Also my first computer, bought as a kit and I soldered it together. Mine lasted a long time. It was so limited though I learned Z80 assembler, which turned out to be really cool. The ZX-81 was a wonderful machine.
The ZX81 was also my first computer. Have to say I must have better luck because mine is still going to this day (although I did recently need to service and fix it).
> "But he did not make personal use of his own inventions. His daughter said he never had a pocket calculator as far as she knew, instead carrying a slide-rule around with him at all times. And he told interviewers he used neither a computer nor email."
That doesn't particularly surprise me. His computers weren't aimed at middle aged adult engineers. The early calculators weren't all that sophisticated. They were convenience devices rather than serious tools. There's nothing wrong with designing products aimed at people other than yourself.
> His computers weren't aimed at middle aged adult engineers.
Maybe not Clive Sinclair's products specifically, but you'd be surprised with what professional engineers could use these 'toys' for. Keep in mind that machines with comparable featuresets could sell for huge prices well into the early and even the mid-1960s, and were used for real, sometimes critically important work.
Turing's Pilot ACE, that Turing considered didn't have enough memory for real work, had 32 mercury delay lines with 1024 bits each: that's four times as much memory as the ZX81.
Absolutely. During a time when most any other computer was an unreachable dream in communist Poland the ZX Spectrum was a gift to the emerging geek community here. I was lucky to have received my own in 1984. I was one of the first in the neighbourhood to get one. It literally cost about 2 months of my dad's wages. Those were the days.
The ZX Spectrum was my first computer. So many good moments with it... It's hard to describe it for the current generation - if you were there, you know what I mean.
Sir Clive Sinclair had an enormous impact on my life and career. Today is a sad day for me :(
It was also the first for me. It was expensive for my family to have but my school buddy had it and naturally we spent all our free time in their house typing programs from the large book. Fun times. RIP.
RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.
You could replace many ICs with just your fingers or a screwdriver. On the C64 the main ones like the CPU, graphics, sound and IO chips were in sockets, and that was similar on many home computers of the era.
I freaked my parents out by switching chips between our C64 and the floppy drive to see what would happen (they had almost compatible CPUs and IO chips - many things kept working).
Also: Repairing by touching chips to see if any of them were unusually hot was fun...
EDIT: to bring this more back to the thread subject, as a Commodore user at the time we used to make fun of the Spectrums, but they absolutely had a massive impact on the market. Including on competitors - e.g. Tramiel got spooked by how cheap the ZX81 was, and it certainly contributed to choices made at Commodore. Sinclair's influence as a result spread wide and far beyond the sizable direct influence of his own machines.
Do the touch hot chip diagnostics a lot. Mainly for the faked pineapple II. Cannot afford intel memory chip then and has to settle down for Fujitsu memory chip.
Only a couple of years a go I replaced a blown cap on a motherboard. It was faster than replacing it with a new board because I happened to have a cap with the right specs. So in principle you still could do this today. If you don't use your soldering iron on the CPU or the RAM or ... well, lots of other parts.
Started with a ZX-81 clone. The factor I liked most was the attention with the manuals, they really cared to teach the basics of programming, even low-level things, to the layman.
I memorized the ZX81 (and Spectrum) manuals back to front. Around age 11 I used to write out assembly long-hand and "poke" the OpCodes into memory to write programs and drivers. I really credit what has now been a long and happy career in software development to the affordable computers Sir Clive developed. (My family was pretty poor growing up, but I convinced my Dad to spring the 80 pounds or so for one after I borrowed a friend's and took to it).
What you could do was limited enough that you could master it, and I really think that's a good thing for education and motivation. When I think about teaching my kids to program today, I effectively get "choice paralysis" from all the paths I could go down and the options within easy reach.
Same here - writing code in assembly, on paper, then looking up the opcodes in the back of the orange manual.
Having to write out the bytes and using DATA to store them, and POKE to put them in-memory. Calculating the JMP offsets by hand, and taking the time to SAVE to cassette before running it for the first time.
I didn't write much assembly, but I spent a hell of a long time removing protection from Spectrum games, and patching the code to give me infinite lives/time.
I started with Apple 2+ but back then there were many computers to be fond of. There were Vic 20, Dragon 32, Amstrad, Thomson TO7, TRS-80, BBC. All were different, all had their capabilities. But what was fun is that everyone had access to the whole thing : hardware, software. Nothing was hidden behind layers of security. You could relate software and hardware in a very natural way. Everybody was fiddling around. Also, they were the first computers for the general public so software had to be invented every single day.
I'm truly grateful to have been part of that, it gives such a perspective...
Yes, and today such a perspective is almost impossible to achieve outside the embedded space. Even a Raspberry-Pi is many orders of magnitude more complex than say a Dragon 32 (Color Computer clone, by the way) or a BBC Micro.
Given the availability of tech like the Pi now, I wonder what it would take to build a modern, child-friendly device in the same spirit around it: something that offered a fun and instructive introduction to programming, in a box that was self-contained, safe and practically indestructible. Design a case with a sealed keyboard? Expose standard power and display connectors with robust ports? Write some child-friendly software that might be flashier than what we had but was still in essence a guided programming environment with a simple but effective language? Maybe include some sort of USB connectivity, primarily so that older kids could also control external devices like light boards or robot arms or turtles? I haven’t come across anyone trying to do this that I can recall, but I feel like there’s an entire ecosystem’s worth of startup ideas in this space just waiting to be implemented. Maybe the next Sir Clive is out there somewhere to get it started.
It's a very interesting device in a very Spectrum-like form factor. It also has its limitations, much like the Spectrum itself - you're not going to code comfortably in resource-intensive languages with it.
The 400 isn’t quite what I had in mind. I was thinking more of a device usable even by the under-10 group, with a simpler and more robust physical design and, crucially, the kind of instant-on, guided programming environment the early home “PCs” had.
With early Sinclair systems, each key on the keyboard would act like modern auto-complete: you would start typing and keywords would appear almost magically. On the BBC Micro, you powered on and heard the trademark beeeeep-beep and were instantly presented with a prompt where you could start typing a program or other commands. Everything in those systems was geared towards immediate responses and inviting you to start programming them straight away.
TLDR - Kids who want to learn to program already have access to the tools to do this... It's just that most kids don't want to learn to program.
Wasn't this what the One Laptop Per Child (OTLP) project was trying to achieve? The problem is that when the ZX, C64 etc were around there was no alternative. If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine (several times) and hopefully save them to a cassette.
These days, if you want to play a game, you reach for your phone and install a free one that is far more capable than anything you could develop yourself.
The real trick would be to create a development environment that will run on a phone. Apple have gone somewhat down this path with their Swift Playgrounds and you could always work with Scratch and similar systems or you could even do something in html/javascript, but none of these really give the same imperative to learning how that the original home computers did. You really need a system that lets you develop a full program, share it with your friends and modify (and break) it.
You know the reality is that we do have these systems, and kids that are interested in doing anything other than just playing games can access them with a minimum of problems. I wonder how many of those ZX Spectrums, C64 etc were given to kids, who on finding that they had to actually do some work to make them do anything useful relegated them to a shoebox under the TV. It is possible that for every positive story about "kid learns programming from ZX Spectrum" you would have a hundred stories of kid calling ZX Spectrum a piece of crap.
> I wonder how many of those ZX Spectrums, C64 etc were given to kids, who on finding that they had to actually do some work to make them do anything useful relegated them to a shoebox under the TV.
In my experience, that tended to happen more with the kids who got the C64s. Those were the ones with color TVs and Betamax at home, too.
I had a Spectrum (couldn't afford a C64), but my friends had C64s. I was the only one I knew who ever did coding though. The C64s were still used lots, but just for games.
> If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine
There was a third possibility: you could figure out how the game worked and write your own version from scratch. I learned so much about programming by writing a Pac-Man clone on a ZX Spectrum simply because I didn't have the pocket money to keep feeding the arcade machines, or even to buy someone else's knock-off version on a cassette tape. I quickly got bored of typing in other peoples' programs from a magazine, much more fun to write your own.
My memory, it was generally true about the C64/ZX split being about gamers vs coders; however I did know some "Speccy" owners (generally with slightly-better-off parents) who had lots and lots of different games on tapes and did nothing but play games on the machine. Yes, I "borrowed" a lot of games by copying the tapes on an Amstrad dual-cassette stereo system (thank you, Sir Alan!) but I'm really glad that generally, scarcity of an "easy option" forced me into a place where I had to write my own code.
I was like that too. Kids with C64 had plenty of games, and having better sound and graphics they just played games. I always advanced in coding when playing games became unrewarding/boring.
>The problem is that when the ZX, C64 etc were around there was no alternative. If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine (several times) and hopefully save them to a cassette.
I agree. When there is no shortcut you find much more motivation to go the hard way. I was in that exact position when I was 10, and I kept messing up copying the basic lines from books so I got a book for kids that teached me basic, this way I was making my own code and could debug it. I made simple games completely from scratch that way it was how I got into programing.
I can understand that now with so many shortcuts available for kids the same motivation is not there anymore. It's like once you get access to cheat codes in a game that makes you invincible and gives you infinite money, the challenge is not there and you lose interest.
I'd like to see such a device, but unlike the Pi, or specially contrived educational environments, the 8-bit home computers were the centre of a growing market for games and software, seemingly only a few steps away from your first attempts at working through the manual that came with your computer. This was a huge motivation for many of us who started programming in the home computer days.
I remember games that had a note on the back of the box asking for programmers to send their work to the publisher's address for consideration. Magazines advertised commercial software obviously sold by one guy out of his house, and featured interviews with programmers who were only a few years older than me. If you owned a home computer and could program it, you imagined you could access this growing and exciting world, and maybe make some money.
Great points. The gap between the current crop of huge team produced eye candy infused games vs the machine they run on in its bare state is enormous. There are a few exceptions, but unfortunately they only serve to confirm the rule.
I started with an Amiga 500. Wonderful machine, but the lack of a built in compiler/programming language that allowed you to access the power of the machine was a lack that limited your learning. I think it resulted in me taking a very wide path to my current programming job than would otherwise have happened. Looking back, there is a lot of power in having to work hard to get a program from a magazine entered and working. You are forced to learn something about programming.
When I was about 15 me and my friends put what little money we had together and send it out I think to England or Germany to buy a license for the Amiga C compiler. 3 months later it arrived in the mail. I could not wait so I actually learned C in those 3 months, straight form K&R, without access to the compiler. It was all so gloriously magic back then. I do not think I ever enjoyed a piece of software as much as that compiler.
There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power.
Indeed. After I saw this sad news and your comment, I was reminded of an earlier HN comment¹ I had written about the joy I experienced as a young child learning to program on a ZX81 and my regret that my children’s generation are not growing up with the same opportunities. I’m not sure there is any analogous device I could give my kids when they reach the same age any more. Any device they do eventually get when they’re older seems more likely to have preinstalled social media apps and regular security updates than a preinstalled programming environment and a line in the manual reassuring you that nothing you type will break your computer. Something certainly has been lost.
What a great learning tool the early personal computers were.
It's a pipe dream, but I would have loved to have given my children a simpler device and restricted the internet until they were capable of assembling the hardware/software to get connected.
These devices exist today as VMs. But, what I think we've lost is the boredom and free time that drives that type of learning and discovery.
People have different expectations to computers nowadays. They aren't isolated curiosities any more, you can't capture the environment of the 1980s home computer revolution.
If you do want a similar experience (at least superficially) to a spectrum 48k, get a Pi 400, don't connect it to a network, but don't expect the same outcome as you had -- the world is different, there are very different things competing for attention, and different rewards for time spent.
My 8 and 10 year old kids have just discovered the Roblox editor. They are building mutiplayer 3d worlds.
The 8 year old is the most enthusiastic about it. He is second grade at school and knows addition, and subtraction, and his times tables but has not started multiplying more than single digit numbers.
Right now they are mostly placing blocks around and decorating the world, but they are very interested in the lua scripting. I have no doubt that they will soon be attempting to read that read the Roblox API docs. Actually, they'll be watching youtube video tutorials.
Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that while the old 8 bit days are gone, there are plenty of ways kids can build things and tinker with computers and software.
I had to give a talk on coding a few years back. I brought in my Acorn Atom to show people what I started on. 12Kb of memory, no hard drive, no sound card, no network, monochrome display. The BASIC language it knew had maybe 10 keywords, and the Assember had another couple dozen commands. Everything in the computer was simple, easily understood, and robust (turning the computer off wiped everything except the ROM - essentially a factory reset every time).
I compared that to my phone - 256Gb of storage, 32Gb of memory, plus sound, graphics, wifi, and the kitchen sink.
Learning on the Atom was easy because it was so simple. And as I mastered it, so computers became more complicated. It was, in many ways, the perfect method of teaching tech. A new programmer nowadays has to learn so much so quickly to be able to write anything useful, it's often overwhelming. Trying to teach my gf how to code was painful because we were always bumping into rabbit holes of complexity, which we could either go down and waste whole days, or avoid and leave an area of ignorance that would bite later. I never had that problem. It's humbling - I wonder if I would even be a dev if I hadn't had that advantage?
Agreed. I taught myself to program on my Acorn Atom, I still remember the "Aha!" moment when I finally understood what I needed to make a simple "Space Invaders" program on my (minimal) 2K Acorn Atom, (later sold by "Bug Byte" software).
I wrote a version of Missile Command that I got reasonably working, until we got called down for tea and my cousin "helpfully" turned the computer off.
Same here, I owe him my whole career. One day I came to my house at nine years old and saw that metal with ruber thing and lots of colours that my father bought. Wonder and awe, as you said. One of the best times of my life was understanding and coding an assembler routine to achieve 64 columns. RIP Sir Clive Sinclair. So sad news.
@dang - I believe that deserves a black ribbon. In some countries generations grew up learning hacking and programming with his computers (and knock-offs)
Agreed! The Timex Sinclair 1000 (US ZX81 rebadging) was my first computer when I was 6 and as an autistic child it really helped keep me engaged and I suspect that without it I would have ended up in special education classes... Sir Clive literally changed my life
Absolutely. His systems did so much to democratize computing in the 8-bit era, and there must be countless greybeards who owe their careers to the access that Sinclair Computers granted. Likewise, many non-technical entrepreneurs who made tons of cash in the first dotcom boom would only be able to find programmers able to work for them because they had self-trained in skills that schools knew nothing about by staying up late staring at the family TV with one of these little machines plugged into it.
More democratising than other machines around at the time, because those less-well-off families in the UK who couldn't afford a BBC Micro or CBM-64 could more easily scrape together the funds to buy a ZX Spectrum instead.
My personal anecdote: I didn't have enough pocket money to feed my Pac-Man addiction in the arcades, and my family certainly wasn't going to splash out on an Atari console, so I wrote myself a Pac-Man clone in ZX Basic. It turned out that programming was so much more fun than playing the game in the long run, and almost 40 years later people are still paying me to do this! Thank you, Sir Clive.
I sold my Sinclair Scientific calculator, from the mid-seventies, just a month ago. Got a tenner for it even though it wasn't working.
I miss those times, there was something so much more immediate, more real about computing in the 70s and 80s. It was somehow lighter and less intimidating. It's only just coming back with Arduino style kit.
One thing the Arduino doesn't quite have is that the ZX machines, while not cutting edge, were quite novel and "high tech".
Most people who have an Arduino also have a supercomputer-phone. But a ZX81 or ZX Spectrum were, at the time, all you could afford and relatively advanced to the point of being amazing for most other people (who didn't own any computer whatsoever).
I had a Sinclair Scientific too - so small with hard clicky keys! Back then it was a wonder to type numbers that looked like words when you held it upside down.
I expect more people here will remember the ZX80, but what about the minimal SC/MP-based MK-14 that came before... I skipped that but got a NASCOM-1 kit the following year (1978).
I worked at Acorn in the early 80s and Sir Clive attended a couple of our infamous Christmas parties (since he knew Chris Curry).
The good thing about those old computers was the simplicity. The only thing on a NASCOM-1 between your assembly code and the hardware was 1KB of monitor program.
I splashed out on a Nascom 2. I wish I had a keyboard as good as the one it came with now.
Had a bit of a fright after I finished soldering everything and switched it on. Nothing happened! So I laboriously went over all 1200 (?) solder joints again and breathed a sigh of relief when it worked.
I bought an old 5 bit code teleprinter and wrote a driver so that I could print by connecting the UART to a couple of transistors driving a mercury wetted relay to drive the printer. I think it would be a lot more complicated to do that on any modern computer.
Leaky abstractions in not well thought out solutions caused by exponential growth in computing is the issue. Rich Hickey's "Simple made easy" talks about this very thing.
We had one of his op-amp home hifi kits from before his computing days. I'm not going to gloss things up here, it was shit. Noisy, bad circuit design, bad instructions.
Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up.
Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke.
I curse the membrane keyboard to this day.
Smart man. Crap product. A joke of the times from British TV: the Sinclair digital penis: 1 inch long and takes 28 days to come.
I understand how many people bootstrapped into computing from the spectrum btw, a friend made significant money from writing sw for it. Tiny compilers, games.
Yes, perhaps it is. Eulogies and Obituaries are different things. I'm not here to eulogise him, for sure. He was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, a brilliant self promoter. Lord Alan Suger learned a lot of marketing tricks from him.
There's something quintessentially British about promoting tech wizards as heros for making remarkably average product, but making it mass market. Sinclair electronics and Amstrad unquestionably took computing to the masses, in all its buggy variety.
Sinclair's calculator made the V&A design gallery as an icon. It was pretty unusable, but stunningly beautiful. My dad refused to let me get one (he was a compsci professor) and I got a Texas instruments handheld instead.
It really irks me when someone is misrepresented when they drop dead. I’m personally fine with the parent poster’s comment because it’s exactly a fair representation of the guy’s products. They were mostly awful to some degree.
We've banned this account, not just for this egregious violation of the site rules, but because you've been doing it repeatedly for a long time and have ignored our requests to stop. Seriously not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Looking back, maybe the lesson is that there are some occasions when giving up on quality in order to make a cheaper product is an excellent idea, and 8-bit computers in the early 80s was one of those occasions.
(While, for example, electric road vehicles in the mid 80s was not.)
Yes. Hooking up with Timex (a very stodgy, cheap product company at the time) was a big move. Ultimately commodore did for them, but it took Sinclair to the US.
The Sinclair car would sell well now the market for escooters is established.
> The calculators were highly approximate trig functions
This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one. He did this by using a chip designed for four-function math and using a series of brilliant (if, yes, slow and approximate) hacks to fit arithmetic and trigonometry in the same 320 assembly instructions and three registers. It cuts basically every corner, but my favorite one is that it didn't have room for constants like pi in the ROM. No matter what they did they couldn't fit it in. Eventually, they just printed pi on the case. My impression of Sir Clive is that he always tried to take shortcuts no other company would dare, and while this often flamed out, sometimes he pulled it off and brought a lot of technology to a lot of people.
Here's a fantastic breakdown of how the calculator worked and why it was so impressive:
> This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one.
Same with his computers. At least before the QL. They were affordable for people not on IT salaries.
And for Eastern Europe/Russia, for some values of "affordable".
If I recall, it was the "micro penis". The 28 days to come was based of then then rather standard 28 day (4 week) delivery time for much of this mail order stuff.
Yeah, some Sinclair products were solid, and others were flakey, but all were cheap and seemed very futuristic at the time.
My first computer was a ZX81, then an QL. I still have them at home. Maybe I'll try to power them up. I've found some listings of programs I wrote in BASIC on the ZX81. They are only marginally easier to understand than machine code, maybe not :-) but they were the first step to bring me here. Thanks Sir Sinclair.
Don't plug them in without doing some basic checks! A common fault with the ZX81 at least is the PSU and/or the internal voltage regulator degrades/fails and will destroy the RAM chips. Have a look through some of Noel Retro Lab videos for some tips first: https://www.youtube.com/c/NoelsRetroLab/videos
When I had no computer, I wanted one of those <USD$200 ZX81s so badly – just from seeing it magazines, & maybe pressing some of its keys at the electronics counter of someplace like maybe a Sears.
IIRC the video output often cut out whenever a user program was running?
I'm sure I would have enjoyed having one, but was fortunate enough my parents picked up an Apple ][+ instead. Still, warm feelings towards that unit, & its series, as something that made home computing thinkable.
Drawing video took up a very large fraction of the CPU cycles on the ZX81 so there was a 'fast mode' and 'slow mode'. Fast mode cut out video output when programs were running, slow mode left it on and ran at something like 1/4 the speed.
The scary thing: this all seems like yesterday to me. For years I thought we were counting up to when we die, but now I realize we are actually counting down.
For its time and price vs. performance, the Spectrum might have been the best personal computer ever made. It was my first machine, and I loved it so much.
Ah, the Timex Sinclair 1000! I would fantasize about having one while looking at magazines ads. You could buy the kit, build it and learn so much about computing, all for $99.95 US! Sure, the 1K of RAM was a bit limiting, but you could save up and buy a 16K RAM pack.
1K of RAM seems an unimaginably miniscule memory limit today, but incredibly you could squeeze a game of chess in that limit using a bit of creativity. The YouTube channel Nostalgia Nerd compares a game of chess on the 1981 Sinclair ZX81 1KB computer vs. a modern PC.
Both were company founds who went pair shaped in 1985. Both were narcissists obsessed with miniaturization and small items. Both were obsessed with the physical look of their devices. Both were not engineers.
I'd say Clive Sinclair was more like Britain's Jack Tramiel. Chris Curry or Herman Hauser would be more like Britain's Steve Jobs and Sophie Wilson as Britain's Steve Wozniak.
Wikipedia calls Acorn, Britain's Apple. Just as Apple chose its name because it was before Atari in the phone book, so Acorn chose it's name because it was before Apple.
I worked at Acorn in the early 80's. I once arm wrestled Chris Curry in a bar. Neither one of them was really a Steve Jobs figure. I doubt many BBC Micro owners at the time would even have heard of them, unlike Sinclair who was in the press all the time. Curry was more of a drunken playboy, and Hermann more business man than marketeer or face of the company. It was a dream job for a geek!
I've still got my Sinclair in a shoebox upstairs, complete with the 16KB RAM expansion pack, a program or two on cassette tape, and the cord for plugging it into my TV (which would probably need a whole chain of adapters today).
My 77" LG CX OLED still has a coax RF input, and I've hooked a few consoles and computers up to it. And it actually looks, well, better than I expected I guess!
Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.
"Games! Games! Everywhere I go games! This is what my lifetime of achievement has been reduced to! Clive Sinclair the man who brought you Jet Set f**ing Willy!" -- Clive Sinclair (fictional), Micro Men
Micro Men is so good. I met the director once at an event and asked him if it would ever be released on DVD or equivalent and it sounded like that was unlikely, so it's great to see it available on YouTube.
The Centre for Computing History videoed Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching Micro Men and chatting for the tenth anniversary of its broadcast:
It is interesting to watch the video of the actual interview that they recreate in the movie. The movie Sinclair seems a bit upset while the real life one was smiling a lot and being very friendly.
My father knew Clive Sinclair thanks to the Cambridge tech/hifi scene at the time, and we also used to live near him in Madingley. Somewhere in my dad's shed there's a ZX81 with a single digit serial number (amongst a lot of other similar machines: Jupiter Ace, ZX80, various Spectrums with weird and wacky keyboards, Dragon 32, Commodore 16 Plus/4, etc).
A bit later we also lived next door to Franni and Geoff Vincent who were part of the Acorn team that designed and built the BBC Micro. They used to let me come round (aged 8 or so) and use their Model B whenever I wanted.
Sir Clive Sinclair had a HUGE influence on my life. RIP.
ZX81 was my first computer, putting the kit (!) together with my dad. Didn’t work so sent it back and got a pre made one, found out later that at least 1/3rd of the kits didn’t work.
That, going through 101 Basic Computer Games, and typing in the esoteric Beagle Bros commands in their ads are fond memories.
The reason many of the kits didn't work is that the timing was super critical and parts variation alone could result in a built kit not working, especially if you added the RAM expansion.
The Spectrum and ZX81 are (rightly) the computers for which Clive Sinclair is remembered. But it was his unsuccessful follow-up, the QL, which inspired a certain Linus Torvalds to write Linux:
After the first couple of biscuit-tin amplifiers and some bare board products like the Mk14, design became a Sinclair USP.
He was a kind of proto-Jobs. While most of the competition made boring-looking devices, Sinclair hired some of the top people for the time and made products that stood out because they looked exciting.
The ZX series are the best known, but there were precursors like the Black Watch and the Sovereign Calculator.
Yeah it is. The guy had a rabid cult following much like Musk does today. He had many financial victims with poorly engineered products.
He made a very valuable contribution to the industry however.
People have rose tinted glasses about it but the reality was products not turning up, not shipping, not working and a sour taste for many against technology.
He even bought faulty RAM in which was discarded for the Spectrums and sold the ones that booted.
The only reason it worked out for a lot of people is we have pretty strong consumer protection laws here!
He brought faulty RAM that had errors just in a single half and then he used just the other (correct) half - nothing wrong with that.
Such cost cutting made it affordable to a large number of people - had it costed a couple of time more it could be a hard sell for my Eastern European parents. Fortunately, that didn't happen and now, 40 years later, I have a nice career and I'm still enjoying dealing with computers just as when I was a kid with ZX Spectrum.
Actually that’s not strictly true. Test methodology was “see if it worked and ship”. Many many of the computers were returned and replaced immediately. And a lot of the new ones you got were the broken ones which were sent back and the chips replaced. I’ve seen a new one which still didn’t work which had been reworked at least once and sold as new again.
My father had a nice business for a few years doing adhoc repairs and then started his own PC import business in the end with the cash he earned fixing people’s stuff. That was a world of difference.
Agree with your comments about affordability. As you say about Eastern Europe, even the clones were more expensive I understand.
It's not that unique in the computer business. I used to build PCs for a shop during the 90s internet craze. When we got a box of Quantum Bigfoot HDDs we'd be lucky if half of them worked. Someone who cared about quality wouldn't put that crap in a computer. But it was cheap. The soundcards we sold were so cheap they were cut diagonally to save on PCB material.
Though this shop just did it for profit margin. Sinclair did it to make computers available to the masses.
Yes, it's very common. Even companies like Intel sometimes test a CPU at umpteen GHz, then retest the ones that fail at umpteen/2 GHz and sell them at a lower price if they work reliably at the lower speed.
This isn't the time and place for polite shallow mutterings either. We're not at the funeral here, or barging in on the bereaved. If we're going to have a discussion thread about his legacy, it should be a fair one.
Yes and no. The 48k was a bit of a disaster to start with. Lots of failures, bugs galore, a full recall due to power supply shock hazard. Not to mention the horrible keyboard.
When you look at the microscopic view of owning one computer from him that worked it does somewhat rose tint the overall view of things which was not good.
these are extremely minor issues when you look at the bigger picture - you could argue that Clive kick started the multi billion pound games industry by getting young people interested in computer games
sure it would have happened anyway, but he definately made it happen earlier
almost 100% of the people who work in IT (in the UK) over a certain age had one of his affordable computers
Hero worship because he brought computers to the masses. The cost cutting was the point - there were already computers that cost the same as a nice TV, this was a computer a kid could get for Christmas. For many of us that oppertunity was the start of a lifelong passion.
Yet the commoditization of computers he brought forth was a genuine gift to the people that opened a lot of doors for many. He has positively influenced the lives of many.
Sinclair made computers which a kid like me, not from a rich family, could afford. Yeah the computers were of cheap quality with a crappy keyboard - but he changed home computers from being a plaything for the rich to be available to everybody. A lot of clever design went into making them as cheap as possible.
Oh wow, it turns out the QL hardware was reused in the ICL One Per Desk. We had one at home growing up (for some reason?!). Kind of funny to read that it's greatest success was in networking hundreds of bingo halls together across the UK.
The QL failed because (amongst other things) they had outsourced the basic interpreter to another company for the ZX series and decided to bring it in house for the QL :(
I attribute the decline of the UK’s domestic computer industry (including Acorn) to the scene as-a-whole being either uninterested or unwilling to embrace PC-compatibility. Had they done that, I think they could have secured better distribution deals, especially in education, but eve more-so overseas. What if Sinclair, Amstrad, and Acorn were able to establish themselves as a third-way (like Amiga and Be almost did) alternative to both IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh?
I know that being PC-compatible would automatically make them commodity, but if they had positioned themselves as a value-added “PC+” platform and focused on competing in areas where PC clones at-the-time sucked and alternatives like Amiga reigned (e.g. Video Toaster), could they have succeeded? What if they merged with Quantel and made their Paintbox more affordable sooner? That would have taken the wind out of Adobe’s Photoshop sails.
———
I feel the UK computing scene suffered from a lack-of-ambition. The world is too small for each medium-sized country to have their own computer-makers, so it’s important to go-big early and establish footholds in all the major markets - which isn’t something anyone in the UK except ARM (and to an extent: Sinclair) has done.
Various people tried the PC+ scheme in the US and had limited success. Tandy probably came closest.
Sinclair and Acorn were extremely ambitious. Acorn even sold an NTSC conversion of the BBC Micro in the US for a short time. My theory is they were undercapitalized.
Acorn attempted this but suffered from various US "regulations" that seemed designed to keep non-US companies out of the USA, or at least make it difficult for them to operate.
One example is the RF rules that hampered the Acorn Archimedes.
No: The BASIC on the QL was one of the best BASICs ever. What killed the QL was imho those fucking awful microdrive cartridges. Unreliable, slow and quick to fail.
I remember at university writing a couple of little programmes that allowed the swanky BBC Model B (with no floppy drive) to use the Spectrum as a file server, over the serial interface.
Someone did eventually bring out a floppy-drive peripheral for the QL, but it was basically too late to save the platform. Also, iirc, you needed to be drop-dead rich to afford one.
There were long delays in delivery if you ordered a Sinclair QL, to the point that people speculated that 'QL' stood for a long 'Q' and an 'L' of a wait!
Many people did, and the drives were not expensive at all really, not if you ever popped over to a swapfest (I had one, and money was very tight in our family at the time, but Dad was adamant that we have a computer to play with--- forward thinking, plus he wanted to play with it too).
But you're right-- it was too late to save the QL by then.
Of course, that wasn't the only problem with the machine, not by a longshot. I did my very first commercial hardware hacking in high school building/selling plug-in 'spiderboards' to protect the oh-so-fragile ZX8301 chips, and got my first oscilloscope in college to chase down all the ground bounce that was still occasionally killing the NMOS ROMs...
Yep, the retelling I heard from the David Karlin (I worked with him after Sinclair went bust) was the micro drives didn't meet the spec that he designed the gate array to.
The only real hardware bit that we could rib him about was the serial port design, but I can't even remember what was wrong with it now (handshaking?)
I do wish I'd snaffled the QDOS listing that got thrown away during an office move.
My Dad had a QL at home and even had a small business selling software for it back in the day. It was a bit of a daunting machine for me as a child (I got more mileage out of the BBC Micro), but I have fond memories of playing around with it, and loading games off of microdrives.
Whilst my first programs was on the acorn atom, Zx80 and zx81
the zx spectrum hold a special place in my memory because the manual was fantasic - I learnt almost everything from it.
and then progressed on to typing the monterous (using the aweful rubber keys) blocks of programs from magazines - THEN I learnt how to debug and rewrite the games that I'd just typed in from the magazines, because they never worked first time.
I have memories of my father using a QL. also, he was very lucky as he got a late version with many bugs fixed.
He like it too, that when got a IBM PC compatible with a 8086, he thought that the QL was better.
Uh oh. Soviet ZX spectrum clone was my first computer, and the first I ever wrote a program on using a built-in basic at an age of 10. This was a magnificent device that brought me a lot of joy. Rest In Peace, Sir Clive.
Now, I'll go play some Manic Miner or Nether Earth in your honor.
First computer I ever typed a program into was zx80 that belonged to a friend of my dad. He (a journalist) didn’t like the membrane keyboard so he attached a teletype keyboard.
454 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadThose were wild little toys; and people stretched them beyond all reason.
Maybe not Clive Sinclair's products specifically, but you'd be surprised with what professional engineers could use these 'toys' for. Keep in mind that machines with comparable featuresets could sell for huge prices well into the early and even the mid-1960s, and were used for real, sometimes critically important work.
Sir Clive Sinclair had an enormous impact on my life and career. Today is a sad day for me :(
I freaked my parents out by switching chips between our C64 and the floppy drive to see what would happen (they had almost compatible CPUs and IO chips - many things kept working).
Also: Repairing by touching chips to see if any of them were unusually hot was fun...
EDIT: to bring this more back to the thread subject, as a Commodore user at the time we used to make fun of the Spectrums, but they absolutely had a massive impact on the market. Including on competitors - e.g. Tramiel got spooked by how cheap the ZX81 was, and it certainly contributed to choices made at Commodore. Sinclair's influence as a result spread wide and far beyond the sizable direct influence of his own machines.
What you could do was limited enough that you could master it, and I really think that's a good thing for education and motivation. When I think about teaching my kids to program today, I effectively get "choice paralysis" from all the paths I could go down and the options within easy reach.
Having to write out the bytes and using DATA to store them, and POKE to put them in-memory. Calculating the JMP offsets by hand, and taking the time to SAVE to cassette before running it for the first time.
I didn't write much assembly, but I spent a hell of a long time removing protection from Spectrum games, and patching the code to give me infinite lives/time.
They were available as bargain sellout at the time(1985).
When other people already used Commodore64 or the first Amigas or Atari STs.
But I've been sceptic and low on funds :-)
Wasn't that difficult because there weren't much parts. And no SMD.
Scale was almost like electronic breadbording.
And it worked for the first time!
Regarding the Handbook, compare this image of the cover
[1] https://i.imgur.com/0WarG.jpg
with
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon
I felt so very, very Zaxxonized!
Anyway, it lasted me about half a year, where I got a 16KB RAM extension,
learned how to duct-tape this so I don't get resets,
a data-capable cassette recorder for reliable storage, which my ghetto blaster didn't do,
learned Z80 assembly including illegals,
replaced parts of the ROM with RAM to get glorious 256x192 pixels
in black & white instead of block graphics,
and finally got an Atari 520stfm with flicker free 640x400 pixels on 12 inches,
because why not? I've already been used to BW from the ZX81.
I'm truly grateful to have been part of that, it gives such a perspective...
Bloat is the moat were stuck in.
An unsustainable sin,
a cognitive load,
too heavy to comprehend,
a house of cards,
the opposite of smarts.
With early Sinclair systems, each key on the keyboard would act like modern auto-complete: you would start typing and keywords would appear almost magically. On the BBC Micro, you powered on and heard the trademark beeeeep-beep and were instantly presented with a prompt where you could start typing a program or other commands. Everything in those systems was geared towards immediate responses and inviting you to start programming them straight away.
OTH... Taking a RPI400, and build a stripped-down linux system which resembles Sinclair BASIC could prove to be a fun exercise.
Edit: I just realized how expensive the ZX81 was here in Germany back in 1981 - it'd set you back 450€ by todays value.
Wasn't this what the One Laptop Per Child (OTLP) project was trying to achieve? The problem is that when the ZX, C64 etc were around there was no alternative. If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine (several times) and hopefully save them to a cassette.
These days, if you want to play a game, you reach for your phone and install a free one that is far more capable than anything you could develop yourself.
The real trick would be to create a development environment that will run on a phone. Apple have gone somewhat down this path with their Swift Playgrounds and you could always work with Scratch and similar systems or you could even do something in html/javascript, but none of these really give the same imperative to learning how that the original home computers did. You really need a system that lets you develop a full program, share it with your friends and modify (and break) it.
You know the reality is that we do have these systems, and kids that are interested in doing anything other than just playing games can access them with a minimum of problems. I wonder how many of those ZX Spectrums, C64 etc were given to kids, who on finding that they had to actually do some work to make them do anything useful relegated them to a shoebox under the TV. It is possible that for every positive story about "kid learns programming from ZX Spectrum" you would have a hundred stories of kid calling ZX Spectrum a piece of crap.
In my experience, that tended to happen more with the kids who got the C64s. Those were the ones with color TVs and Betamax at home, too.
There was a third possibility: you could figure out how the game worked and write your own version from scratch. I learned so much about programming by writing a Pac-Man clone on a ZX Spectrum simply because I didn't have the pocket money to keep feeding the arcade machines, or even to buy someone else's knock-off version on a cassette tape. I quickly got bored of typing in other peoples' programs from a magazine, much more fun to write your own.
My memory, it was generally true about the C64/ZX split being about gamers vs coders; however I did know some "Speccy" owners (generally with slightly-better-off parents) who had lots and lots of different games on tapes and did nothing but play games on the machine. Yes, I "borrowed" a lot of games by copying the tapes on an Amstrad dual-cassette stereo system (thank you, Sir Alan!) but I'm really glad that generally, scarcity of an "easy option" forced me into a place where I had to write my own code.
I agree. When there is no shortcut you find much more motivation to go the hard way. I was in that exact position when I was 10, and I kept messing up copying the basic lines from books so I got a book for kids that teached me basic, this way I was making my own code and could debug it. I made simple games completely from scratch that way it was how I got into programing.
I can understand that now with so many shortcuts available for kids the same motivation is not there anymore. It's like once you get access to cheat codes in a game that makes you invincible and gives you infinite money, the challenge is not there and you lose interest.
I remember games that had a note on the back of the box asking for programmers to send their work to the publisher's address for consideration. Magazines advertised commercial software obviously sold by one guy out of his house, and featured interviews with programmers who were only a few years older than me. If you owned a home computer and could program it, you imagined you could access this growing and exciting world, and maybe make some money.
Indeed. After I saw this sad news and your comment, I was reminded of an earlier HN comment¹ I had written about the joy I experienced as a young child learning to program on a ZX81 and my regret that my children’s generation are not growing up with the same opportunities. I’m not sure there is any analogous device I could give my kids when they reach the same age any more. Any device they do eventually get when they’re older seems more likely to have preinstalled social media apps and regular security updates than a preinstalled programming environment and a line in the manual reassuring you that nothing you type will break your computer. Something certainly has been lost.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21119236
If you do want a similar experience (at least superficially) to a spectrum 48k, get a Pi 400, don't connect it to a network, but don't expect the same outcome as you had -- the world is different, there are very different things competing for attention, and different rewards for time spent.
The 8 year old is the most enthusiastic about it. He is second grade at school and knows addition, and subtraction, and his times tables but has not started multiplying more than single digit numbers.
Right now they are mostly placing blocks around and decorating the world, but they are very interested in the lua scripting. I have no doubt that they will soon be attempting to read that read the Roblox API docs. Actually, they'll be watching youtube video tutorials.
Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that while the old 8 bit days are gone, there are plenty of ways kids can build things and tinker with computers and software.
PS: buy your kids a Steam Deck.
I compared that to my phone - 256Gb of storage, 32Gb of memory, plus sound, graphics, wifi, and the kitchen sink.
Learning on the Atom was easy because it was so simple. And as I mastered it, so computers became more complicated. It was, in many ways, the perfect method of teaching tech. A new programmer nowadays has to learn so much so quickly to be able to write anything useful, it's often overwhelming. Trying to teach my gf how to code was painful because we were always bumping into rabbit holes of complexity, which we could either go down and waste whole days, or avoid and leave an area of ignorance that would bite later. I never had that problem. It's humbling - I wonder if I would even be a dev if I hadn't had that advantage?
I still give him shit for it
More democratising than other machines around at the time, because those less-well-off families in the UK who couldn't afford a BBC Micro or CBM-64 could more easily scrape together the funds to buy a ZX Spectrum instead.
My personal anecdote: I didn't have enough pocket money to feed my Pac-Man addiction in the arcades, and my family certainly wasn't going to splash out on an Atari console, so I wrote myself a Pac-Man clone in ZX Basic. It turned out that programming was so much more fun than playing the game in the long run, and almost 40 years later people are still paying me to do this! Thank you, Sir Clive.
I miss those times, there was something so much more immediate, more real about computing in the 70s and 80s. It was somehow lighter and less intimidating. It's only just coming back with Arduino style kit.
RIP
Most people who have an Arduino also have a supercomputer-phone. But a ZX81 or ZX Spectrum were, at the time, all you could afford and relatively advanced to the point of being amazing for most other people (who didn't own any computer whatsoever).
I expect more people here will remember the ZX80, but what about the minimal SC/MP-based MK-14 that came before... I skipped that but got a NASCOM-1 kit the following year (1978).
I worked at Acorn in the early 80s and Sir Clive attended a couple of our infamous Christmas parties (since he knew Chris Curry).
The good thing about those old computers was the simplicity. The only thing on a NASCOM-1 between your assembly code and the hardware was 1KB of monitor program.
Had a bit of a fright after I finished soldering everything and switched it on. Nothing happened! So I laboriously went over all 1200 (?) solder joints again and breathed a sigh of relief when it worked.
I bought an old 5 bit code teleprinter and wrote a driver so that I could print by connecting the UART to a couple of transistors driving a mercury wetted relay to drive the printer. I think it would be a lot more complicated to do that on any modern computer.
Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up.
Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke.
I curse the membrane keyboard to this day.
Smart man. Crap product. A joke of the times from British TV: the Sinclair digital penis: 1 inch long and takes 28 days to come.
I understand how many people bootstrapped into computing from the spectrum btw, a friend made significant money from writing sw for it. Tiny compilers, games.
There's something quintessentially British about promoting tech wizards as heros for making remarkably average product, but making it mass market. Sinclair electronics and Amstrad unquestionably took computing to the masses, in all its buggy variety.
Sinclair's calculator made the V&A design gallery as an icon. It was pretty unusable, but stunningly beautiful. My dad refused to let me get one (he was a compsci professor) and I got a Texas instruments handheld instead.
We should speak the truth of the dead and not lie to ourselves.
Welcome to the truth my friend.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(While, for example, electric road vehicles in the mid 80s was not.)
The Sinclair car would sell well now the market for escooters is established.
This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one. He did this by using a chip designed for four-function math and using a series of brilliant (if, yes, slow and approximate) hacks to fit arithmetic and trigonometry in the same 320 assembly instructions and three registers. It cuts basically every corner, but my favorite one is that it didn't have room for constants like pi in the ROM. No matter what they did they couldn't fit it in. Eventually, they just printed pi on the case. My impression of Sir Clive is that he always tried to take shortcuts no other company would dare, and while this often flamed out, sometimes he pulled it off and brought a lot of technology to a lot of people.
Here's a fantastic breakdown of how the calculator worked and why it was so impressive:
http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...
Same with his computers. At least before the QL. They were affordable for people not on IT salaries.
And for Eastern Europe/Russia, for some values of "affordable".
Yeah, some Sinclair products were solid, and others were flakey, but all were cheap and seemed very futuristic at the time.
Edit: Different channel, but here's a video about ZX81 restoration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyluEM0N6TY
IIRC the video output often cut out whenever a user program was running?
I'm sure I would have enjoyed having one, but was fortunate enough my parents picked up an Apple ][+ instead. Still, warm feelings towards that unit, & its series, as something that made home computing thinkable.
1K of RAM seems an unimaginably miniscule memory limit today, but incredibly you could squeeze a game of chess in that limit using a bit of creativity. The YouTube channel Nostalgia Nerd compares a game of chess on the 1981 Sinclair ZX81 1KB computer vs. a modern PC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3By_rdwxSg
When you think of the oceans of RAM available today, a 1KB limit feels like something from a completely different world.
Wikipedia calls Acorn, Britain's Apple. Just as Apple chose its name because it was before Atari in the phone book, so Acorn chose it's name because it was before Apple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h24m)
Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.
(Sinclair didn't exactly like it though.)
"Reach" is what you can just touch with your fingertips outstretched; "grasp" is what you can firmly close your hand on and grip.
A link to the quote in the film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=5m9s
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/55810/Micro-Men-10th...
My father knew Clive Sinclair thanks to the Cambridge tech/hifi scene at the time, and we also used to live near him in Madingley. Somewhere in my dad's shed there's a ZX81 with a single digit serial number (amongst a lot of other similar machines: Jupiter Ace, ZX80, various Spectrums with weird and wacky keyboards, Dragon 32, Commodore 16 Plus/4, etc).
A bit later we also lived next door to Franni and Geoff Vincent who were part of the Acorn team that designed and built the BBC Micro. They used to let me come round (aged 8 or so) and use their Model B whenever I wanted.
Sir Clive Sinclair had a HUGE influence on my life. RIP.
That, going through 101 Basic Computer Games, and typing in the esoteric Beagle Bros commands in their ads are fond memories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Legacy
He was a kind of proto-Jobs. While most of the competition made boring-looking devices, Sinclair hired some of the top people for the time and made products that stood out because they looked exciting.
The ZX series are the best known, but there were precursors like the Black Watch and the Sovereign Calculator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Watch_(wristwatch)
http://www.vintagebritishcalculators.info/html/sovereign.htm...
He wasn't so good at making things that worked reliably or delivering them on time, but even with the delays the ZX comps were game changers.
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/sinclair-ql/3347
His business acumen was nil and his cost cutting nailed shut the coffin of every venture he started.
I don’t get the hero worship.
There's definitely a time for robust debate about his legacy and potential flaws, but that time and place should not be this thread.
He made a very valuable contribution to the industry however.
People have rose tinted glasses about it but the reality was products not turning up, not shipping, not working and a sour taste for many against technology.
He even bought faulty RAM in which was discarded for the Spectrums and sold the ones that booted.
The only reason it worked out for a lot of people is we have pretty strong consumer protection laws here!
Such cost cutting made it affordable to a large number of people - had it costed a couple of time more it could be a hard sell for my Eastern European parents. Fortunately, that didn't happen and now, 40 years later, I have a nice career and I'm still enjoying dealing with computers just as when I was a kid with ZX Spectrum.
My father had a nice business for a few years doing adhoc repairs and then started his own PC import business in the end with the cash he earned fixing people’s stuff. That was a world of difference.
Agree with your comments about affordability. As you say about Eastern Europe, even the clones were more expensive I understand.
Though this shop just did it for profit margin. Sinclair did it to make computers available to the masses.
Yes, it's very common. Even companies like Intel sometimes test a CPU at umpteen GHz, then retest the ones that fail at umpteen/2 GHz and sell them at a lower price if they work reliably at the lower speed.
I love the positive remembrances here. I also appreciate the full picture, like the joke about the "Sinclair digital penis" in another thread.
Sinclair did well for himself & his family. He did a lot of good in the world, from the people he introduced to tech.
Neither he nor his legacy are harmed in the slightest with an honest recounting. Instead, the memory is improved with realistic texture.
I don't know (and I know very little about him, tbh), but I was raised to not speak ill of the dead, and it's stuck.
It doesn't matter everything else didn't work out, I'd be pretty damn happy with that legacy.
When you look at the microscopic view of owning one computer from him that worked it does somewhat rose tint the overall view of things which was not good.
sure it would have happened anyway, but he definately made it happen earlier
almost 100% of the people who work in IT (in the UK) over a certain age had one of his affordable computers
There were lots of home computers available with proper keyboards. As a kid I couldn't afford any of them.
That horrible keyboard did me just fine.
I know which I'd want to be my legacy.
People can have great legacies in spite of their flaws. This is true for all of our heroes.
https://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk
I know that being PC-compatible would automatically make them commodity, but if they had positioned themselves as a value-added “PC+” platform and focused on competing in areas where PC clones at-the-time sucked and alternatives like Amiga reigned (e.g. Video Toaster), could they have succeeded? What if they merged with Quantel and made their Paintbox more affordable sooner? That would have taken the wind out of Adobe’s Photoshop sails.
———
I feel the UK computing scene suffered from a lack-of-ambition. The world is too small for each medium-sized country to have their own computer-makers, so it’s important to go-big early and establish footholds in all the major markets - which isn’t something anyone in the UK except ARM (and to an extent: Sinclair) has done.
Sinclair and Acorn were extremely ambitious. Acorn even sold an NTSC conversion of the BBC Micro in the US for a short time. My theory is they were undercapitalized.
Yes, this. Very much so.
One example is the RF rules that hampered the Acorn Archimedes.
I argue that if Acorn designed the hardware ready-for-localisation then this would be a non-issue.
I remember at university writing a couple of little programmes that allowed the swanky BBC Model B (with no floppy drive) to use the Spectrum as a file server, over the serial interface.
But you're right-- it was too late to save the QL by then.
Of course, that wasn't the only problem with the machine, not by a longshot. I did my very first commercial hardware hacking in high school building/selling plug-in 'spiderboards' to protect the oh-so-fragile ZX8301 chips, and got my first oscilloscope in college to chase down all the ground bounce that was still occasionally killing the NMOS ROMs...
The only real hardware bit that we could rib him about was the serial port design, but I can't even remember what was wrong with it now (handshaking?)
I do wish I'd snaffled the QDOS listing that got thrown away during an office move.
The QLs problem was more the unreliable micro-drives the use of a cut down processor and the keyboard/build quality.
the zx spectrum hold a special place in my memory because the manual was fantasic - I learnt almost everything from it.
and then progressed on to typing the monterous (using the aweful rubber keys) blocks of programs from magazines - THEN I learnt how to debug and rewrite the games that I'd just typed in from the magazines, because they never worked first time.
but it felt like I was living in the future
Thanks Clive - RIP
The user manual "Atomic Theory and Practise" was an amazingly good introduction to computers, and is still on the shelf above my desk.
https://youtu.be/as6hSAqJ_g4
The sense of wonder I got as a kid by playing games and learning how to program on his machines made for amazing life-shaping experiences.
I was quite envious from my pals that eventually got +2A and 3 models, specially with the 3 one, having floppies and CP/M version available.
Pity that QL did not work out, nor the Sam Coupé, although the later wasn't related to Sir Clive.
Now, I'll go play some Manic Miner or Nether Earth in your honor.