Sir Clive Sinclair, home computing pioneer, dead at 81

[Ginger Piglet]

Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies at the age of 81

Sir Clive Sinclair helped bring computers into people's homes thanks to his groundbreaking ZX Spectrum - it is reported that he died at his London home this morning

www.mirror.co.uk

I never owned a Specky but I feel the need to find one and enter this into it:

10 CLS : PRINT "Sir Clive Sinclair, 1940 - 2021"
20 PRINT : PRINT : PRINT "Press 'F' to Pay Respects"
30 INPUT A$ : IF A$<>"f" THEN 30 ELSE 40
40 PRINT "F"; : GOTO 30

Also, there needs to be a ceremonial drive-past of electric tricycles at his funeral.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

While the Speccy was before my time, I can respect what that four colored computer could do with a piddly amount of RAM. I can hear the computer nerds from the UK crying right now, and it is from sadness.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

While the Speccy was before my time, I can respect what that four colored computer could do with a piddly amount of RAM. I can hear the computer nerds from the UK crying right now, and it is from sadness.

Not just nerds either. A huge number of Britbong developers who got big in the PS1 era were founded by people one man banding games for the Speccy. In the 1980s it was the gaming system to have. Yes, the C64 and especially the BBC Micro may have been superior in terms of hardware but the Speccy was as cheap as you could go and still be able to do worthwhile things on. It's safe to say that a huge number of vidya people know and love today would not have existed had their developers not started out poking their dead flesh keyboard in 1982.

 

[Pissmaster]

Sir Clive wasn't just a computing pioneer, he was a massive chad:

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Sir Clive wasn't just a computing pioneer, he was a massive chad:

And once had a fistfight with a rival computer manufacturer, Chris Curry of Acorn, in a pub in Cambridge over ads Acorn had put out criticising Sinclair's RMA rates.

 

[GorebyHog]

Godspeed.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Not just nerds either. A huge number of Britbong developers who got big in the PS1 era were founded by people one man banding games for the Speccy. In the 1980s it was the gaming system to have. Yes, the C64 and especially the BBC Micro may have been superior in terms of hardware but the Speccy was as cheap as you could go and still be able to do worthwhile things on. It's safe to say that a huge number of vidya people know and love today would not have existed had their developers not started out poking their dead flesh keyboard in 1982.

The ZX Spectrum has had most of it's legacy paved over internationally. Most people are unaware of it and think britbongs still played NES.

I mean it lasted until almost the mid 90's IIRC.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Him, Tim Berners-Lee and Donald Knuth are the reasons why as of late I’m very passionate about computing. Sir Sinclair was the original master of what technology can do to expand the curiosity of not just children but also to adults alike.

 

[Enig]

Good riddance, the Spectrum port plague sagged Amstrad, C64 and MSX1 simultaneously for years. Fuck that gelatin color filtered calculator.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

The ZX Spectrum has had most of it's legacy paved over internationally. Most people are unaware of it and think britbongs still played NES.

I mean it lasted until almost the mid 90's IIRC.

Even us bongs seem to think that. Because of cultural burgerisation anyone younger than an early model millennial like me seems to think that we all played Mario and Donkey Dong.

Erm, nope. We played Manic Miner and Elite and Knightlore on the Speccy and C64 and Beeb, then Turrican and Carrier Command and Dungeon Master on the ST and Amiga. Consoles were not popular at all in bongland until about 1993, when the Mega Drive and SNES seemed to burgeon in popularity almost overnight, and various developers for the 16- and 8-bits got snapped up and formed a cartel which basically decided to take "floppy disk based systems" out the back and shoot them. Partly because they were utterly frit of piracy.

I have a theory that the creative bankruptcy of a lot of modern vidya stems from that period. The developers who got on the gravy train with the late SNES / early PS1 era have all shot their bolt. But the openness and creative anarchy of the 8- and 16-bit eras has been flattened by licencing and marketing, and people younger than me who wouldn't have had the ability to play a game, then autodidact themselves C or assembler and make the game they wanted to play because the systems were locked down unless you spent vast sums on a devkit went without. And PCs in the 1990s were pretty damn pricy (our first PC, a Pentium 60 with 8 MB RAM, 512 MB hard drive, ATI Mach64 graphics card, and 15 inch CRT cost us £1,300 back in 1995) so there was that barrier to entry. The upshot of all this is that the GenX autists who had Speccies and early Millennial autists who had STs and Amigas have all exhausted their creative juices, while the late Millennials never had that exposure to the "guts," if you will, of computing.

That being said, I still think that there absolutely should be a game called Tonya Harding's Pro Skater.

 

[NoonmanR]

The Zee Ex Speecytrum, as far as i can tell, is something that was only ever relevant to the british, so i have nothing to say on that other than good god does it look miserable to play games on. Why is everything this garish, eyebleeding yellow and black? Even the Apple II had more pleasing to look at games,

 

[Mikoyan]

Sir Clive wasn't just a computing pioneer, he was a massive chad:

I had no idea of his penchant for strip clubs. Sugar straight up cucked him out of the business at the end, though.

The Zee Ex Speecytrum, as far as i can tell, is something that was only ever relevant to the british, so i have nothing to say on that other than good god does it look miserable to play games on. Why is everything this garish, eyebleeding yellow and black? Even the Apple II had more pleasing to look at games,

World's cheapest, jankiest video system. Color was a low-res overlay over top of the higher-res mono graphics. Didn't have a real graphics chip, just some space on the ULA (an area in which the 80s Brit chip industry were honest pioneers). Cheap, utterly brilliant but not all that great. Before that, the ZX81 was doing the raster on the CPU kinda like a 2600.

 

[Tom Nook's Gloryhole]

I have a theory that the creative bankruptcy of a lot of modern vidya stems from that period.

Nope, one man innovation games will always be around, just look at Stardew Valley or Braid or Terraria for example, as well as tight small teams that have produced insanely addictive games like Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac, Rimworld, Baba is You, Factorio etc. There's even a massive wealth of tranny faggots who occasionally shit out a decent game on itch.io (which is pretty much the sinclair equivalent these days in terms of throwing shit against the wall and hoping things work out)

When it comes to nostalgia, there's always the fear that you're condensing 10 years of innovative developers into one greatest hits package and forgetting the dirt worst shovelware that existed even back then. I had tons of dogshit liscenced tie ins back in the Mega Drive, PS1, PS2 eras and now I'm emulating games from those era I'm only picking a handful of them which keeps the quality high and prone to overestimating how good those consoles were.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

The Zee Ex Speecytrum, as far as i can tell, is something that was only ever relevant to the british, so i have nothing to say on that other than good god does it look miserable to play games on. Why is everything this garish, eyebleeding yellow and black? Even the Apple II had more pleasing to look at games,

Idk, this looks cosy af. I like how bright the palette is.

A C64 would beat it for graphics and sound, but for a very low budget machine from 1982, it's actually pretty impressive. The VIC-20, Atari 2600 and Tandy Coco were still viable mainstream products when this came out, the ZX Spectrum doesn't look bad in comparison.

 

[Internet Explorer]

Goddamn, we lost a real national treasure today. RIP, you electric tricycle nutter.

 

[sasazuka]

Goddamn, we lost a real national treasure today. RIP, you electric tricycle nutter.

I see the ZX Spectrum got a port of Enduro Racer via Activision that is a relatively more faithful port of the Sega super-scaler arcade game than the isometric Enduro Racer port which Sega themselves put on their own 8-bit Master System.

Spoiler: Enduro Racer - Sega arcade game

Spoiler: Enduro Racer - ZX Spectrum port by Activision

Spoiler: Enduro Racer - Sega Mark III/Master System (Japanese version)

Note that this is the Japanese version of the game, on a 2-Mega cartridge, which had more tracks than the western version, which Sega crammed on to a 1-Mega cartridge to save money.

My only real Spectrum experience was playing games at my cousins' house in Northampton, mostly Valhalla a text-interface adventure game with rudimentary graphics (but well-animated stick figure walking animations).

Spoiler: Valhalla - ZX Spectrum

RIP Clive Sinclair.

 

[Madre Muerte]

Ew Briish "people"

 

[Chaos Theorist]

 

[Pissmaster]

View attachment 2544052

Oi me speccy!

also why is it called the zedex spectrum lmao there's no D in the letter Z its pronounced Zee you canadain freaks

 

[Pee Cola]

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...