly debugged, and its single-key entry system, although alien and displeasing to many a hard-bitten veteran programmer, is a joy to the novice.

The machine's grim determination to forbid you to enter any line that is not syntactically correct is also - usually - a giant step for user-friendliness, as is the way the Spectrum automatically spaces keywords in the program listing.

So the basic machine, plus the 'cheap and cheerful' ZX printer, is all the novice needs to learn how to program in glorious Specnicolor.

Sinclair is also promising a low-cost cartridge system which, depending on the sort of software that is offered, will make a considerable difference to the machine's capabilities.

Certainly Sinclair machines are different, and the Spectrum is no exception, but there are now enough of them about for users to be confident that they won't be stranded with an outmoded white elephant.

Who knows, in two years' time there could be millions of people out there with souped-up Spectrums, cartridge software and the flat-tube TV...?