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Sir Clive Sinclair has died

theguardian.com

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Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#331

Post by FearNotDaniel »

dragonsky67 wrote: post #215
Chris_Newton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

TLDR - Kids who want to learn to program already have access to the tools to do this... It's just that most kids don't want to learn to program. Wasn't this what the One Laptop Per Child (OTLP) project was trying to achieve? The problem is that when the ZX, C64 etc were around there was no alternative. If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridg…

> If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine

There was a third possibility: you could figure out how the game worked and write your own version from scratch. I learned so much about programming by writing a Pac-Man clone on a ZX Spectrum simply because I didn't have the pocket money to keep feeding the arcade machines, or even to buy someone else's knock-off version on a cassette tape. I quickly got bored of typing in other peoples' programs from a magazine, much more fun to write your own.

My memory, it was generally true about the C64/ZX split being about gamers vs coders; however I did know some "Speccy" owners (generally with slightly-better-off parents) who had lots and lots of different games on tapes and did nothing but play games on the machine. Yes, I "borrowed" a lot of games by copying the tapes on an Amstrad dual-cassette stereo system (thank you, Sir Alan!) but I'm really glad that generally, scarcity of an "easy option" forced me into a place where I had to write my own code.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#332

Post by antod »

nanis wrote: post #272
dragonsky67 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR - Kids who want to learn to program already have access to the tools to do this... It's just that most kids don't want to learn to program. Wasn't this what the One Laptop Per Child (OTLP) project was trying to achieve? The problem is that when the ZX, C64 etc were around there was no alternative. If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridg…

> I wonder how many of those ZX Spectrums, C64 etc were given to kids, who on finding that they had to actually do some work to make them do anything useful relegated them to a shoebox under the TV. In my experience, that tended to happen more with the kids who got the C64s. Those were the ones with color TVs and Betamax at home, too.

I had a Spectrum (couldn't afford a C64), but my friends had C64s. I was the only one I knew who ever did coding though. The C64s were still used lots, but just for games.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#333

Post by raffraffraff »

antod wrote: post #303
becurious wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were many 3rd party add-on keyboards for the 16K/48K Spectrum. I got the Saga 1 Emperor keyboard the Christmas after I got my 48K. You opened the case of the Spectrum, removed the ribbon connectors from the board and then attached the new keyboard and screwed the bottom plus board to it. There was some magical feeling back then that I think is hard to capture now. The manuals were really good for teaching you -…

> I learned sine and cosine from the diagrams in the manual years before we covered them in maths. You too? I didn't fully understand them, and thought they had more to do with circles than triangles, but yeah that circle drawing code in the Spectrum manual was my first exposure to sin and cos.

Same! I had the Spectrum +2A model, which had a bunch of issues running older software. The OCP Art Package didn't work at all, so I ended up writing a really awful drawing program in BASIC. Figured out how to poll the mouse, detect button presses etc. I drew a toolbar on the left of the screen depicting squares, circles etc. If the mouse button was pressed within one of those, the drawing mode was changed. That would let me draw the objects on screen. That was also where I learned what sin and cos "really" did. Never got the bucket fill to work 'properly' - didn't know if BASIC 'gosub' supported recursion, and I can't even remember if I tried.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#334

Post by marcus_holmes »

I was always an Acorn kid (now ARM and taking over the world). I still have my Acorn Atom; 12Kb of memory (with the expansion pack) that somehow included a BASIC interpreter, assembler, and left 10Kb of usable program/graphics memory.

I was jealous of the Spectrum kids with the sheer number of games made for the Spectrum. I'd go round to my mate's house who had a Spectrum but wasn't into games, and bug him for hours until he'd load something up and we could play it. I'd then try and make bad clones of those games on my Atom.

I think there's a whole generation of British techies like me, raised in the 80's, who owe Sir Clive (and his peers) our entire careers. If there's a Tech Valhalla, he'll be seated on the high table.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#335

Post by praptak »

I was a (small) part of the Spectrum hackers clique in Warsaw. Most of us had "Masterface" which was a hardware extension that had a switch to replace the ZX ROM with a custom-baked one and used NMI to do things like snapshotting the state of the machine to tape or loading a custom debugger.

The first one was used for pirating games (but pirating by snapshotting was considered cheap) but the debugger was the real deal. It fit in the screen memory (so as to mess as little as possible with the game memory) and let us discover "pokes" for infinite lives. I think it was called Fox Mon or Foxmon?

Cool times.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#336

Post by marcus_holmes »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #137
zarkov99 wrote: post #11

RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.

There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Indeed. After I saw this sad news and your comment, I was reminded of an earlier HN comment¹ I had written about the joy I experienced as a young child learning to program on a ZX81 and my regret that my children’s generation are not growing up with the same opportu…

I had to give a talk on coding a few years back. I brought in my Acorn Atom to show people what I started on. 12Kb of memory, no hard drive, no sound card, no network, monochrome display. The BASIC language it knew had maybe 10 keywords, and the Assember had another couple dozen commands. Everything in the computer was simple, easily understood, and robust (turning the computer off wiped everything except the ROM - essentially a factory reset every time).

I compared that to my phone - 256Gb of storage, 32Gb of memory, plus sound, graphics, wifi, and the kitchen sink.

Learning on the Atom was easy because it was so simple. And as I mastered it, so computers became more complicated. It was, in many ways, the perfect method of teaching tech. A new programmer nowadays has to learn so much so quickly to be able to write anything useful, it's often overwhelming. Trying to teach my gf how to code was painful because we were always bumping into rabbit holes of complexity, which we could either go down and waste whole days, or avoid and leave an area of ignorance that would bite later. I never had that problem. It's humbling - I wonder if I would even be a dev if I hadn't had that advantage?

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#337

Post by goto11 »

hughrr wrote: post #107
5faulker wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Failure can be a source of inspiration, after all.

Sinclair was an expert at that. He guided many an industrial product designer to fortune by showing them exactly what not to do.

Sinclair made computers which a kid like me, not from a rich family, could afford. Yeah the computers were of cheap quality with a crappy keyboard - but he changed home computers from being a plaything for the rich to be available to everybody. A lot of clever design went into making them as cheap as possible.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#338

Post by Cosi1125 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #225
tcbawo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume he meant an Atari video game system rather than an Atari personal computer.

Yeah I (or rather my parents) got an Atari 800XL and it totally got me in tech. But yeah Atari was much better known for its having consoles (5200 and 7800 I think). I was never interested in those. Especially because the Atari was very unpopular in Europe. The C64 was king. That also made it more expensive which was why I got the 800XL. But it also meant much less software around which is how I started programming.

> the Atari was very unpopular in Europe

It depends on your definition of "Europe" ;-) The 8/16-bit Atari was (and still is, in some circles) extremely popular in Germany, Poland, and former Czechoslovakia.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#339

Post by b3lvedere »

ghoul2 wrote: post #101

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…

Dad bought a ZX Spectrum. I was very curious and wanted to play with it. Dad gave me the huge manual and told me to study that first. I didn't. Instead i tried every key and this started my huge computer adventure that will probably only end when i'm dead.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#340

Post by 8fingerlouie »

RIP.

I, like many others here, started on a ZX Spectrum 48k. It was a wonderful time where one could experiment and "learn by doing". I spent days copying program code from a magazine into the REPL, and after debugging it for a while, i marvelled at the space invaders game i had "made myself".

It was also a time where local radio stations would dedicate a couple of hours every friday night to broadcast user made programs. Yes, that's right, 2 hours of "brrzzzziiiiwwwwwhhzzz". Before each program was broadcast, the radio host would give a small intro to what was being broadcast, and the computer needed to run it.

We had classes with no set agenda, where "nerds" could meet up, and we could code whatever we wanted.

The whole "world" was different back then, and looking back i can easily see how a generation of skilled engineers came to be.

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