Ben Cheese

Who was Ben Cheese?

Ben Cheese was the engineer who got Sinclair's ZX Microdrives to work. Authors Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy, in their book Sinclair and the "Sunrise" Technology, writes that "it seems only fair to note that it was the tenacity and imagination of R&D staffer Ben Cheese that got the product [i.e., the Microdrive] to the market".

When Sinclair sold up, Cheese formed a company called Flare Technology with two other ex-Sinclair engineers, John Mathieson and Martin Brennan. Brennan and Mathieson went on to form Flare II, and to develop the Atari Jaguar console. Meanwhile, Cheese worked with Argonaut Software and Nintendo to develop the Super FX chip used in SNES games such as Star Fox.

Besides his engineering work, Ben Cheese also drew some mildly subversive cartoons for the Sinclair in-house newsletter.