Sir Clive Sinclair Computing Pioneer Dies Aged 81

Inventor Sir Clive Sinclair, who popularised the home computer and invented the pocket calculator, has died at his London home aged 81.

His daughter Belinda Sinclair said he passed away on Thursday morning after having cancer for more than a decade.

Sir Clive's products included the ZX series of computers and his ill-fated C5 electric vehicle.

He was still working on his inventions last week "because that was what he loved doing", said Ms Sinclair.

"He was inventive and imaginative and for him it was exciting and an adventure, it was his passion," she added.

Sir Clive Sinclair: Computing pioneer dies aged 81



My first computer was the ZX Spectrum 48k.

Very sad to learn of his passing away.

The man changed the course of the digital and information age, and arguably a lot of people, and children's life's.

Rest in peace Sir Clive Sinclair.

Its a great shame that he didn't get the support and backing and recognition he deserved. A genius.
Rainbows
Jane

Yes... I just heard this..

May he find rest and may we continue to benefit from what he brought to the table

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair

a reply to: andy06shake

I bought one of those ZX computers when they first came out. They had a whopping 16k of RAM!

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair.

a reply to: angelchemuel

Indeed Jane , read some of the comments on this story ....

www.theregister.com...

One example ...

"Re: Brought back memories
I saw him give a lecture about technology, where a cheeky student asked about the disaster of the C5.

His response? "I lost about seven million pounds of my own money on that, but there you go."

Many of us owe our careers to his early influence on the tech scene in the UK. Besides the technical leaps and wild experimentation, he also had a keen enthusiasm for design - Rick Dickinson (Sinclair) and Jony Ive (Apple) were both graduates of the same Design for Industry course in Newcastle."

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I can remember the coding in BASIC you got from the mags. LoL

One of the things i remember about that computer was the noise, hardly dulcet tones, whilst loading data from the tape deck.

Bruce Lee and Target Renegade spring to mind also, many many Moons ago.

a reply to: andy06shake

I remember freaking my Mom out with that computer. My Mom's name was Elaine. So, on the day I got the ZX I wrote this short BASIC program. Mom had no idea what a computer was, so I showed it to her. It was turned on, and was just sitting there at a flashing cursor. Mom asked..."So what does it do?".

I told her I didn't know exactly, so lets find out together. I told her to type in the word "Hi" and hit the 'Enter' key. She did, and the program returned:

"Hi Elaine! How are you?" Mom about jumped out of her chair! It actually scared her! LOL!

I had her type in "Fine" and hit Enter. The program returned:

"That's great! How was your Bridge game today? Did you and Estelle win?" (Mom played Bridge on Tuesdays, and her partner was named Estelle) Mom freaked out! Said the computer was creeping her out! LOL!

I had put several other things in there too, and she just got more worked up as time went along. Told her to just type in some random nonsense and hit Enter. Computer came back and said:

I'm sorry, Elaine, I didn't understand that. Could you please type that again?

That was it. She'd had enough!

Later I overheard her telling Dad about it. Mom thought I'd joined some kind of a diabolical cult, and we had machines which could see and read people's minds! She told him it just wasn't right, and there must be something wrong with me!

LOLOLOLOL!!!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

That's priceless Flyingclaydisk, love to have been a fly on the wall for that one.

Talk about life imitating art all the same, back then we dreamed about and envisaged the likes of such communication.

40 odd years later we are now hard pushed to determine as to whither its a person or bot we are communicating.

And speech recognition actually does what it says on the tin for the most part.

The world spins eh?

a reply to: Cymru
Thank you
Rainbows
Jane

I had a Timex/Sinclair Z81 and the 2086. One of the cool thing about the BASIC language used on the machine was the ability to do calculated GOTOs and GOSUBs. You could have a block of code to parse user input, look for keywords, and then use that to determine where to execute code. I can't remember the syntax anymore but it was so cool. I wrote a string parser to read input like "Please clear the screen and then make a new file." and then extract out the commands and execute the correct subroutines.

5 INPUT x$
***** String Parser Code Goes Here lol *****
10 IF X$="" THEN GOTO 10
20 If X$="new" THEN LET S=100
30 ELSE IF x$ ="clear screen" THEN LET S=9000
40 END IF
50 GOSUB (S)
60 GOTO 5

100 REM Make a new file
105 GOTO 5

9000 CLSC
9010 GO TO 5

You could also load code stored on a cassette into the program at runtime! I used this crazy feature to add modules to my programs.

Such a cool machine. RIP Clive.

I saw this a few hours ago.

In Portugal, his computers were the first affordable computers common people could buy, and were the start of many things, from people (like me) starting programming and other people opening shops to sell the computers and the cassetes with the games (and for many people to start illegal copy schemes).

I got a ZX Spectrum for Christmas in, if I'm not mistaken, 1983. I had to send it for repair one time and got a replacement, that I still have somewhere.
I have to see if it still works.

Rest in peace, Sir Clive Sinclair.

The ZX Spectrum was the start of the affordable home computer in England. (The ZX80 was kit form and had no colour or sound. The ZX81 was assembled for you if I remember correctly.) In contrast, a Commodore 64 cost 3 or 4 times as much back then which was basically the equivalent of a months' wages.

My poor Mother used to read BASIC listings to me as patiently as a saint while I typed it in. Oh, those heady daze... Sometimes the printed programs had an error so it didn't work until a correction was posted in the magazine a month later but obviously I couldn't save the data and turned the machine off. My poor Mother...

R.I.P. Sir Clive, I hope you rode your C5 vehicle (ahead of it's time, yeah, # you Elon Musk!) right up to the pearly gates.

The Spectrum had a CPU that ran at a whopping 3.5 MHz in contrast to the C64 which had a 1 MHz CPU but was helped by dedicated chips for sound and other bells and whistles that the Spectrum didn't have.

Time flies.

a reply to: andy06shake

Jeremey Vine just said £399 in the 1980s for the C5 I can't quite figure it out lot of dosh back then or not for something radical.

I had an Amstrad back in those days. Similar, but different to the Sinclair, had a tape deck and the Basic language as well. Sinclair sounds like it was a good machine for those that got into the music for its time, has gone a long way since then.

Wish I had more to say, it was a time life was good. RIP.

Still got my ZX81 and speccy in the attic.
I used to love loading up the games on the tape deck,the 10minute pychedelic experience watching the loading screen,the noise of the data transfer.
I was obsessed with "the Hobbit" text based game.
And Jet set willy!

Spent days programming just to get a really simple vector graphics moving image to work.
The comforting feel of those rubber keys after a hard day trying to avoid working at school..great times.

Thanks for the fun Mr Sinclair.
One idea of his that probably would have done a lot better a decade or so later was his 1992 Zike-a small lightweightish electrc bike-pre lithium battery tech,so it used those old NiCads,lke they used to have in RC cars.
The "green" trend was not as big back then,so the bike flopped sadly.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner. Aaaarrrggghhh! I loved the games but couldn't play it for the life of me. Thanks for the reminder!

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver

I liked Jet Set Willy myself.

I remember the likes of Usagi Yojimbo(Samurai Warrior) on the old Spectrum and C64.

That was class in a glass if memory serves.

To think how spoiled we are in this day of age with the pretty much photorealistic 3 dimensional worlds we create in games is rather the contrast and then some.

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver

With Jet set willy-Do you remember you got a little card with tiny tiny sequences of colored bars,which you would have to input on the color keys,as a form of bootleg security?

en.citizendium.org...

Man those colors were hard to read they were so tiny..
I remember being so excited when I found a shop with a "state of the art" color photocopier..finally I can print a big version of the card and be able to see the codes easier.

But no.
The colors all just blurred together and I couldn't read it.

Those pre borg days,before technology was weaponised-what fun we had.

a reply to: andy06shake

I had no idea he was still alive. I still have a mint condition, boxed ZX Spectrum 48K.
R.I.P Mr Sinclair. You were a true pioneer.

a reply to: andy06shake

I hear ya. I used to play Elite back in the day, albeit on my Dads' C64. Now I play Elite Dangerous with 8 GB memory and 400 billion different solar systems on a PC with excellent graphics. We have come a long way but that is only due to what came before. The Z80 was a great CPU.

Wireframe graphics worked well enough at the time.