Titans are falling
Sir Clive Sinclair has died
281–290 of 455 posts
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#282RIP 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…
Who remembers waking into a store on the high street in Britain and seeing rows of different computer systems!
Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Model B and so on!
It was glorious!
It was so exciting as a kid!
Going to each of them and writing 3 lines of basic to print my name infinitely!
A truely golden age of discovery!
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#283RIP 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…
That is such an empowering statement.
I've said before on HN that fear of what may happen stops many people from experimenting with computers, coupled with locking everything down and hiding the non-consumer-friendly aspects out of site.
Starting with a blinking cursor, the worst you could do was format a floppy disk with your work on it - or blow a fuse because you were tinkering with the internals.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#284RIP 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 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. The memory layout and system variables were documented, as were all the Z80 opcodes. The first time I used LDIR to transfer data to screen from off screen memory was magical.
You really could master the whole machine and I feel that the limitations actually helped. I would spend summers writing large assembly language programs. Before I had an assembler (HiSoft DevPac) I would hand assemble programs by writing them out on paper and then figuring out the opcodes and calculate the jump relative offsets.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#285A sad day indeed. A true democratising force in computing, without his work I wouldn't have ever thought someone like me could write software. Even If I was too young to write at the time, the ZX Spectrum was my first/only video game experience, small games made by one or two people that my family could afford or borrow.
This led me into making indie games and software dev, it gave me the idea of 'why not me?', the ZX Spectrum might not have been the door, but is sure was the key into a much wider world for me.
It also led me to recreate my favorite thing about the ZX Spectrum, the loading sounds as a musical instrument. The ZX Plectrum.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#286RIP 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…
> "You cannot harm the computer in this way."
I've long suspected that Star Trek trained people to be fearful of pressing the wrong key, as it would always send a huge electric shock through the hapless keyboardist and send him flying across the bridge.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mine was smuggled into the country due to currency crises and import/export controls. I owe thanks to my mother for arranging that so that I could graduate from writing programs using paper and pencil to using an actual computer. Thank you Psion's Horizons cassette for teaching me about computer architecture. Thank you Toni Baker for teaching me Z80 assembly so I could program x86 with no problem. But, thank you Sir…
In my country, there weren't any originals, even smuggled. Clones were built and sold by local engineers, using smuggled schematics and photocopies of circuit board layouts. The one I first get my hands on as a kid was built by my elder brother, an electronics engineer. I was so fascinated, I remember secretly sneaking into his house when he was at work to play the games. He taught me electronics and encouraged me to…
Do you still have the nonworking computer? Might be a fun project for a rainy weekend.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#288RIP 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…
That is such an empowering statement. I've said before on HN that fear of what may happen stops many people from experimenting with computers, coupled with locking everything down and hiding the non-consumer-friendly aspects out of site. Starting with a blinking cursor, the worst you could do was format a floppy disk with your work on it - or blow a fuse because you were tinkering with the internals.
It works on that generation of machines, but when I was young I carried that philosophy into learning Unix in the early 90s, and some of the results weren't as positive. It was a net positive, though.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#289RIP 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…
"You cannot harm the computer in this way." This seems quite likely to have been inspired by some of the intro documentation for the Apple ][, apparently written by Jef Raskin. Short comment about it from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077364
Jef*
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#290Sir 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.
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