RIP Sir Clive Sinclair

[markjay]

Sir Clive Sinclair: Computing pioneer dies aged 81

The inventor, entrepreneur and ZX Spectrum creator died at his London home following a long illness.

www.bbc.com

 

[KillerHERTZ]

First computer game ever played was on a ZX

RIP

 

[Jobsworth]

My mint and boxed ZX80 may sadly be worth something now

 

[kianok]

Persuaded my parents to buy me an Acorn Electron rather than a spectrum.

Literally a school boy error!

 

[Gollom]

RIP Clive Sinclair. The UK used to have lots of people like him, but sadly there does not seen to be many now. A visionary in many ways.

Maybe this post really belongs in the "New petrol and diesel car sales will be 'banned from 2030'" thread?

 

[whitenemesis]

RIP Sir Clive..
Spent many a happy hour coding and re-coding my Spectrum..

 

[fabes]

Ditto.

Had the ZX81 with clip on extra Ram pack (think it was 16 kB!??)
Writing code and games in his version of basic with a cassette deck - happy memories

He had a great innings, made a difference and left his mark.
RIP

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

I posted off cheques to buy these as soon as they came out.

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

Has anyone checked on Alan Sugar recently?

 

[Dryce]

I had a Sinclair MK14 that predated the ZX80. A single board with a National Semiconductor SC/MP processor.

It had a hexadecimal keypad - which was next to useless in its original form. It was a sandwich of a legend top layer with a rubber conductive middle layer and a lower layer with holes below each 'key position'. This was clamped onto the circuit board with a metal top plate that was a grid. So you pressed your finger on the 'button' which was a hole in the gtop grid plate and presse the legend and through to the conductive layer that wa spressed down through the hole in the bottom layer to touch the contacts on the bare circuit board below.

Later on they sold a kit of domes and plastic keys that actually worked.

The MK14 was sold as a kit of parts. It was a small circuit board with generic components.

So it was cheap. There were supply problems. It was in some ways under engineered.

The MK14 wasn't remarkable but it was cheap and I can't have been the only person who had their introducton to micriprocessors by building one and then learning to programme it.

The ZX80 was in some ways horrible (keyboard, cost reductions on hardware) but in others was inspired.

People forget the QL with its microdrives - which were a technical risk too far. But at the same time it uniquely brought 16 bit personal computing with storage to the market.

And that seemed to be the pattern with Sinclair's products. They were sort of market leading and low cost but the production engineering and the supply raised question marks. The business seemed to never settle on any one thing but moved on to the next. New producton issues. New supply issues. New risks.

My MK14 set me out on an interesting and varied career in IT.

And I know many others of my generation and later who were grounded in the ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum. (I have never met anybody who had a QL - so I guess they must have been very rare).

So Sir Clive Sinclair has quite a legacy in erms of peoples' lives and careers.

 

[Darrell]

RIP Sir Clive..
Spent many a happy hour coding and re-coding my Spectrum..

Rock n Roll in your house then.

 

[Deleted member 126251]

I posted off cheques to buy these as soon as they came out.

View attachment 118562View attachment 118563View attachment 118564View attachment 118565

I also had the white one, IIRC came with a whole load of booklets / swatches with formulas and a way to get the answer from the calculator. Also had a ZX??. He was way ahead of his time.

 

[Darrell]

I also had the white one, IIRC came with a whole load of booklets / swatches with formulas and a way to get the answer from the calculator. Also had a ZX??. He was way ahead of his time.

I remember a young maths teacher in my school the day before he was picking his up. I’d never seen anybody so excited.

 

[GeeJayW]

Brilliant man. RIP Sir Clive.

 

[190]

It's a shame he is remembered mostly for the silly electric trike as he did a whole range of interesting stuff. I built my first "hifi" at the age of 15 using a Sinclair stereo 60 kit you had to make a chassis wire everything together and fit it in a cabinet. It was a big step up form a Dansette record player at the time.

 

[ChipChop]

The Sinclair ethic of UK innovation is still alive and well with the Raspberry PI.

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

It's a curious how quickly tech moves. Looking at those calculators this morning reminds me of how "advanced" they were in 1975.

My first "commercial" phone jockey job was for a huge packaging company in Liverpool in '75. The proper pukka commercial and planning guys, gave sheets of numbers to the "NCR" girls who would add them all up on their NCR adding machines. The numbers equivalent of a typing pool.

As a "bright young kid" I was one of the few in the office to own or use an electric calculator.

That was a Sinclair commercial legacy.


.

 

[chic0821]

Back in the Seventies , I worked in a Design office when the first small "affordable" calculators came out. Think they were Texas Instruments & one of the Designers bought one. They cost about a week's wage & only did basis calcs. I think Sinclairs first calculator which from memory was white & really affordable worked on Reverse Polish logic which was not really user friendly. This is how you used it
For example, to do the operation 3+4, on an RPN calculator we would press 3, ENTER, 4, +. A more common calculator would use 3, +, 4, ENTER (or the equal sign).

 

[Ted]

Yes - some of the early calculators used reverse polish notation.
My brother had a Kovacs (sp?) which also used this

 

[markjay]

Yes - some of the early calculators used reverse polish notation.
My brother had a Kovacs (sp?) which also used this

Ha ha, RPN, great fun, it's like Yoda doing maths...