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RIP Clive Sinclair

Vividly remember my dads friend who was a maths teacher pulling out a ZX81 when I was about 10. Looked like the future.

At the time, my dad had an early 1970's Burroughs L5000 monster thing in the marital bedroom to do accounting stuff! I'm sure he had to get a special power supply line in just to feed the beast, I remember a bulky plug on the wall and also playing 'golf' game on it.
 
Tony L said:
I was just going to post a thread. Very sad news. A hugely influential and radical figure in the world of computing who arguably more than anyone led the way in reducing costs and increasing accessibility. He got computers into the bedrooms of a generation who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford to get a foot in the door. A whole generation of programmers, arguably the whole UK computer games industry, owe him a huge, huge debt. RIP.

PS Here’s my fully restored and working ZX Spectrum+

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Nice. I still have mine which is in good nick. Also the manual, but that's much more tatty. It might well be the most fun I ever had on a computer, alongside Amiga 600.
 
RIP Sir Clive.

We had a ZX80, the upgrade to the 81 (keyboard membrane, ROM, and a separate small PCB to add FAST (or was it SLOW) mode. Basically a means of processing whilst maintaining VDU output. Then onwards to the ‘Speccy’ which not only had a huge following, a wealth of amazing accessories from DKtronics, Kempson, etc. Then a ZX microdrive inspired quick load of software (ok not quite HDD but the same principle). Superb games like Knight Lore from Ultimate ‘play the game’. There’s a lesson in kind that the rubber keyboard and indeed limited colour graphics capability and sound performance could not compete with the C-64 and BBC and yet millions were sold and the software houses and the mags had them and ya doing amazing things. The ZX BASIC programming was super accessible, and I’m sure many friendships were made through days and evenings spent together programming and playing. Jet Set Willy..... Ant Attack....

I remember my brother (who is now in IT) hacking the Ant Attack code so he could utilise its MIDI code to play other songs through our DX9 synth. And he was ahead of his time using XOR frames to create custom animations from VU 3D, minimising data storage and refresh times on the Spectrum. XOR. Clever stuff.

Anyhow Sir Clive once said he was a good product designer but not a great businessman or was it vice versa? No matter!!! Influenced milllllllions!
 
gninnam said:
Had some shit ideas though....
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Only the C5, which didn't work because battery technology wasn't there yet. If you could put Tesla batteries in a C5 there would be a racing series by now and the things would be topping 100mph on track. On second thoughts, perhaps not. Tyres from a Raleigh shopper and rim brakes, I think 15 mph is enough.
 
stevec67 said:
Only the C5, which didn't work because battery technology wasn't there yet. If you could put Tesla batteries in a C5 there would be a racing series by now and the things would be topping 100mph on track. On second thoughts, perhaps not. Tyres from a Raleigh shopper and rim brakes, I think 15 mph is enough.
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The A-bike and the Zike were total failures too.
 
stevec67 said:
Only the C5, which didn't work because battery technology wasn't there yet. If you could put Tesla batteries in a C5 there would be a racing series by now and the things would be topping 100mph on track. On second thoughts, perhaps not. Tyres from a Raleigh shopper and rim brakes, I think 15 mph is enough.
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Had one at work 15 mph only off the edge of a cliff and too low to be seen in traffic.

Still rip Cliff.

Pete
 
RIP Sir Clive.

The only Sinclair product I owned was a pair of his Q16 speakers.
At the time ( 1969 ) I thought they were fantastic.
 
sq225917 said:
One of the true visionaries, never afraid to take a risk.
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Yes, he would never let the lack of a product get in the way of a launch!

Wrote my O level programs on a zx81, one of them was a customised version of sniper, added 2 player mode and difficulty (I think, a lot of years back)

S
 
Nye Samuel said:
I had a Sinclair Science calculator in my 6th form back in 1974 that used Polish notation...so 1 million...1,000,000 would become 1 E 6...most students doing chemistry or physics had one...we pretended they were Star Trek communicators.

Clive Sinclair was a visionary....Chapeau...RIP :(
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Got one in a drawer here - no idea if it works though! He was clearly a visionary, but also seemed o be a real gent. RIP sir Clive
 
I remember seeing a rather adventurous old lady riding a C5 through the centre of Blackpool. As she turned the corner towards me she threw her fag away with some style, her fur coat trailing on the road.
RIP Sir Clive.
 
Marchbanks said:
My first er, hifi amp.

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I couldn’t afford all of it (I think the pre-amp section alone was nearly a tenner) so I had to make do with the PSU and a single amp module, plus a pot. Into my Wharfedale Unit 3 kit in special natural chipboard finish. It did me for a few schoolboy years.

Edit: I tell a lie... I did have the pre-amp bit! I remember the tone controls now I think about it after what must be 53 or so years. It was the input bit at the top that I didn’t have. But I didn’t need that - my BSR MP60 (no SP25 nonsense here) went straight into the phono section of the pre. ‘Fewer connections in the signal path - obviously vastly better sound’ was the thought that never crossed my mind for a second.
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I had the one with the slider type controls. The amp modules looked just like those. Built in to a box with a kit turntable (Connoisseur?) on top. Did me for a couple of years as a student. A pair of KEF kit speakers in thick chipboard boxes. My mother made some fetching orange fabric front covers.
 
A 16k Spectrum aged 10 or 11 felt like the best gift ever. I was obsessed! Upgrade to 48k the following Xmas. Various interfaces and peripherals after that (Currah Speech Synthesiser, Rotronics Wafadrive, slightly less crap keyboard etc). Most of my evenings were spent avoiding sunlight, surrounded by C90s of copied games, my trusty Multiface 1 and the latest pokes from Crash and Your Sinclair only venturing out to the monthly Computer Club in the local library.

Happy days! :) Thank you Clive!
 
A real visionary but just couldn't make those visionary products into a well-made thing. Wobbly RAM packs on ZX81, stretching tapes in the 'floppy' drive of the QL, the QL 'dongle' because they couldn't fit the OS chip in the case, characters coming off the rubber keys on the Spectrum, the whole set of keys falling of the Spectrum plus if you accidentally inverted it... I always wonder if that reputation for poorly made goods was what lost him the "Computers for Schools" contract to Acorn.

A friend's wife worked for Sinclair Research in St Ives in the 80s in customer services. The amount of returned goods was horrendous; she learned a lot about customer relations.

But RIP - my early teens would have been a lot duller and I would never have learned about programming without my ZX81.
 
Seeker_UK said:
…the whole set of keys falling of the Spectrum plus if you accidentally inverted it...
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That is largely a myth! I’ve got two of them and you have to give keys quite a firm pull to remove them, not much different to any other. If you dropped it off a table a couple might fall off, but that’s about the extent of it. The keyboard being absolutely awful to type on is far more of an issue! Given it was meant to be an improvement over the original rubber key unit one would expect rather more. The rubber one is arguably a lot better for playing games on, the Plus is very long-travel and very spongy and imprecise. That and the totally flat layout, height, and shape of the keys make it a contender for one of the worst ever.

I suspect it was the proper keyboard of the Acorn kit that scored the BBC contract, that and the expandability (right from the Atom they had a great keyboard, and that would have been up against the ZX81). The BBC B obviously had a great keyboard, but it cost 4 times the price of a Speccy. The Elk, which was it’s own disaster in many ways, could have been a contender as that has the same keyboard quality as the Beeb, but it was too late arriving so the Spectrum owned the UK home market. The C64 had a nice keyboard, but again way more expensive than the Sinclair. It would have been interesting to see what happened if the Plus and later Spectrum 128 had a keyboard of Acorn quality. Obviously Amstrad did this later, but too late really, by that time the 8bit era was over really.
 
I nearly bumped into Sir Clive in London. He was striding towards me along the western end of Piccadilly. He was quite a slight chap and was nearly not spotted!
 
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