[Closed] Clive Sinclair...

I hope Manic Miner is available to dig his grave.

So long Sir Clive, you shaped my world in such a profound way RIP.

In my student days I bought a Sinclair Scientific. It cost the equivalent of many pints of beer and the trig functions were a bit shit.

I remember my mate playing this on his dad's ZX81.

My first home computer was a VIC20 though.

I had that game for my zx81 too! 16k ram pack too! 🤣

Worth a read if you are a fan.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29985976

Prolific inventor.

My first home computer was a VIC20 though.

Same here - backed the wrong horse! It looked a lot more like a computer than anything else at the time (the ZX81 kind of looked like a Stylophone).... but that was about it 🙂

I had a rubber keyboard 48k.

10. Print “Rip”
20. Goto 10
Run

Same here – backed the wrong horse!

Me too! Although it did turn into the C64, which was definitely a success.

10. Print “Rip”
20. Goto 10
Run

👏

VIC20,
Commodore 64
Amiga 1000
Amiga 1200...

Then Pc's.

So I was a Commodore fanboy but the Spectrum was a legend.

Me too! Although it did turn into the C64, which was definitely a success.

Oblong pixels though - that really irked me. An aesthete even then. Even though Sinclair's competition arguably had better hardware and was in a better package (more ram, more colours, a more professional form-factor) his stuff just seemed to have better ideas inside. Something of the plucky underdog about it too.

Spectrum 16k

Spectrum 48k+

Spectrum +3

Atari ST

Amiga 500

Amiga 1200

PC, God PCs were hard work, then became work

Playstation 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

Nintendo Wii

Nothing will beat Death chase 3D on the Spectrum

48k here.

I've talked about this at work (I am an engineer), people of my age who had these early home computers are lucky in that they are the first of the digital generation but also the last of the analogue generations. We are equally at home taking something mechanical to bits and repairing it as we are picking up a piece of new technology and not being daunted by it.
And for this I thank Sir Clive. RIP.

My mates dad was his number 2 for a while in the 80s back in Cambridge. We got all the toys to play with invluding the mini TV where we tried our best to get excited at watching Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon at Scout camp on a fuzzy 2 inch bw screen. Should I say part of Blue Lagoon as the weird expensive slide in polaroid battery didnt last more than 50 mins!

The C5 was a laugh though and very easy to roll..

I’ve talked about this at work (I am an engineer), people of my age who had these early home computers are lucky in that they are the first of the digital generation but also the last of the analogue generations.

I filmed an ediucation conference once on the subject of creating curriculums given that a significant proportion of kids a school today will spend their life doing a job that currently doesnt exist. It then occurred to me that pretty much everyone from my class at school had gone on to work in IT* (regardless of what subjects they'd done at college subsequently) even though we hadn't actually had any computers in the school.

The grounding they'd all had in computing was pretty much the result of having to know by ear when to stop the tape and enter a cheat code 🙂

*not me - I was too busy eating crayons and had my sights set on the only degree you can do where statically you're guaranteed a worse career than if you'd had no education at all 🙂

Thanks, Sir Clive.

Have they tried giving his power pack a wobble?

We had a rubber keyed 48k, and a +2A, which still works. I guess more than anything else it made my brother an engineer and me a gamer. Very sad

10. Print “Rip”
20. Goto 10
Run

syntax error

ZX81 and then a Spectrum.

Which is up in the loft, in it's box. My parents found it when they moved house a few years ago.

Rewind the tape, turn the volume up full and try again

Arse. I bought a couple of Sinclair mag titles via him in the 80s and kept publishing them. A fun person to meet.

My mate Dave had a ZX81, and we spent hours playing on that. Good times and good memories.
RIP Sir Clive, one of the few that deservedly earned his knighthood.

Up to £1500 for a used C5, and probably likely to climb. That has to be one of his inventions that proved he was ahead of his time.

Sinclair Calculator - original 4-function, batteries lasted about 20 minutes

Sinclair Scientific - yay! Reverse Polish!

ZX81

Spectrum

QL - awesome machines, only slightly let down by the microdrives

RIP

Started my addiction to computer gaming ~40 years ago, first with a ZX81 and then a Spectrum. They looked sully at the time, but he was well ahead of the game with his C5. RIP.

ZX81 AND 16k memory pack. Paid from a paper round and Saturday jobs. Joined to a tape recorder and a Marconi b&w TV. In my room bashing out machine code. Never played games graduated to a BBC with a lot more saving.

Thank you Sir Clive. RIP.

Even though that memory pack wobbled and you lost your code.

Also had a ZX81 with 16k ram pack. 3D monster maze was amazing! Think I had to sellotape the ram pack on as if it moved you lost everything.

Then a rubber keyed spectrum.

Thanks Clive.

Fond memories of owning a 48k. Best ones being:

Having a bedroom above the kitchen and if my brother and I heard someone go in there, having to bang on the floor. Reason being if the fluorescent light got switched on it would cause the loading screen to crash/freeze.

My grandad finding a couple of games on cassette and asking me if it was my music!

Playing strider and breaking the TV. There was a level that flipped upside down and reversed the controls so genius boy here simply flipped the TV over.

Getting a massive bollocking for running up a huge phone bill from ringing a walkthrough guide for Treasure Island Dizzy.

Good times!

ZX81
Spectrum 48k

RIP Sir Clive. You you had a huge influence on my early years.

I had a ZX81 with the wobbly ram pack.

I think it's due to this that even to this day I just assume that any tech I buy just won't work very well. I'm usually right.

I really wanted a C5 though.

Had one of his black watches and a Cambridge calculator, and still remember the class at school where we all gathered in the physics lab to be shown the ZX80 that the school had bought... but then I spent my own cash on an Acorn Atom. RIP Sir Clive, you showed me the future.

Shaped my early years with his machine. Now I'm in software engineering.

First purchase for my Spekky:

Shaped my early years with his machine. Now I’m in software engineering.

Yep learnt to program on a zx81 , part of Maggies thing of putting a computer in every school.

Then got a Spectrum 16k with sockets so upgraded in the kitchen on the sink drainer one weekend 🙂

RIP Clive.

Had the Rubber 48k, the 128k then moved on to Atari ST. Every time telling my dad that I would learn to program it, but just played games. If only I had!

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One of the 1st superstars of gaming?

At least he got to see the development of his ideas before he left.

Bit of a modern day da Vinci with the C5.

The technology just wasn't ready for the genius at the time.

Another spectrum zx user we had a zx+ with the expansion pack.

Revolutionary to make a computer (ZX80) from yogurt pot plastic!

Brilliant man. Great products sauf the C5.

Product design was years ahead.

Loved my ZX81. Too impatient to wait for a Spectrum so went the Tangerine Computers Oric-1 route. Mistake.

Suggested headstone design:

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Wether you had a Spectrum or not - contributed hugely to computing by making early participation more affordable.

At the time a Spectrum was several times cheaper than a VCR - but offered so much to an enquiring mind.

One of his almost forgotten gems is the Zike electric bike.

11 kg
Batteries fit inside tubes
NiCad batteries when the rest of the work was lead acid
Upto 3 hours battery life
100 watts

There are not many 11kg e-bikes these days even with lithium batteries

It got pretty slated in the luddite (motoring) press for being underpowered and twitchy but I think it was just way too far ahead of its time.

The basket alone is a masterpiece

I would love to get one and upgrade the batteries.

My first computer was a 128K +2, from the Amstrad era. By this time Amstrad were pitching the Speccy as a budget computer and it was beginning to become clear that the platform was in a developmental dead end. I learned to program too, spending hours making sprites in BASIC and trying to figure out how to avoid the inevitable colour clash.

Of course it wasn't nearly as good as my mates' Commodore 64s, there were a few build quality issues that needed to be addressed but I spent hours playing Elite and most of Ocean Software's back catalogue.

Wether you had a Spectrum or not – contributed hugely to computing by making early participation more affordable.

At the time a Spectrum was several times cheaper than a VCR – but offered so much to an enquiring mind.

100%. I learned so much from that little grey machine.

started off with a ZX80, then got a ZX81. Had a 64k RAM for it which I thought would never run out in a million years! Spent many hours and days writing programs in BASIC probably between age 12-13. Then moved from the z80 to a 6502 processor and got an Oric by Tangerine systems, and then upgraded to the Oric Atmos. Still work in IP Networks to this day!

contributed hugely to computing by making early participation more affordable.

At the time a Spectrum was several times cheaper than a VCR – but offered so much to an enquiring mind.

so very much this, it was the right machine at the right time

Remember the warm spot on the underside of the ZX81 where the heatsink is?

Me and a mate set up IB Software aged 13; business bank account and everything. We sold a cassette of ten games we had written for the 1k 81. And we set up a local "mobile IT" business where would visit local people who were struggling to set up their home computers!

This mate now runs a military simulation software company out of Atlanta.

I. Do not.

Nobody has mentioned his audio components. My mate had the full set, mounted onto an ancient record player.

Yep Sinclair radionics and don’t forget all the multimeters and that matchbox radio.

I think the ingenuity was getting the product out within a price point. An apple II europlus at that time was a lot of money (oottomh i’m thinking 700squid) so was out of the reach of the home user.

The user manual was also responsible for teaching a lot of programming so it was more than just a hardware solution.

This was also all before the games were out there so it was for the anoraks of the time.

Sneaky edit quick google puts an ‘81 apple at US$1,298 so could be a lot more than my 700 squid !!!

I have one of those matchbox radios. Seem to go for about £150 on ebay.

Sinclair was directly responsible for, well, my life. Some bloke came in to our infant school and hooked up a ZX81 to one of those wooden TVs on wheels with the blackout shutter doors and it blew my goddamn mind. My first ever computer was an Issue 3 Speccy and I have a Spectrum Next on my desk right now.

Someone posited earlier that Miner Willy was one of the first gaming icons. Horace?

Is the Next readily available?

Where from and how much?

It looks lovely.

Cougar
Full Member

Someone posited earlier that Miner Willy was one of the first gaming icons. Horace?

The butterfly from Survival

You lot were leaps and bounds ahead of me in the tech,

I had a difficult Christmas day trying to hide the disappointment to my parents when they bought me Dragon 32 computer. All my mates had ZX or C64 and until the release of Kreigspeil, there was a barren period of gaming in my life. And then chuckie egg landed, in green and black obvs.

i never owned a spectrum myself (had a c64) but i definitely appreciate what sir clive did for computing and gaming was huge to put it mildly.

i did have a quick go on a zike back in 92 at earls court bike show and thought it was really good.

rip sir clive 😢

i would love to get a spectrum next one day (and a zike).

Three grand for a PC in 1985 (and more than a Mac)! That's over £9k today.

Is the Next readily available?

Other than ebay scalpers, not exactly. The second Kickstarter has completed, I think you can preorder on the website, but you're likely looking early next year for delivery. Your best bet is to join the Facebook group, people sell machines or KS pledges occasionally.