Sir 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…
It's Sir Clive, or Sir Clive Sinclair, never Sir Sinclair. Knights primarily use their first names, and their surname only for disambiguation.
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.
Yes and no. The 48k was a bit of a disaster to start with. Lots of failures, bugs galore, a full recall due to power supply shock hazard. Not to mention the horrible keyboard. When you look at the microscopic view of owning one computer from him that worked it does somewhat rose tint the overall view of things which was not good.
these are extremely minor issues when you look at the bigger picture - you could argue that Clive kick started the multi billion pound games industry by getting young people interested in computer games
sure it would have happened anyway, but he definately made it happen earlier
almost 100% of the people who work in IT (in the UK) over a certain age had one of his affordable computers
Oh dear. My parents smuggled (!) a ZX Spectrum in 1985 into Hungary and they knew they will do it and while they were on their tour to Western Germany I was at a summer daytime camp at the nearby community center where we learned BASIC on them. And , of course , played games , mostly Horace And The Spiders :) I was ten. Fast forward two decades and I was contributing to Drupal core (first core commit 17 years ago was…
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.
Yet the commoditization of computers he brought forth was a genuine gift to the people that opened a lot of doors for many. He has positively influenced the lives of many.
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…
It's fascinating how empowering knowing just how safe you are can be.
I used nearly this exact phrase the other day with someone who appeared fearful of a dashboard tool and once they realised they could basically do no harm whatsoever it freed them up to experiment and learn.
Same here, but it also reminds me, the first programming lesson in school (not on a Spectrum but on an IBM PC), our teacher told us "there's nothing you can do with code that will harm the computer in any way" (these computers did not have a hard drive so you could not wipe anything). This immediately set us on a quest to find ways to prove him wrong - the basis of hacker thinking. Not that we did find anything with…
There was a way you could burn out a chip in the C64 with a poke command IIRC. And you could break the tape advance relay in the MSX by switching it on and off rapidly. Edit: Oops it wasn't the 64 but the PET: https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-killer-poke-for-the-commodore-p... Also, everyone here will know the phenomenon of bricking. You can damage hardware with software. Luckily it's very rare.
It's much harder with early 80s hardware (and no internet to learn this stuff) than with modern hardware. These machines were stateless beasts. You could either damage the BIOS with writing to it somehow, or fry some hardware. I suppose you could damage the floppy drive head with very intensive seek commands in a tight loop, or something like that.
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…
> Sir Sinclair
FYI since I've seen this mistake a few times in this discussion: Sir Clive or Sir Clive Sinclair. "Sir" and "Dame" are attached to the given name, never the surname. I don't know why it's different from other titles, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to explain, just states the rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir