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Sir Clive Sinclair has died

theguardian.com

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Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#391

Post by mikro2nd »

Angostura wrote: post #367
mikro2nd wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No: The BASIC on the QL was one of the best BASICs ever. What killed the QL was imho those fucking awful microdrive cartridges. Unreliable, slow and quick to fail.

I mean, they were speedy compared to tapes. I remember at university writing a couple of little programmes that allowed the swanky BBC Model B (with no floppy drive) to use the Spectrum as a file server, over the serial interface.

Someone did eventually bring out a floppy-drive peripheral for the QL, but it was basically too late to save the platform. Also, iirc, you needed to be drop-dead rich to afford one.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#392

Post by nottorp »

Miraste wrote: post #170
ggm wrote: post #18

We 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 trig…

> 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.

Same with his computers. At least before the QL. They were affordable for people not on IT salaries.

And for Eastern Europe/Russia, for some values of "affordable".

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#393

Post by rbanffy »

In Brazil we had only clones, as the military dictatorship wanted to bootstrap a local industry. The only exception I remember was HP-85, which was classified as a scientific instrument or something other than a personal computer.

The first computer I had at home was a CP-200, a ZX-81 clone with an inverted video signal (white on black) and calculator keys made by Prologica (who also cloned the ZX-80, the Intertec Superbrain, the TRS-80 model 3, CoCo and, later, PCs). Didn't last long - we returned it to get a much more practical Apple II+ (a clone, again). The damage to my brain, though, was done: I discovered the thrill of writing programs.

The ZX Spectrum was the only other Sinclair cloned in Brazil, by a different company, Microdigital.

I really like the elegant, minimalistic electronics design (even though it did hurt performance to task the Z80, which is no speed demon itself, with putting up pixels to the screen) of the ZX-81.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#394

Post by Arwill »

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #331
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…

> 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 th…

I was like that too. Kids with C64 had plenty of games, and having better sound and graphics they just played games. I always advanced in coding when playing games became unrewarding/boring.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#395

Post by robryk »

dvirsky wrote: post #268
GekkePrutser wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I managed to kill one PC floppy drive by switching the motor that rotated the disk and not switching it off (because my crash handling was nonexistent and floppy read routine I was writing crashed somehow). I guess the disk rotation motor (or its switching circuitry) overheated (after all, it was supposed to be used with a reasonably low duty cycle): the drive would no longer rotate the floppy (so I could also not tell if the rest of the drive still worked).

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#396

Post by lixtra »

Wildgoose wrote: post #358
123pie123 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst my first programs was on the acorn atom, Zx80 and zx81 the zx spectrum hold a special place in my memory because the manual was fantasic - I learnt almost everything from it. and then progressed on to typing the monterous (using the aweful rubber keys) blocks of programs from magazines - THEN I learnt how to debug and rewrite the games that I'd just typed in from the magazines, because they never worked first…

I still have my Acorn Atom from Christmas 1980. The user manual "Atomic Theory and Practise" was an amazingly good introduction to computers, and is still on the shelf above my desk.

For those who want to very this claim: https://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/atom/atap/

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#397

Post by giuseppeciuni »

In late '80s an italian advertisement company sent to almost all italian families a book where you could buy almost everything using Post Offices. A kind of amazon's father :-). If any italian will read this post he will remember "Postal Market". In the last pages of that book there were all tech stuffs to buy including ZX Spectrum, commodore 64, etc. I was 7-8 years old and I was fascinated about those things. I didn't have enough money to buy a computer. When I reached the right amount (my savings) to buyone, Postal market hasn't sold any computer anymore. I started in 1991 with a "12 Mhz 80286 Vegas Communications".

I still rimember the feeling when I was browsing those pages

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#398

Post by rbanffy »

headmelted wrote: post #150
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…

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…

There's a huge difference between these 8-bit computers and PCs that came later, or even the CP/M machines contemporary to them.

When you booted a ZX-80, 81, Spectrum, a VIC-20, a PET, or an Apple II+, you went straight into a BASIC interpreter (or REPL, for the initiated). You could enter a program, or issue commands at will. We rarely think about this, but the first UI you see in those machines is a programming language.

And we did program a lot with those machines.

With a CP/M machine or a DOS PC (there were about 2 people in the world with PCs without floppies ;-) ), you boot into an OS. It's not a programming environment, but one designed for starting applications someone else wrote. While most had a BASIC interpreter you could run, it was a standalone program and not THE language of the machine. And experimenting COULD harm the computer - you could delete files from your DOS boot disk, as many of us discovered the hard way.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#399

Post by smoyer »

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…

I had a similar experience with a ZX-81 (and a TS-2000). What's interesting related to your "You cannot harm the computer in this way" quote is that I see that experimentation embodied in my kids (who grew up with a PC in the house) but also the anti-pattern in my mother and my in-laws who clearly didn't have a computer in the house until middle-age (note that I left my dad our of this category as he was an EE building embedded systems for instrumentation for much of his career).

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#400

Post by wwtrv »

marco_craveiro wrote: post #350
PapaSpaceDelta wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of us Brits Sir Clive's machines were our first glimpse of the future. If that doesn’t sound like you, then just stand aside while we mourn our hero.

Actually, may I say it was the same for most eastern Europeans. Most of the programmers I know in Portugal started with a ZX Spectrum.

It’s funny that Portugal is an eastern European country.
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