111–120 of 455 posts
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.
Still today when I see picture of old computer, I get memory of the smell and the glow of the screen (Yes, computers at that time had electric smell).
The excellent Micro Men docudrama ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men ) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h24m) Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by A…
Your reach should exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for? A key quote from the documentary. "Reach" is what you can just touch with your fingertips outstretched; "grasp" is what you can firmly close your hand on and grip.
A link to the quote in the film:
The excellent Micro Men docudrama ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men ) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h24m) Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by A…
The very first bug I had to figure out was when I was typing in an expression like "A B", and not realizing that "" was a single character on the keyboard, and not "".
So many happy memories of weekends spent entering game code from the back of magazines and then venturing into writing our own. Genuinely don't think I'd be in the software industry today if it hadn't been for his creations.
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…
genuinely appreciate your anecdote, it is interesting to know, but perhaps a bit distasteful in reply to his death.
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.
