Sir Clive Sinclair Computing Pioneer Dies Aged 81

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver

Same. It's remarkable that the Elite franchise has spanned four decades.

a reply to: Wide-Eyes

I went to a Q&A with David Braben once.

Hell of a clever dude, like Sir Clive but with maths.

I do miss the days when people had limited resources but managed to knock out some stunning code smaller than a blank word doc.

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver



Did you ever do the Amiga or Atari ST?

They were the dogs bollocks also.

a reply to: andy06shake

The Amiga. I bought it on credit. (And never repaid the 500 pounds due to circumstances beyond my control. I lost my job.)

Then I moved to the Netherlands (1992), bought a PC and went from there.

Indeed the dogs bollocks, and then the bees knees.

/me leans back and remembers...

originally posted by: Cymru
a reply to: Wide-Eyes

I went to a Q&A with David Braben once.

Hell of a clever dude, like Sir Clive but with maths.

I do miss the days when people had limited resources but managed to knock out some stunning code smaller than a blank word doc.

“We’ve got no money, so we’ve got to think,” is attributed to the New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford. This seems to be applicable to the early days of programming too. What David Braben OBE, Ian Bell, Matthew Smith, Jeff Minter and many others did with limited resources back in the day will be in the annals of history forever.

a reply to: andy06shake

It's always sad to hear of pioneers passing.

I still feel sad when I read the terrible story of Phil Kats, the creator of PKZip.

we're losing all the creators, and being left with conglomerates that only want to control us. sad.. sad sad sad...

www.wsj.com...

originally posted by: LightSpeedDriver
a reply to: andy06shake

The Amiga. I bought it on credit. (And never repaid the 500 pounds due to circumstances beyond my control. I lost my job.)

Then I moved to the Netherlands (1992), bought a PC and went from there.

Indeed the dogs bollocks, and then the bees knees.

/me leans back and remembers...

Was a bit of a swapper back in the day. got my name in a few scrolltexts

files.scene.org...

files.scene.org...

One of a handful of claims to fame.

a reply to: Cymru

"At the Barras is better" if you ken what i mean.

Props on the scene mentions Cymru.

a reply to: andy06shake

I was trying to think of the name that Samurai type game, all I could come up with is Horace goes skiing. I seem to remember an excellent game my mates had on either the c64 or Amiga I think it was called Wizball? I’m going to have to look up early games this eve.

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver

The Amiga was my favourite, received one for my 11th birthday, loved my parents that year big time.

My Little Bro had the Atari ST.

So many great titles back then i would not know where to start, "Captive", "Dungeon Master", "Chaos Strikes Back" spring to mind for some reason.

My first PC would have been around 98 with an old Celeron 500Mhz 16Mb RAM and onboard/die GPU, but i done an apprenticeship that involved the old IBM 286/386 and clones back when windows came on 13 disks and MSDOS was important(still is in my book).

a reply to: surfer_soul

Scores of emulators and roms that are free/abandonware now if you ever wish to reminisce.

"Zool" was another one that was great, oh aye and "James Pond".

a reply to: andy06shake

MSDOS is indeed still very relevant. Small, light weight, effective. It's an embedded MSDOS that is the "OS" of my Canon EOS 1000D Digital SLR camera. A very nice camera although a feature reduced version of the more expensive 450D camera. Gary Kildall I thank you.

And up yours, Bill Gates!

a reply to: andy06shake

Plenty of stories from back then
Ah, the innocence of youth and cheating, er, playing the postal system

originally posted by: surfer_soul
a reply to: andy06shake

I was trying to think of the name that Samurai type game, all I could come up with is Horace goes skiing. I seem to remember an excellent game my mates had on either the c64 or Amiga I think it was called Wizball? I’m going to have to look up early games this eve.

I forgot about Horace goes skiing,man that was boss!
Horace and the spiders was as well.

Also JetPack was top notch.
There was another game I forget the name,but I loved it-you played as a chef,there was food being thrown around which you had to throw bags of flour at to get them into the pot-there was also a sort of cookie monster guy who popped out of the bin in the corner..

Oh yeah-and SkoolDaze man!
Catch a mouse,run to the girls school across the road,release mouse in class and watch all those scared girls jump on their desks!
Top mid 80s entertainment.

a reply to: andy06shake

You never lived till you had a c64 and became part of the coding scene. No mobiles, no emails, no txts.. out of the blue some fellow coder would call you and ask how you made a random number generator.

We'd talk for hours on landlines. they were the graphics and music coders, but I funked out the intricacies..

God those were the days, seeing a demo we worked on. and such a small local community, having comps.. haha.. I'd go back to those days in a heart beat. they were the best.

Oh and then those sneakers who'd use a demo maker, to try and sneak in... shut down so fast, real 6502 coders knew what was going on.

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver

I so agree. What would Bach or Beethoven have created with a modern synth?

It actually seems to me these guys did something new. For about the last 30 years all we've really done is polish the same trick over and over, and change the box it comes in.

I'm really glad I've lived through the before, the during, and the after. I just hope I make it to the next big leap of imagination.

a reply to: andy06shake

Sir Clive was a visionary genius who's ideas and products were way ahead of their time , he introduced me to computing with his ZX Spectrum computers and introduced the world to electric vehicles with his flawed but still brilliant Sinclair C5 , it was only the technology of the time that held him back.

I too started with a ZX Spectrum 48k then moved up to the beast that was the Spectrum 128k , I will never forget the frustration the was the kempston joystick port and waiting 5-10 minutes for a game to load from tape only to have it crash within seconds ... sweet memories.

The word Genius is often used but rarely deserved , in Sir Clive's case it's richly deserved.

RiP Sir Clive Sinclair , Genius.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

Cookie.

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a reply to: jerich0

This needs a like button.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

This sums it up nicely ...

youtu.be...

Add this ...

www.theregister.com...