RIP Clive Sinclair

Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81

The first computer I owned was a ZX81, thanks to its affordable price. Shitty keyboard and memory extension contacts, but what a discovery it has been! The Spectrum was a fun little computer to mess and play with.

If you like slices of history:

Alas poor Clive, his time has come.

My brother had a zx81, complete with silver paper printer.

Clive was so ahead of his time it's kinda sad really. He got his biggest phase of notoriety in his home country for inventing a small, single person electric car, which was much ridiculed at the time, even though it makes a lot more sense than either the reality then or now. I think that's why he got such notoriety from it, it triggered everyone's sense of, "yes, that's what we want, but not what we want" internal confusion.

Ahh yes, I remember his one man vehicle, and later the Zike bicycle. RIP to a brilliant mind that's now ascended to a higher plane.

Bought a ZX81 in 83 with wobblebox RAM, pretty much unusable. Got some birthday money and traded up to a Spectrum. Lost 10 years to gaming, just about got through some professional exams although took me longer than it should have.....

He was such a great inventor, mad as a box of frogs, but was instrumental in giving so many people the chance to develop games well before it became accessible on a PC. RIP Uncle Clive

It was best not to touch the wobblebox. Or not touch the table on which the computer was, for that matter. And I learned to breathe very smoothly! But since the base computer only had 1 kB, and depending how much you displayed on the screen, it could eat up more than 700 bytes... it was a necessity.

There were all sort of tricks to save memory, like putting numbers into variables because references took fewer bytes than numbers, and so on. Makes for unreadable code.

I saw there was a documentary / movie on the BBC in 2009, Sinclair vs Acorn, Micro Men. It's available on Youtube (better quality than the movies I could download). I haven't watched it yet so I don't know if that's any good.