- Joined
- Oct 6, 2016
I assume for the funeral he'll be sent off in a burning C5 that then gets sucked under the wheels of a car and splats his body everywhere?
Sir Clive Sinclair, home computing pioneer, dead at 81
- Thread starter Ginger Piglet
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
After the fall of the eastern bloc these units flooded some of the local flea markets of former eastern bloc countries for a bit, some made it all the way to west germany and I kinda regret not picking some of these up, most where ghetto as hell or DIY-kits but some looked kinda fancy. The eastern bloc 74xx logic didn't follow the naming standard of the free world so pre-internet they were kinda annoying. They also reverse-engineered and made unlicensed clones of the Z80 (e.g. U880) since there was no legal way for them to import it. (I have one such east german computer, clone of the CPC) For a while after the wall came down, electronics retailers sold eastern bloc electronics components for discounted prices. I think if you really dig you can still find the odd GDR-manufactured optocoupler or logic IC here and there.
Was never exposed to the Spectrum myself, saw a Schneider CPC from afar once I think. West Germany was squarely Commodore's home turf. All these 8-bitters weren't state of the art when they were sold, their draw was that they were affordable for the average Joe and didn't cost thousands, so it was ok to buy one for the son on christmas. Things like the Speccy were an important part of bringing computers to the people and developing the logistics for cheaper mass-manufacture of the systems themselves and parts involved. Not without it's problems either, back then it wasn't unusual to buy one of these 8-bit home computers in a store and find out at home that it didn't work correctly or at all, when was the last time you bought an smartphone or PC that was DOA?
RIP.
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2016
Oi me speccy!
Meanwhile, whilst Sinclair's computers might have seemed a bit dinky, you gotta remember that the British economy was a basket case in the early '80s. Computers like the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum were the only computers affordable enough for the typical Britbong to buy, and thousands of people (especially young people) who no longer had the option of working in the same factories or mines as their fathers and grandfathers did went into computing instead. In a sense, it was the birth of the "learn to code" meme.
Then there were all the Eastern European knockoffs, made possible by reverse engineering the Speccy's custom chip (ULA) via shitloads of off-the-shelf logic chips. If you thought the British economy was fucked in the '80s...
Literally. Monty Mole was a Speccy game originally by a Pete Harrap who did it while the miners' strike was ongoing. It involves the titular mole going down a mine and stealing all the coal and then taking on King Arthur Scargill at the end. Before a poem flashes up explaining how he got shoved in prison for coal theft.
That was where Gremlin Graphics began. You might have heard of them.
E:
The C64 was yuge in Germany. Germany was also the home of the biggest Atari ST market in the early 16 bit days as well. Though the Speccy also did fairly well in Spain apparently.
Us Bongs were split about evenly between that and the Amiga. The froggos stuck with the Amstrad CPC for far too long though for some reason.
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- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
Auf Wiedersehen Monty was the definitive Monty game. Also, about games that arose from anti-Thatcherism and the mine closures - how about Seaside Special? That game involved collecting irradiated seaweed to go fling at Tory cabinet members. Absolutely shit, but I loved it just because of that concept.
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
The C64 and the Amiga were yuge in Australia. I've lost count of the number of pirated Amiga games I've played that were cracked by Aussies.
The Speccy made it down here, but it didn't do anywhere nearly as well as it did in the UK or Europe because by that time, Dick Smith had cornered the cheap home computer market with rebadged VTech machines. Yes, the same VTech that make those kiddy computers. It also didn't help that the Speccy was nearly the same price as the C64.
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- Joined
- Mar 29, 2014
At least Sinclair lived a life full of accomplishment.
I like the mentality he had with the ZX better than the attitude Jack Tramiel had with the C64.
(Commodore 64 vs ZX Spectrum - The Great British Computer War - Kim Justice - YouTube (especially 4:40))
I like the mentality he had with the ZX better than the attitude Jack Tramiel had with the C64.
(Commodore 64 vs ZX Spectrum - The Great British Computer War - Kim Justice - YouTube (especially 4:40))
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- Joined
- Mar 4, 2019
I never had a spectrum. I had a BBC Acorn Model B. I remember always being a bit jealous of my neighbour's speccy. Fun times.
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- Jan 5, 2015
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- Jun 13, 2016
The Beeb was arguably a better system in that is was far better built and more expandable hardware-wise and could use standard 5.25" floppies as well as tapes (as opposed to the Amstrad era Speccy's use of those weird 3" floppies) but because it was more expensive and sold mainly into schools there was less software for it.
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2019
It was. Better graphics subsystem as well, but as you say, it didn't have the games.
I seem to have had a knack for picking the losing ecosystem for a long while. First the BBC micro, which Acorn could never properly capitalise on for reasons that escape me. Then an Amstrad, which needs no introduction or explanation for its failure. Then finally Amiga, which should have been what Apple became, if not for the dead hand of Commodore dragging it down, or the fact that they lost the schematics for Agnus and Paula. Great, now I'm nostalgic and drunk...
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
Apple around that time struggled hard and basically almost went the same way Commodore did. Over here in Germany we didn't really do 68k and PowerPC Macs much and moved right on to the PC, so I never really had anything to do with these old Macs back then. Acquiring one a few years ago was an eye opener. Leaving out performance altogether (which also was superior) the quality level in that 040 lowcost Apple I bought was worlds away from what Commodore put out, both software- and hardware-wise. If Apple already struggled with that it's of no surprise the Amiga went the way of the dodo. I myself bought an A1200 in the early 90s, was very disappointed at how little value it offered over my older A2000 (you could even make an argument for negative value as a lot of software from my A2000 refused to run on it) and went straight ahead and brought that machine back to the store to get a 486. The 486 felt like a step back in many ways (I originally didn't even buy a sound card because I already literally spent thousands at that point and had to live for a bit with the beeper, and Win 3.11/DOS kinda sucked if you were used to AmigaOS) but it was just so much faster and there was finally software to get again. (Amiga developers had left the market in droves, I think you could make an argument about more development for the Amiga happening now than in 1991)
A basic, unexpanded Amiga in the early 90s was pointless and hardware upgrades were hard to come by, only supported in hackish ways by the OS (to this day, you need 3rd party OS patches for graphics cards) and way too expensive for what they were. Maybe about a decade ago I spoke with the engineer of one of the few graphics cards you could buy for the Amiga and while having fond memories of his design (he sadly couldn't share fully with me, as the code for the programmable logic was lost) he was still noticeably bitter he bet on the wrong horse. (And a few other details I can't share here because I'd literally dox myself)
I mean there were books written on Commodores mismanagement and I'm kinda familiar with their contents but seeing that Mac really drove it home to me personally again and reminded me of getting that 486. I also personally think at least in Germany the Amiga being seen as a games console for kids (many people still see it that way to this day) really hurt it's market value too, as believe it or not it was quite an able computer for both serious office applications, multimedia work and for hardware hacking and there was a lot of good software too.
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
The Beeb was an expensive machine, which is why they didn't really catch on as home computers in the UK. That said, Acorn wiped the floor with the competition in the educational market.
The thing is that both Acorn and Sinclair had near-death experiences in the mid '80s were similar. Sinclair lost a shitload of money on the C5; Acorn lost a shitload of money in their failed attempt to crack the US market. Sinclair tried unsuccessfully to go upmarket with the QL; Acorn's attempt at an entry-level machine (Electron) was a commercial disaster.
It was around the time that Acorn and Sinclair got bailed out by Olivetti and Amstrad respectively that their paths started to deviate. Sinclair was assimilated into Amstrad. Olivetti let Acorn do their own thing.
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2018
People often don't appreciate how fucking grim the UK was in the latter half of the 20th century. The fact that the common man could afford a computer much less a pair of socks is amazing.Oi me speccy!
Meanwhile, whilst Sinclair's computers might have seemed a bit dinky, you gotta remember that the British economy was a basket case in the early '80s. Computers like the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum were the only computers affordable enough for the typical Britbong to buy, and thousands of people (especially young people) who no longer had the option of working in the same factories or mines as their fathers and grandfathers did went into computing instead. In a sense, it was the birth of the "learn to code" meme.
Then there were all the Eastern European knockoffs, made possible by reverse engineering the Speccy's custom chip (ULA) via shitloads of off-the-shelf logic chips. If you thought the British economy was fucked in the '80s...
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
The prescient, quirky legacy of U.K. gadget inventor Clive Sinclair
Little known in the U.S., Sinclair democratized computing with his dirt-cheap 1980s PCs. Even his many failures were decades ahead of their time.
By Glenn FleishmanLong Read
[ original | archive ]
A digital watch that kept poor time and might explode. A keyboard that felt like typing on a corpse. A three-wheeled electric “car” that couldn’t power its way uphill. No successful products for nearly four decades. Why do the British remember inventor Clive Sinclair so fondly? His legendary, affordable personal computers—and his ability to see the future, if not grasp it.
Sinclair died September 16 in London at age 81 after living with cancer for a decade. Renowned across the United Kingdom and Europe in the early 1980s as the pioneer of low-cost computing, Sinclair also developed dozens of other products that came to market before their technology had ripened. He continued to work on projects until his final days, his daughter told the BBC.
The Economist devoted its cherished last page to remembering Sinclair, but in the U.S. his death received only spotty coverage. Technology and gaming publications such as The Verge and Kotaku took note, as did CNN. The Washington Post’s website ran an AP obituary. Other major newspapers such as The New York Times have not (yet) reported his passing. It’s a sharp contrast with how Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs was remembered at the time of his death—and likely will be again on the 10th anniversary next month.
Although he hadn’t had a blockbuster hit in years, Sinclair predicted the future with extraordinary precision, often making either the first electronics product in a category or, if the not first, the smallest and most affordable. This included a vast range of devices, such as a pocket radio receiver, pocket calculator, personal computer, digital watch, calculator watch, portable television, flat-screen portable TV, “mobile” phone, and electric car—or at least an electric tri-wheel vehicle.
Yet while the British called him “Uncle Clive,” and a wide range of people between the ages of about 45 and 85 will wax fondly about his computers and chuckle indulgently about his failures, Sinclair is little known in the United States. A gap between the economies of the U.S. and U.K. in the 1970s and early ’80s—and the U.S. and chunks of Europe at that time—meant many American releases of computing and electronics tech were out of the price range of the majority of Brits and Europeans. Into that gap, Sinclair sold his ideas to a willing market.
Sinclair’s gadgets often suffered from technology that he introduced before manufacturing, chip, and power capabilities were ready. He cut corners so severely to keep costs low that the corners of some of his devices literally fell off. What shipped was sometimes janky, incomplete, or had frustrating limitations. But his indefatigable nature and his homegrown development inside the U.K. meant he was forgiven, again and again.
To understand his impact on tens of millions of people across Europe, imagine Jobs and his Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak rolled into one person—but if, after the Apple II and a couple of additional improvements, the company never released a successful computer again. Our alt-Jobs in that universe spent the rest of his life and nearly all of his fortune pursuing ideas that sold in the thousands, not billions. Consider how he would be remembered now: fondly in the U.S. and forgotten most everywhere else.
Sinclair’s legacy may be best summed up by a few prominent figures in technology who idolized him during his heyday. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who grew up in India, tweeted:
Philippe Kahn, a legend himself for founding Borland and three other software companies—and sending the first photo ever transmitted by cellphone—posted a tribute on Facebook. (Kahn gave Fast Company permission to quote from it.) Kahn, born and raised in France, met Sinclair to discuss a software development and gaming partnership between their two companies, but Sinclair had already moved on:
“[W]hen we met, Sir Clive had lost interest in the ZX [computer]. Instead, like a true innovator, Sir Clive focused on his next adventure: The C5 electric car. His prototype was brilliant yet still limited to solo rides initially, making it tough to market successfully. The C5, like the ZX, was a pioneering effort. My visit with Sir Clive was most inspiring. For a young mathematician, it was like meeting an actual iconic role model.”
I have to admit that having lived my life in the U.S., I was only mildly informed about Sinclair’s legacy until I read a draft of my friend Marcin Wichary’s upcoming book, Shift Happens, a history of keyboards from typewriters to computers. Marcin devotes a chapter to the keyboards on Sinclair’s computers, including the outrageous ZX Spectrum, which had five or six labels per key. Marcin grew up in Poland, and is one of many people outside the U.K. who also basked in the reflection of Sinclair’s success—but he doesn’t whitewash where things went wrong.
Inexpensive, powerful, profitable, and influential
When it came to computers, the sheer affordability, capability, and availability of Sinclair’s machines overrode quibbles. His ZX80, ZX81, and Spectrum are remembered with varying degrees of fondness—largely by people over 45—and the Spectrum, or “Speccie,” sold in the millions. The slab-shaped ZX80 featured an 8-bit Zilog Z80 chip and went on sale in early 1980 for 79.95 pounds in kit form or 99.95 pounds assembled, which apparently involved snapping a few pieces together. Those 1980 prices equate in U.S. figures, at that time’s exchange rate, to about $180 and $225 (or, with inflation in 2021 figures, $600 and $750). Its successor, the ZX81, launched the next year for even less: 49.95 pounds as a kit and 69.95 pounds assembled. Both and later models connected to a TV for a display.These prices were a far cry from the 700 pounds for a Commodore PET around 1980, which included a tiny integral monochrome display. Apple offered an 840-pound Apple II starting model that year as well without a screen, but promoted a business package that cost almost 2,400 pounds to get a monitor and other upgrades. (I bought a computer with the same 6502 CPU as an Apple II, Ohio Scientific’s C1P, in 1980 at the whopping price of $333.)
Sinclair and his engineers achieved this pricing feat by using the same approach he had brought to miniaturizing radios, calculators, TVs, and a watch that predated his computers: a relentless drive to reduce the number of chips and shrink the size of circuit boards, thus reducing the cost of parts and complexity of manufacture. (Wozniak had a similar compulsion for minimalism.)
In a letter to New Scientist magazine published on June 26, 1986, Sinclair wrote to complain about what he said were factual inaccuracies in a previous issue about his computers:
“It is implied that our computers were cheap simply because we left things out. What rubbish. They were cheap because of the ingenuity of design. The ZX81 had four chips when our nearest competition in this respect, the TRS-80, had 44.”
The ZX80 did have its issues. It was poor at dissipating heat, and a set of “vents” at the case’s top were actually cosmetic (they were painted on). And the use of a flat membrane keyboard kept costs, maintenance, and repairs way, way down—for both the ZX80 and ZX81—but left some thinking that it, along with the plastic case, made the computer look and feel cheap.
This cheapness may be why the BBC opted to anoint a computer made by another U.K. manufacturer, Acorn, instead of the ZX81 as the official computer of a TV series in 1982. That series introduced the British public to personal computing, and was expected to lead to blockbuster sales, especially with subsidized school purchases.
No worries, though: Sinclair sold a reported 1.5 million units of the ZX81 and then 5 million of its successor, the ZX Spectrum—introduced in 1982 to compete against the twice-as-expensive Acorn model the BBC had picked. (Acorn sold about 1.5 million units.) That despite the Spectrum featuring a rubber overlay on its keyboard which some described as akin to typing on dead flesh.
Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the U.K. Labour Party and now the chair of UK Music, put the ZX80 and Spectrum in context on Twitter:
Among my friends and colleagues from the U.K. and further afield, Sinclair’s name was never far off when we talked about our computing past. They listed games I had never heard of and talk fondly of oddball problems that only made them love the machines more.
Sinclair’s fame outside the U.K. stemmed largely from another early innovation: cloning. The ZX81 was manufactured for Sinclair by Timex in Dundee, Scotland, and sold in the U.S. first under that name, and later as a Timex Sinclair model. It’s the only major market exposure Americans had to anything Sinclair or his companies made. Reports indicate about 600,000 of the combined models were sold. That was impressive in a market in which, at that time, only a few million people had bought personal computers—though PC ownership rose to the tens of millions just a few years later.
But the ZX81 and Spectrum were also widely pirated. Knockoffs using cheaper or different components sold in countless numbers in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Even though these weren’t made by Sinclair and sometimes ran an entirely different operating system—like CP/M—the influence was widespread.
Exceptional invention, rare good timing
Sinclair, the son and grandson of engineers and the son of a rare midcentury British entrepreneur, entered the electronics world while still in secondary school. At 18, he designed a tiny, inexpensive radio receiver that required just a single transistor, and quickly saw sales reach 1,000 per month. He opted against college, and moved into technical writing, producing more than a dozen books in a few years about building devices around transistors.Financing a new venture in the 1960s for an untested young person wasn’t easy, and even after having founded Sinclair Radionics, Sinclair continued to work in the technology publishing industry as a trade magazine editor for several years. But he kept his hand in the electronics business by purchasing transistors that had failed quality testing at a local semiconductor plant for computing purposes yet worked perfectly well inside radio receivers and for analog processing. After retesting and sorting, he sold them at prices up to 15 times higher than he’d paid.
Eventually, Sinclair used the funds to produce a series of successful pocket calculators and tiny portable televisions. But an early digital wristwatch was his undoing. The Black Watch served as a template for post-computer endeavors. The watch had a short battery life, a problem because of the difficulty of changing it; seasonal temperature changes affected the accuracy of its internal timekeeping crystal; its LEDs were dim; its switches and case parts were unreliable; and static electricity could fry the watch’s single chip.
And, in the right circumstances, the battery could overheat and explode. Yes, explode. The cost of repairs and bad reviews drove huge losses. Sinclair wound up effectively selling the company to the U.K. government, which eventually chopped up the valuable patents and products, sold them off, and wrote down the remaining loss. (At the time, the U.K. had a nationalization program intended to help keep the economy solvent and prevent job losses.)
Sinclair had already moved on, founding Science of Cambridge—later known as Sinclair Research—to make the remarkably sophisticated and advanced Sinclair Wrist Calculator. However, it was available only in kit form and nearly impossible to assemble successfully. Only about 10,000 were sold for that reason—and because better LED watches (with fewer features) were already on the market. Despite that, the team Sinclair assembled went on to create the legendary ZX80 and models that followed.
With the computers throwing off massive profits and Sinclair becoming a multimillionaire, he used his wealth to create and invest in yet another company in 1983, Sinclair Vehicles. The firm produced the Sinclair C5, a three-wheeled electric vehicle released in 1985. Sinclair hoped to sell 100,000 of them in the first year. But the single-occupant trike lacked safety features, was so low it was below the sight lines of automobile drivers, and lacked the energy to go up hills (drivers had to pedal). A few thousand were sold.
Sinclair Research, meanwhile, had continued to release new computers, but had fallen behind the competition, and invested heavily into an advanced, portable flat-screen CRT-based TV—which shipped years too late in 1983, a year after the polished and more advanced Sony Watchman. Sinclair Vehicles went into receivership (the U.K. equivalent of bankruptcy) in 1985, and Sinclair Research’s assets were sold for a song to a firm that leveraged its ahead-of-its time technologies, selling them off or licensing them.
Sinclair kept developing products under the umbrella of Sinclair Research, however, producing an early powerful electric bike (the Zike), a two-wheeled electric vehicle (the X-Bike), and an underwater propulsion system for scuba divers.
His contribution to the U.K. and the world can’t be measured in how well his products performed, and his successes by unit volume and sales revenue certainly outweigh his failures. Sinclair saw the future a little too well. Nearly everything he invented came to pass, often 20 to 30 years later. Trillions of dollars worth of companies now ply the products he couldn’t quite get to work.
But the truth? He was always more interested in the potential than the thing itself. As he said during his life and his family confirmed, Clive Sinclair didn’t care much for using his devices, only making them available to others.
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2021
First thing I ever coded was in Spectrum BASIC.
God rest you Clive.
God rest you Clive.