171–180 of 455 posts
RIP. With all due respect, Meta comment here: I imagine computing has become sufficiently ubiquitous such that in ~50 yrs time the HN bar will always be black because we will have > 365 important folks pass away each year. But will there be a HN then?
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genuinely appreciate your anecdote, it is interesting to know, but perhaps a bit distasteful in reply to his death.
It really irks me when someone is misrepresented when they drop dead. I’m personally fine with the parent poster’s comment because it’s exactly a fair representation of the guy’s products. They were mostly awful to some degree.
The 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
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My story is so similar to yours (and I’m sure many others). Santa brought my house a Spectrum 48k Lo Profile when I was a kid with a cool KnightRider style keyboard. Over the years I haven’t seen it talked about much if at all, so I always assumed it was a fairly niche model. After hearing about Sir Clive, I looked it up to find out how many sold and was surprised to learn that it never actually existed as a standalo…
I got an Atari and I'm in tech. Why should that be any different?
I'm glad he did.
RIP Sir. I was gifted the 48K when I was 6 yrs old - it changed my life. I am here because Sir Sinclair built a machine whose setup instructions said: Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes the copyright message. T…
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Dude, he's just died. There's definitely a time for robust debate about his legacy and potential flaws, but that time and place should not be this thread.
Yeah it is. The guy had a rabid cult following much like Musk does today. He had many financial victims with poorly engineered products. He made a very valuable contribution to the industry however. People have rose tinted glasses about it but the reality was products not turning up, not shipping, not working and a sour taste for many against technology. He even bought faulty RAM in which was discarded for the Spectr…
Such cost cutting made it affordable to a large number of people - had it costed a couple of time more it could be a hard sell for my Eastern European parents. Fortunately, that didn't happen and now, 40 years later, I have a nice career and I'm still enjoying dealing with computers just as when I was a kid with ZX Spectrum.
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It really irks me when someone is misrepresented when they drop dead. I’m personally fine with the parent poster’s comment because it’s exactly a fair representation of the guy’s products. They were mostly awful to some degree.
Why are you whining so much about anyone’s obituary? (Really see this guy’s comments) Who hurt you?
We should speak the truth of the dead and not lie to ourselves.