Richard Francis Altwasser is a British engineer and inventor, responsible for the hardware design of the ZX Spectrum.
[2] Altwasser graduated at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a degree in engineering in June 1978.
[2] Altwasser left Sinclair at the beginning of May 1982 to establish his own company, along with Steve Vickers, author of the Spectrum's ROM firmware and manual.
Provisionally called Rainbow Computing Co.,[3][2] the company later became Jupiter Cantab Limited.
Altwasser left Amstrad in 1992, taking on a number of director and executive jobs in other companies, such as Network Development Manager at RM plc from September 2000 to May 2003.