I started with a Brazilian ZX81 clone, the Prologica CP200. It changed my life. Thank you, Sir Clive Sinclair.
Sir Clive Sinclair has died
161–170 of 455 posts
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#162My love of computing began with my Spectrum. I was bought a ZX Spectrum +3 when I was 10, the one with a floppy drive. My parents were persuaded by the salesman that floppy drives were the future and that it was worth paying more for the +3 rather than the +2 with it's tape drive. Correct, but hardly any games were available on disk which left me a bit miffed at the time.
Multiface 3 from romantic robot was the key peripheral you needed. After loading a game you could save an image to disk, so you could also create save points anywhere and poke in cheat codes :-)
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started with Apple 2+ but back then there were many computers to be fond of. There were Vic 20, Dragon 32, Amstrad, Thomson TO7, TRS-80, BBC. All were different, all had their capabilities. But what was fun is that everyone had access to the whole thing : hardware, software. Nothing was hidden behind layers of security. You could relate software and hardware in a very natural way. Everybody was fiddling around. Als…
Yes, and today such a perspective is almost impossible to achieve outside the embedded space. Even a Raspberry-Pi is many orders of magnitude more complex than say a Dragon 32 (Color Computer clone, by the way) or a BBC Micro.
Given the availability of tech like the Pi now, I wonder what it would take to build a modern, child-friendly device in the same spirit around it: something that offered a fun and instructive introduction to programming, in a box that was self-contained, safe and practically indestructible. Design a case with a sealed keyboard? Expose standard power and display connectors with robust ports? Write some child-friendly software that might be flashier than what we had but was still in essence a guided programming environment with a simple but effective language? Maybe include some sort of USB connectivity, primarily so that older kids could also control external devices like light boards or robot arms or turtles? I haven’t come across anyone trying to do this that I can recall, but I feel like there’s an entire ecosystem’s worth of startup ideas in this space just waiting to be implemented. Maybe the next Sir Clive is out there somewhere to get it started.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#164Sir Clive Sinclair was a hero of mine for realizing that computing could be for children of poorer families. The Apple II is lauded for the classroom, but it was way too expensive for my family. Without people like Sir Sinclair, I and many other would have never been able to enter this profession we so love. Apple gets the credit, but it was Sir Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, and TI that raised a generation in computing…
Yes! As a kid, I was jealous of friends who had 'better' computers, but the appeal of the spectrum was seeing how it could be pushed to its limits and do amazing things.
Learning BASIC and then assembly on the spectrum got me hooked on computers, all thanks to Sir Clive making it possible and affordable.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#165RIP
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#166The Spectrum and ZX81 are (rightly) the computers for which Clive Sinclair is remembered. But it was his unsuccessful follow-up, the QL, which inspired a certain Linus Torvalds to write Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Legacy
Sir Clive was in a memorable QL ad as well:
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#167I also owe a lot to Sir Clive. At 13 years old in 1981, My friends father bought a ZX80 for him. Some days after, I was at his home and he explained, what he had figured out about it. The same evening at home, I wrote my first program on paper (a Russian roulette game, I think). I couldn't wait until the next day, when I came home to him again, to see if my program would work. After some work we got it working :-) and I was hooked. I began buying the magazines "Your Computer" and "Byte", and even though English was a foreign language, I managed to understand some of it. A few months later, on my birthday I got my own ZX81, and after that an Acorn Atom, and then an Acorn Electron, and then a PC clone, and then... Still working with programming, now in data science :-)
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell - are you praising Sinclair, or shredding him? (I'm on the wrong side of the pond to have any real knowledge of him.)
Shredding him. His business acumen was nil and his cost cutting nailed shut the coffin of every venture he started. I don’t get the hero worship.
And yet, the 48K is in history books, and is fondly remembered by many of us tech geeks who cut their teeth on that machine.
It doesn't matter everything else didn't work out, I'd be pretty damn happy with that legacy.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#169Britain's Steve Jobs.
I'd say Clive Sinclair was more like Britain's Jack Tramiel. Chris Curry or Herman Hauser would be more like Britain's Steve Jobs and Sophie Wilson as Britain's Steve Wozniak. Wikipedia calls Acorn, Britain's Apple. Just as Apple chose its name because it was before Atari in the phone book, so Acorn chose it's name because it was before Apple.
I worked at Acorn in the early 80's. I once arm wrestled Chris Curry in a bar. Neither one of them was really a Steve Jobs figure. I doubt many BBC Micro owners at the time would even have heard of them, unlike Sinclair who was in the press all the time. Curry was more of a drunken playboy, and Hermann more business man than marketeer or face of the company. It was a dream job for a geek!
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#170We had one of his op-amp home hifi kits from before his computing days. I'm not going to gloss things up here, it was shit. Noisy, bad circuit design, bad instructions. Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up. Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke. I…
> The calculators were highly approximate trig functions
This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one. He did this by using a chip designed for four-function math and using a series of brilliant (if, yes, slow and approximate) hacks to fit arithmetic and trigonometry in the same 320 assembly instructions and three registers. It cuts basically every corner, but my favorite one is that it didn't have room for constants like pi in the ROM. No matter what they did they couldn't fit it in. Eventually, they just printed pi on the case. My impression of Sir Clive is that he always tried to take shortcuts no other company would dare, and while this often flamed out, sometimes he pulled it off and brought a lot of technology to a lot of people.
Here's a fantastic breakdown of how the calculator worked and why it was so impressive:
http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...