The weirdo baldy inventor of crap stuff: brown bread. Another fragment of our childhood fades away. That being said, skool daze on the zx spectrum was fluffing ace. I bet it will take about 3 hours to load him into the coffin.
The pocket calculator and his cheap home computers were truly revolutionary. If he had partnered with a bigger electronics business and developed those machines, particularly the recreational market for games he would have had an even bigger legacy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58587521 I owe my love of computing to him. I learned so much from my Speccy. A different era.
If you've never seen it then Micro Men is excellent entertainment. There are cameos from some of the people portrayed, Alexander Armstrong, absolutely nails Clive Sinclair. I am reliably told the fight in the Baron of Beef pub, where he assaulted his rival Chris Curry with a rolled-up newspaper shouting, "You fark1ng bugger1ng sh1t-bucket!" did actually happen. There's an archival 70s shot of the Mill in St. Ives, Cambs (you can see the historic bridge with a chapel on it on the right), where Sinclair had his early offices, at the beginning of this film. It's now luxury flats and I walk opposite it on the quayside every day. RIP.
Another of the technology greats fall. Instrumental in the adaption of how software could be threaded onto cassette tapes. I learnt my first programming language on the Spectrum ZX. I'm currently learning Ada 2012, and without influence from Clive and others like him, we would be nowhere today in the technical fields. I remember when Commodore went bust as well, that was another great 1980s firm. RIP Clive. You inspired so many people. xx
I have a Speccy emulator on my laptop with a handful of games - Jet Set Willy (which I can still very rarely complete even with all the cheats) and Knight Lore (try completing that on 100% for a real challenge) are my favourites, with Everyone's a Wally coming close, although the action's a bit slow and it doesn't have the replay value of the other two. TBH, I enjoy those games mainly for the nostalgia factor (the only game I play on my emulator that I didn't play back in my youth is Manic Miner) and haven't felt compelled to download any others. And most of the endings for these games were crap (for instance, all you get when you complete Atic Atac is "Congratulations - you have escaped" - for over 25 years I really wanted to know what the world was like outside that haunted castle when you finally find that magic key, and if I'd known that was going to be the ending I wouldn't have bothered!). But many of those games were amazing and groundbreaking back in the day.
Indeed. Self educated for the most like many of the great British inventors. A bit preoccupied with his C5 but his ideas like the folding bike were excellent if poorly executed at the time but are now mainstream. So many British discoveries and patents have ended up being used by overseas companies. There was a long period when business and science were out of kilter in the UK.
Ah, memories of Watford Electronics and getting an Acorn Atom (12 K Ram + 12 K Rom, later upgraded to 16 K Rom with WE Rom EPROM upgrade).
Like many my first computer was a ZX81 with a cassette player I nicked off one of my sisters. After that C64, Amiga, then IBM286 my mum bought me for uni. SCS was a maverick, chancer, dreamer on a short fuse all rolled into one, and had the knack of turning good ideas into crap! A pioneer perhaps but not one of the greats.
Maybe the Elon Musk of his era? I can trump everyone, my first computer was a ZX80. Upgraded to a 48K Spectrum, I skipped the ZX81. Got through 3 spectrum keyboards playing Daley Thompson's Decatholon. Still have it somewhere, sadly modified by drilling loads of holes in the case to stop it overheating so probably worth squat. Remember buying magazines and programming in the games from the text listing. They never worked. Progressed to an Amiga, then a long list of PCs starting at a 486 SX25 with 210Mb HD which was slowly upgraded to a 486 DX2-66 with CD Rom and sound card. various pentiums from self build to pre built and now have an i7. It was the spectrum that fired up my interest incomputers and I've pretty much based a career on them. My best memories are hopping on a train to Harrow or Uxbridge on a saturday morning to spend my pocket money on the new Codemasters game which I'd play all afternoon until the A-Team was on telly. My grandfather had a C5 which he purchased because ill health meant he was unable to drive a car any more. Overall it was an excellent concept, years ahead of it's time only let down by poor battery technology, which was actually sourced from elsewhere. The C5 somewhat soured Clive's reputation when it really was third parties and lack of business support that killed it off. A great inventor and someone who should go on a bank note in years to come.
To celebrate the 40th birthday of the rubber 'keyboard' (sic.) monstrosity someone's launched a bumper back of games for donations of $10: https://itch.io/b/1343/the-zx-spectrum-40th-birthday-game-mix-tape
If CS had brought out his C5 car now it would probably have become a great success, as it was low all round.
