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Sir Clive Sinclair has died

theguardian.com

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Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#371

Post by bennysomething »

raffraffraff wrote: post #333
antod wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 woul…

Genuine question: I had a 2a+ too, it crashed all the time. Really frustrating. I believe it was because amstrad bought spectrum and started building them cheaper. Did your crash all the time?

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#372

Post by Wildgoose »

bane wrote: post #93

One of the legacies from Sinclair's era is the profound understanding of the power of young hobbyists working on cheap computers, and how that leads to a workforce trained in STEM. This idea directly inspired the development of the Raspberry Pi which has been beyond wildly successful and may be the most popular line of British computers in history.

The Raspberry Pi is really a continuation of Acorn's contribution - including some of its developers being former Acorn personnel.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#373

Post by Zuider »

mkl wrote: post #270
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…

> 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

Formal surnames attached to a family are a later invention than aristocratic titles. In fact, surnames were originally introduced for the sole purpose of identifying individuals for the purpose of taxing them. When the English tried this on the Welsh, they mass rebelled by all choosing the name "Jones."

This was especially the case for commoners, or non aristocrats, who only had first names, and had to be uniquely identified by their professions, the names of their fathers or a well known relative. If Bob the Builder got a knighthood for exceptional diligence in building siege engines for the noble and perennial cause of annoying the French, then the only real name the title could be attached to would have been "Bob."

The reason it is different for other titles is that those titles belonged to the landed aristocracy, and were generally titles to the fiefdoms of that territory, so titles like Lord Acton, Lord Dunsany, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, referred to actual places. If a higher title is awarded to a commoner who does not possess a hereditary fiefdom, then a fiefdom will be invented for them such as when William Thompson became Lord Kelvin.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#374

Post by Wildgoose »

dboreham wrote: post #100
hughrr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. As a former Sinclair user his products taught me patience and tolerance. I jumped ship the moment I could afford a BBC.

There wouldn't have been a BBC without Uncle Clive.

Not true. The BBC was based on Acorn's "Proton" computer which was intended as a successor to the Acorn Atom.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#375

Post by marttt »

blippage wrote: post #365

I was thinking this morning about how the Raspberry Pi never really quite got it right in bringing the legacy of the early 80's computers into the 21st century. The Pi Foundation bring out new models, but I think this just complicates things. They are evolving more towards PCs. I think this is unfortunate. The question they should be asking is: what if we crossed a RP2040 with a Pi Zero? Perhaps with a very simple "D…

I was just thinking about how and when to bring my children to computers the other day. I came across RC2014, contemporary homebrew Z80 computer: https://rc2014.co.uk/

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#376

Post by Zuider »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #320
mkl wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

What I didn't know is if you are knighted, you have to give up your birth citizenship.

Not quite true. If you wished to be addressed by the title of 'Sir' or 'Dame,' you would have to be a British citizen, but a non citizen can add letters after their name, e.g. Bob Geldof, KBE, remains a citizen of the Republic of Ireland.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#377

Post by Wildgoose »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #334

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…

Likewise. I only ever had an Acorn Atom. My tech friends had Sinclairs and then upgraded to BBC computers. (Not an option for a working class kid like me).

I was an early enthusiast and originally wanted a Nascom One. I was so frustrated when they went bust, but the (August?) 1980 edition of Practical Computing included the first advert for the Acorn Atom so I switched my attention to that.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#378

Post by hallarempt »

stevekemp wrote: post #294
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…

A lot of people started programming thanks to the ZX Spectrum, and I'm one of them too: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html It was easily the most popular home computer in the UK at that time, though I imagine a large number of people started with the BBC - via the school integration. I still have my manuals, and recently paid for a print of the keyboard to hang on my wall. (I almost bought a dead 48…

My dead ZX Spectrum 48k does hang on the wall, behind my desk. The rainbow colors are amazingly light-fast.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#379

Post by kwhitefoot »

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.

> thought they had more to do with circles than triangles,

But that is exactly right!

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#380

Post by noneeeed »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #322
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…

> "You cannot harm the computer in this way." But your soul dies slowly as you have to reload your program from tape cassette. I remember learning machine code on my Spectrum and having to reload the assembler several times an hour.

The most dispiriting day of my childhood was when I discovered that the write connection to the tape deck on my Spectrum +2a had failed and the day's worth of code I'd written had been lost and I had a blank tape.
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